From the beginning of time human settlement has depended on water; its proximity being indispensable not only for the development of agriculture but also for the maintenance of stable settlements. The presence of water has promoted the development of civilisations, its absence has undermined their continuity. Getting hold of water has been the source of many confrontations in which at issue was not just the acquisition of more and better territories but nothing less that the community's own survival. The intrinsic social value of water has influenced social structures through the community rules for the distribution of this collective good.

The Upper Saintonge region of western France was one of the primary production centres for the supply of exotic pottery to Britain and northern Europe between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The principal manufacturing sites were rural workshops in the parishes neighbouring La Chapelle-des-Pots, on the wooded, limestone plateau north east of Saintes and some fifty kilometres down the river Charente from the maritime port of La Rochelle. The expansion of rural industries, producing for extra-regional markets, was a Europe-wide phenomenon between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The theory of proto-industrialisation has been used to explain this process. It has been argued that regionally-dense, rural industries grew up as urban merchants sought cheap production methods to profit from growing overseas demand for manufactured goods, especially textiles and metals. By the later eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, the participation of large numbers of country people in industrial work altered traditional regional demographic and agrarian regimes, resulting in population growth, land-holding fragmentation and the creation of mercantile profit. This provided labour, finance and motive for a ‘second phase’ in the transition from feudal to capitalist economic relations in some regions of Europe and fully-developed industrialisation in others.

Livestock production has long been important to the Highland economy, before no less than after the clearances for sheep that first spread across the region from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. However, key questions about how it may have developed over the century or so immediately prior to the clearances have still to be answered, as well as questions about how the clearances actually changed farm output. Using stocking data primarily for the southern Highlands and Islands, this paper proposes to examine four particular questions. First, by way of an introduction, it will briefly consider the role of stock within the traditional or pre-clearance township economy. Second, it will use detailed data for the closing decades of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century to characterise the broad stocking balance of townships at the point when detailed figures first become available. Third, it will look at stocking figures for the eighteenth century with a view to establishing how livestock production may have altered during the century or so prior to the clearances. Fourth, and finally, it will consider how the clearances changed the character of livestock production.

The legal process of gaining an enclosure could be long, complicated and expensive …. It could take up to six years, during which time a farmer did not know what was happening or how to farm. (S. Wade Martins, Farms and Fields (1995), p. 81).

The impact of parliamentary enclosure in England has been a subject for debate since at least the 1870s. A series of issues has been identified and discussed including the costs of enclosure; the effect of enclosure on small farmers, small owners, and cottagers; the role of the commissioners; the implications for farm sizes; the impact on agricultural productivity and rents; and the significance for the landscape. Yet the quotation with which we open this paper suggests that there is a subject which has slipped through the historical net, the impact of enclosure on farming. In their work published early in the twentieth century the Hammonds noted of the enclosure of Stanwell in Middlesex (Act 1789) that the nominated commissioners were empowered to direct the course of husbandry ‘as well with respect to the stocking as to the Plowing, Tilling, Cropping, Sowing, and Laying down the same’. W.H.R. Curtler, in 1920, quoted the main substance of the clauses from the Cold Aston (Gloucestershire) enclosure act of 1795: ‘from the passing of the Act until the Award the Commissioners were to direct the course of husbandry in the open fields’. He noted also that earlier acts had stated that the existing course of husbandry should be retained until the award was completed. W.E. Tate wrote as recently as 1967 that during enclosure ‘the general course of agriculture in all the open fields was being carried out under directions laid down by the commissioners’.

‘Everything which can be said [about the land question] … must already have been said in the numerous books, pamphlets and articles’. Thus said Cuthbert Brodrick writing in 1881 in the preface to his substantial book on English land and landlords. Although it was accepted that, as Caird had clearly put it in 1878, the English countryside was dominated by the simple tripartite system of landlord, tenant and labourer, with a few owner-occupiers forming another simple, but tiny and diminishing group, considerable debate surrounded the structure of landownership particularly in terms of size of estates, the rate of decline of the ‘traditional yeoman’, and the significance of ‘open’ and ‘close’ parishes. Despite his preliminary comments Brodrick demonstrated in the course of his book that the land question was still an unexhausted topic in the final part of the century. Nor did the debate on these issues cease then, for it has continued into the twentieth century. Despite a few dissenting voices, the idea of the single coherent English tripartite system still persists. As with much of our perception of the dynamics of the countryside, this view has derived largely from the experience of the arable areas to the south and east of the country and to the statistics presented at national level. It fails to embrace the complexities of landholding in the nineteenth century. Even where it is accepted that owner-occupiers existed, there is little recognition of the fact that these should not be regarded as a single group.

What is common in community is … the fact that the members of a community are engaged in the same argument … the same discourse … in which alternative strategies, misunderstandings, conflicting goals and values are threshed out.

In central and south-western Scotland, squads or groups of Irish migratory seasonal workers, largely comprised of women and teenagers from Mayo, Donegal and Galway, were employed by Scottish potato merchants to harvest the potato crop throughout the harvesting season which extended from June until late October or November. As migratory workers, they started their employment in Ayrshire and Wigtownshire, to deal with the first earlies, and then moved eastwards into the Lothians, and northwards into Fife, Perthshire and Angus, to harvest the later ripening first earlies, second earlies and maincrops. As they moved their employment from farm to farm, staying at each from a few days to as long as six weeks, they lived on or close to the farms where they worked. They were usually accommodated in ‘bothies’, farm buildings such as byres, stables, lofts, stores, barns, stables, potato sheds, disused farm cottages and farm houses, all of which were converted into temporary accommodation for the workers. This accommodation was subject to much criticism and many attempts were made to try to improve its condition, not only by legislative control, but through other action, for example by trade unions and specially appointed committees. Of these channels, the latter (non-legislative means) has received very little attention by scholars and much of it is little known.

One of the most striking aspects of recent scholarship concerning electoral politics in the Victorian countryside is the widespread consensus that has developed that landlords did not – as was so commonly averred by Radical politicians at the time – use the threat of eviction as a weapon with which to terrorise farming tenants into voting as they were instructed. In the work of Norman Gash, Richard Olney and Frank O'Gorman, English tenants are represented as being quite happy to follow the lead offered them by their landlords, both from a ‘semi-feudal’ sense of loyalty and from a sense of gratitude for past favours and the hope of further favours to come. Even in Ireland, where a historiography dominated by Pomfret presented a much bleaker picture of landlord-tenant relations, the process of revision has considerably modified the received view. J. H. Whyte has argued that the landowners were far less tyrannical than had been generally thought, and regards as particularly erroneous the idea that landlords had regular recourse to eviction to punish tenants who had voted contrary to their wishes. This policy was not used, he suggests, because it patently did not work. Whyte's insights, though they have been modified in certain respects, were recently upheld in W. E. Vaughan's study of landlord and tenant relations in mid-Victorian Ireland. The history of politics in the Irish countryside is thus seen as having approximated that of England, and recent scholarship suggests a similar picture for Lowland Scotland, where, outside the Famine years, patterns of eviction were similar to those in Ireland. In only one country do the landowners still retain intact their reputation for electoral tyranny: Wales.

The … history of the rural areas during the Second World War is virtually unstudied. There is some work on agriculture and agricultural policies, but the extent to which these rely on K.A.H.Murray's ‘official’ history, published in 1955, is testimony both to the quality of Murray's work and the general paucity of more recent published research. Moving away from the directly official, or economic history, we move into the field of memoir and reminiscence. Good as many of these are, they obviously seldom make any attempt at sustained analysis. Crucially, the rural areas have been left out of accounts of the social history of the war, such as Angus Calder's magisterial studyThe People's War, first published in 1971.

In the 1880s English farmers and their political representatives began a long campaign for tighter control of beer ingredients. The chief aim of the campaign, which continued intermittently until the 1920s, was to increase demand for English barley and hops. The proposed measures were variously introduced in Parliament by farming MPs as ‘Beer’, ‘Pure Beer’, and even ‘British Beer’ Bills; each sought to limit, or in some cases prohibit, the use of sugar, rice and all other ‘substitutes’ for barley and hops. These proposals were given a serious hearing only twice, in 1896 and 1901, the latter following an epidemic of arsenic poisoning, traced to contaminated brewing sugar, which had killed at least seventy beer drinkers in northern and central England. Farmers exploited this crisis by introducing a Pure Beer Bill that was only withdrawn after the government had appointed a Royal Commission, chaired by Lord Kelvin, to study beer materials and the wider question of arsenical contamination of foods. To the relief of the brewers' national organisation, the Country Brewers' Society, Kelvin exonerated the trade generally and did not recommend statutory control of brewing ingredients.

As recently as the first half of this century, leaf- and twig-fodder cut from trees played a major role in animal husbandry across most of Europe and, in many areas, stored leafy hay was of critical importance to the survival of stalled livestock over winter (e.g. Brockmann-Jerosch, 1936; Radley, 1961; Spray, 1981; Salvi, 1982; Sigaut, 1982; Haas and Rasmussen, 1993). In addition to its importance to livestock, leaf- and twig-foddering also played a major role in shaping the cultural landscapes of the continent, and in particular the structure and composition of vegetation cover (e.g. Moreno, 1982; Austad, 1988). During this century, the use of arboreal fodder has declined dramatically to the point of almost total abandonment and, in consequence, this once important practice is both poorly understood and largely ignored by historians, geographers and ecologists alike.

In 1988, HTV made a series of programmes about a Somerset village called Luccombe. Their starting point was the Mass-Observation survey carried out over forty years before and described in Exmoor Village. No mention was made of the larger project - the ‘wholesome’ British export, for which the survey and perhaps even more importantly, the photographs, were commissioned. The difficulties of producing and reproducing fine-quality colour photographs at that time, however, suggest that the social investigators and the photographer were pursuing widely differing goals. The different approaches of social documentary photography and pictorial photography may not be obvious in a beautiful print, embedded in an anthropological text, but the use of photographs, which were essentially reconstructions of idealised village life disguised as documents, indicates how much importance the Ministry of Information attached to exporting the image of the wholesome, ‘traditional', English rural community.