‘Community’ is ubiquitous in the historiography of early modern England. Although the term is almost universally employed and appealed to, however, its meaning remains controversial, and its use by historians much criticised. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the very concept of ‘community’ is not the creation of modern social scientists: its origins lie in traditional notions of communitas, that quality of oneness claimed by mediaeval associations of various kinds. Consequently, modern historians and sociologists tend to agree only on two issues: first, that ‘community’ implies geographical propinquity, common ties, and focused interaction between and amongst its members; and second, that these characteristics have generally undergone a historical process of decline or disintegration. Rather vaguely-defined as this common ground is, it is sufficiently clear to render modern users of the term vulnerable in turn to two criticisms in particular. It is argued, first, that the mythic status of community begs both historical and sociological questions, relying merely on untested assumptions; and, second, that the strongly emotive overtones and inherent value judgements of such a nostalgic term introduce confusing elements of normative prescription to social-historical analysis. From this perspective, community is not only an elusive concept but also a flawed ideal, and calls for its abandonment have increased.

In 1850, The Yorkshireman, a radical newspaper, offered the following analysis of York's annual Martinmas Hiring Fair:

Martinmas Fair … is an evil which increases crime, causes the profligate waste of money, adds greatly to the already large number of inmates within the walls of our House of Correction, and so increases the City expenses by their maintenance and the necessary increase of the police force to preserve the public from robbery, without conferring a benefit on the public in any way.

Scattered across the face of rural Britain at any one time during the nineteenth century were up to 200 training stables for thoroughbred racehorses. These provided the underpinning for the popular sport of horseracing and were also both a significant source of rural employment and a contribution to rural culture. Despite a growing recognition by rural historians that rural communities are composed of interlocking parts and linked social structures, and a regular focus on the parish, village, estate or farm, these microcommunities have remained largely ignored and undocumented. Equally, sports historians have concentrated largely on sports players to the exclusion of ancilliary staff. This article breaks new ground therefore in giving a more rounded picture of an important aspect of horseracing in its rural setting, beginning by examining the social and economic organisation of stable life and its power relationships, before showing the contribution of the stables firstly to the local economies, and secondly to the cultural life of the local communities in which they were set.

The ‘land question’ occupies a central role in the history of Highland Scotland. The system of estate ownership and tenure introduced in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden (1746) commodified the land as private possession. In its wake came mass evictions of tenants in large-scale ‘Clearances’ designed to convert crofting-lands to other agrarian or sporting uses. During the main period of Clearances (1780–1855), protest by the crofters remained spontaneous and sporadic. It was not until the last part of the nineteenth century, especially during the so-called Crofters' War (1881–96), that a resurgent crofting community engaged in sustained protest. The threat of civil unrest prompted some ameliorative measures, most notably the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886. This stabilised the situation and gave protection from further mass evictions but did not restore lands to the landless population from which their ancestors had been displaced. The demand for restitution, therefore, remained a powerful rallying cry.

I have discussed elsewhere the role of the British Women's Institute Movement within twentieth-century feminism. This paper will take this argument further by focusing on the way in which the W.I. redefined domestic labour as skilled and thus provided scope for rural women to gain status and validation from their involvement in it. First, however, I want to propose a different perception of the Women's Institute Movement from the more common idea of ‘Jam and Jerusalem’ popular in the 1990s, and describe its activities for those unfamiliar with the Movement.

Sugar beet occupies only a minor proportion of the total area of agricultural land in Britain, but it is of major importance to mixed cropping farms in the Eastern Counties of England, where soil and climate combine to give ideal growing conditions. This region produces more than half the annual United Kingdom output, and forms part of the major beet producing area in the European Community, which stretches from the Ile de France and Champagne-Ardenne in France, through southern Belgium to the western regions of the Netherlands. This paper is based on an extensive series of studies of beet production and reports on farming in the Eastern Counties of England, prepared since the mid-1920s by the Farm Economics Branch, and later by the Agricultural Economics Unit, of the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge. After sketching the historical background, it discusses some of the more significant developments – in crop husbandry, structural change, in the substitution of labour for capital and specialisation, and accession to the European Community – which took place in the four decades of unprecedented progress up to 1985.