The gamekeeper was an important but controversial presence in the late Victorian and Edwardian countryside. Admired by some for his skills in woodcraft and deep understanding of nature, for others the keeper was much less benign: a destroyer of wildlife; a barrier against wider public access to the land; and the upholder of fiercely contested laws. At a time when debates about the land and its present and future use formed a major part of contemporary political discourse, and when an urbanising society was investing ever more meaning in its idea of the rural, consideration of the keeper takes us beyond the study of field sports towards broader histories of the English countryside and its attendant ruralist culture. Situating the keeper in a dual setting of material production and recreational service provision, the following examines both what he did and was expected to do, and the ways in which this was represented. Not only were keepers active agents in their own representation, eager to project themselves as skilled professionals, they might also elicit support from unusual quarters. As will be seen, keeper representation was as varied as his many roles.

Tracing developments in British town and country planning during the 1960s and 1970s, this article describes the sudden upsurge of landscape evaluation method-development among landscape architects and planners, and the disputes that made such efforts come to an end in the late 1970s. In this burst of activity, here referred to as the UK landscape evaluation movement, we can observe competing definitions of visual amenity and landscape quality take form. It is described how practitioners invented or adopted numerical measurement and preference methods as means to gain a supposedly unbiased understanding of how different landscape areas are valued by communities. Struggling to make themselves heard in a planning sector that was dominated by more powerful stakeholders and quantitative approaches (for example, cost-benefit analysis), in the landscape evaluation movement we can also witness how pioneering practitioners adopt advanced statistical techniques and computer mapping to communicate qualitative values of landscape more effectively to each other, communities and decision-makers. These were deliberate attempts by the practitioners to occupy a more active and influential role in landscape and country planning during the period. As this article shows, their success in this regard was limited due to the lack of general agreement with respect to the reliability, validity and generalisability of both assessment methods and produced findings.

There is a rich and increasing body of research pointing to the significant role that elite women played in property management during the eighteenth century. In this article we examine the contribution of an elite widow, Barbara Savile, to the management of her son Sir George Savile’s extensive landholdings in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire from 1700 until her death in 1734. We establish that Barbara Savile had a deep understanding of estate business and was a shrewd judge of character, expertise on which both Sir George and his stewards relied. She scrutinised account books, commissioned surveys for rental reassessment, was instrumental in the negotiation of wood contracts and was closely involved in the practical management of many aspects of tree and woodland management.

Loudon’s 1825 Encyclopedia of Agriculture set out why and how ‘comfortable’ family cottages should be built for the farm labouring workforce. Over the next quarter-century, published ‘prize essays’ on cottage-design appeared alongside articles advocating ‘high farming’. Low labourer wages and insecure farm tenancies handicapped investment in both, though a parliamentary inquiry showed improvement projects could enhance labourer employment. The 1834 ‘new’ Poor Law – an ‘administrative’ law – restricted ‘poor relief’, but left many ‘settlement’ issues to continue as perceived obstacles to building cottages (the occupants might become a burden on the poor rates). This paper illustrates ideal contemporary cottage designs – relative to contrasting exposures of poor people’s home lives. Landowners, patchily, promoted some cottage-building, but labouring families mostly remained poorly housed. Along with recent scholarship on families’ work, income, possessions (often very few) and survival strategies, this work augments ideas of real housing conditions in rural areas.

In the 1850s goldrush, new communities emerged in Victoria with members from diverse origins of place, faith and ethnicity. Settlers usually migrated to pursue wealth; however, the social cohesion these young towns required often came from beyond logics of economy. As the goldrush waned from the 1860s, communal searches for children lost in the bush became a secular ‘rite’ that helped produce ‘moral communities’, which articulated shared values through common beliefs and social practices associated with lost children. Entire segments of communities would gather, suspend economic pursuits and search for lost children, often for days or weeks at a time. The euphoria of finding the child alive, or the solemn reverie when the child perished, forged communal goodwill through shared sentiment. The rite of the search became disseminated through newspapers, literature and word-of-mouth, while the ‘bush’ – a construction referring to various landscapes in Australia – enabled readers to participate in the searches remotely, as part of an imagining and feeling community in the colonies’ various climates. In the gradually secularising settler colonies of Australia in the late nineteenth century, lost children functioned as a fulcrum on which communities could pivot, while establishing social cohesion and communal belonging.

Fences were critical in the fight against rabbits in colonial Australia. Initially, domestic rabbits were farmed in pens or paddocks fenced with paling fences or walls. Wild-caught rabbits imported from England escaped and became serious pests from the 1850s. As their status changed from protected private property to a major pest, the functions of fences changed to fencing rabbits out. Legislation requiring or specifying rabbit-proof fences lagged several years behind recognition of rabbits as a problem. Most log and brush fences in infested districts were burnt to destroy rabbit harbour. Dry stone walls were modified in many ways; paling, slab, picket and stub fences were all tried, but were unsuccessful, and by 1886 netting was standard. Using examples from the rich agricultural Western District and the considerably poorer Mallee Region of Victoria, this article describes the many forms of rabbit fences used between the 1850s and the mid-1880s. All of the experimentation with different structures was by individual landholders, with colonial governments conspicuous by their lack of involvement until they erected rabbit-proof barrier fences.

The aim of this article is to broaden our knowledge of the metrological system of the Morisco period in the kingdom of Granada and, more specifically, in the rural area of the Alpujarra. The sources used in the analysis are two inventories of ecclesiastical goods from Islamic origin, drawn up in 1527 and 1530, four decades after the culmination of the Christian conquest of al-Andalus. The article explores the agrarian units of measurement used by the Morisco community of the Alpujarra in their daily lives (measures of surface area and length, weight or mass, volume or capacity, and of water used for irrigation). As far as possible, equivalences are presented for the units discussed. Attempts are made to establish whether these measures were inherited from the Andalusi period or whether, on the contrary, they were the result of the implementation of Castilian legislation on the matter. The data gathered have revealed the existence of a hybrid measurement system, which shows that the ordinances to modify the system of weights and measures of the Muslims and to seek a correspondence with the Castilian system had little effect in the Alpujarra, where, in many cases, the Islamic system of measurement continued in use. This circumstance indicates that the changes and transformations in the daily life of this rural community after the Christian conquest were not as imminent as might have been expected.

Horse trading was an important aspect of the Igbo economy and horse-related title taking was a unique feature among various Nigerian groups, especially in eastern Nigeria. The demand for the introduction of humane horse killers in eastern Nigeria was heightened by the economic drive of the colonial political economy, and was not necessarily a consideration for the harmful treatment of animals. Horse-related title taking was accompanied by the increasing rate of intergroup relations between northern Nigeria and various Nigerian groups such as Igala and the Igbo. Ordinarily, men and women sought horse-related titles as signs of prestige and honour. The culture and traditional humane living of the people saw Ogbuinya horse-related title taking as a way of achieving certain degree of social status, but it also regrettably promoted animal cruelty. Sources for writing this article were derived from archival documents, books, journals, and other written materials. A descriptive method of analysis has been adopted in writing this article.

This article attempts to answer the question about the position of women in Polish peasant families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries based on the memoirs of rural women. Contrary to the claim that taking control over the household budget gave women more power on the farm, memoirs of peasant women show that it was rather an additional duty and responsibility. This problem mainly affected low-income families, where income from typically male activities was insufficient, so homemakers supported the family from the female part of the farm: gardening and dairy production. Thus, despite the decisive importance of women’s earnings for the household budget, their power in the family had only a symbolic dimension.

Influenced by proposals (spanning back to the Kaiser Reich) to hinder the urban-rural divide, Hessian Social Democrats introduced the Hessenplan in 1951 to rebuild the war-torn cities, reconstruct state infrastructure, and integrate displaced persons. A key component of this plan was the establishment of rural community centres, which provided modern amenities and leisure activities, attempted to reduce the hardship of the rural lifestyle through the mechanisation of labour, as well as reinforced democratic principles – all in an attempt to hinder the rural exodus. Branded ‘Castles of Peace’, the rural community centres also represented an environment and a tool for political transformation through democratic re-education. They provided an opportunity to help balance the social, cultural, and economic inequalities between urban and rural communities, were used to prevent further individual anomie, and to instill within the rural populace the importance of becoming responsible citizens in the new democratic age.

As the Battle of the Atlantic threatened Britain’s importation of food and forestry supplies, authorities intensified plans to rapidly increase domestic production. In Scotland, this was a herculean task in rural communities decimated by land clearances, economic depression, and population decline. Against the odds, the mobilisation of a range of workers enabled Scottish agriculture and forestry to make impressive gains in production, and significantly impacted Scotland’s ability to meet wartime production targets. This article examines the contributions of four diverse groups of labourers that toiled in Scottish fields and forests: compelled labourers, including conscientious objectors and prisoners of war; adult and child volunteers; women; and foreign lumberjacks from Canada, Newfoundland, and British Honduras. This original research supplements our knowledge of the British rural workforce during the Second World War, and raises the issue of wartime migration and its effects on rural communities.

Poland, going through three partitions and two wars, has suffered enormous losses across many dimensions. Polish forests have been damaged or destroyed by direct or indirect results of those tragic events and at the same time, timber and non-timber forest products played an important role in rebuilding the nation. This article illustrates the scale of the losses and the economic importance of Polish forests between 1918 and 1945. Actions of three partitioning states (Russia, Prussia and Austria) left the newly liberated Poland with damaged and destroyed forests. For example, during the Second World War, Germany protected its forests by shifting the entire burden of war supplies (that is, wood, game, resin and tanning bark) onto the forests of the occupied countries, including Poland. Despite being left in a bad condition, Polish forests were able to provide wood and non-wood products necessary for the reconstruction of the country and helped to jumpstart some of the sectors of the national economy. This article provides a review of the literature on twentieth century Polish forestry, with a specific focus on its changing economic importance, government perception and policy and the role of forestry to Polish economic, political and cultural life.

The inherent complexity of early medieval rural society is now widely recognised by scholars; this is in no small part thanks to the transformative effect that archaeology has had on our understanding of many aspects of peasant life. Yet it is only in the last twenty years that an archaeology of peasant society of early medieval Christian Iberia has emerged to challenge the supremacy of deeply entrenched historiographical motifs, explored in detail herein, which underplay peasant agency, confine peasants to familiar contextual paradigms (poverty, risk-aversion, resistance), and treat the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of largely passive ‘recipients’ of History. This article focuses upon a case study – early medieval northern Iberia – to show that, far from an auxiliary discipline used to bolster or reject interpretations founded upon documentary analysis, archaeology now underpins our efforts to understand complex aspects of the society and economy of the early medieval countryside.

Drawing on secret witness reports from Intelligence Officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and diplomatic correspondence from France’s representatives to Dublin and London, this article seeks to complement recent historiography and qualify our understanding of the period 1914–18 by engaging fully with the issue of compulsory military service from the outbreak of the conflict. It contemplates how fears of conscription contributed to the radicalisation of rural communities and demonstrates that opposition to conscription formed a solid political foundation for Sinn Féin. Britain’s determination to implement conscription to Ireland frightened civilian populations, gave rise to nationwide discontent, and attracted towards Sinn Féin populations likely to be drafted into the British Army. That study seeks to be a re-examination of the dynamics between the Irish revolution and the conscription scares and maintains that fears of compulsory service in Ireland significantly contributed to the victory of Sinn Féin candidates during the four electoral contests in 1917.

This article analyses the creation of unions and the evolution of protests (demonstrations, tractor blockades) instigated by farmers in the province of Burgos, in the interior of northern Spain, during the period following the death of the dictator Francisco Franco known as the Transition (1975–80). The study uses press articles, documentation from the Civil Government and information gathered through personal interviews. The aim of the article is to show that the farmers of the interior of northern Spain – an electorally conservative region – also participated in the citizens’ protests that were the driving force behind the democratisation process in the country during the 1970s.