This article studies the role of property rights in social change using the case study of the small village of Sansomáin in Northern Spain between the years 1509 and 1957. The sources are mainly notary and court records and the focus is on the identity of neighbours as the foundation of civil and political rights during the Old Regime, and its translation into the new constitutional order that emerged after the era of the French Revolution. In the village studied, the failure of the Spanish liberal regime in extending the right of citizenship involved the usurpation of the commons by two foreign owners at the expense of the families residing there.

Using about 1,730 probate inventories, this article studies the wealth of peasant farmers in Sweden for the years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. Average wealth grew rapidly, tripling over the nineteenth century, but it did not grow equally: the Gini coefficient for the farmers’ wealth grew from 0.46 in 1750 to 0.73 in 1900. Farmers who lived close to the major grain markets in Stockholm and the mining district of Bergslagen were wealthier than others, as were farmers on fertile plains and, in 1900, those living in coastal areas. Increased market access – in terms of cities and foreign demand – meant that farmers well placed in terms of geography and infrastructure benefited much more than farmers on what became the periphery. The diversity of farmers’ wealth grew, as did their financial sophistication.

Traditionally, historians have tended to accept the view that agricultural labourers in nineteenth-century England were subject to seasonal unemployment. In this article, however, it is argued that this is an over-simplification, and that there were in fact two coexisting labour markets. Using two sets of micro data, a wage book and the Census Enumerators' Books, it will be revealed (1) that there were two groups of agricultural labourers: those who were employed throughout the year (core workers) and those employed only in the busiest season (casual workers); (2) that the core workers and casual workers performed different tasks; (3) that they had different places of residence; and (4) that the casual workers' wages were more market-dependent. The movement of wages at the time of the arrival of Irish migrant labourers sheds further light on the different natures of the two markets. While core workers' wages appear to have been unaffected by this change in labour demand, English casual workers' and women's wages increased sensitively.

Since the 1930s turkey production in the United Kingdom has been transformed from a small scale, seasonal activity catering exclusively for the Christmas market, to an intensive mass production sector dominated by all year round producers, of which Bernard Matthews is the best known. This revolution in production methods reflects improved methods of disease control, enhanced nutritional understanding, and the development of more productive strains of turkeys with better conformation. These supply side changes have been accompanied by a succession of very successful marketing campaigns to persuade consumers of the merits of eating turkey throughout the year. This article investigates the reasons for the commercialisation of the turkey industry since the 1930s.

By the outbreak of the Second World War the ‘Land Question’ had lost its power to generate acute political controversy. Yet the issue of land reform did not disappear with the failure of the 1929–31 Labour Government to reintroduce Lloyd George's land taxes. Land reform after 1914 needs to be rescued from an over-identification with the decline of Radical Liberalism. This article will trace the way Labour Party policy developed after 1914. By 1939 it had adopted a set of policies based on the economic protection of agriculture, increased domestic production and marketing. At the same time it argued for the preservation of the countryside through land-use planning. After 1918 a long-term commitment to land nationalisation began to occupy a more important position in its land reform policies, particularly after 1931. In addition, new measures appeared on the party's political agenda for the first time, including the preservation of the countryside against urban intrusion, access to mountain and moorland, and the creation of national parks.

To deconstruct a map, said Brian Harley, it is necessary to read between the lines and to place the cartographic facts within a specific cultural perspective. He used the ideas of literary critics to make historians of cartography aware that there is more to maps than initially meets the eye and that ‘facts’ are rarely what they first appear to be. By viewing a map as a product of a particular society, one can begin to understand why a map was made in the way it was, how it was used and valued, and its role in representing and transforming contemporary attitudes and perspectives. To search for the wider meaning of local maps, it is usually necessary to make inferences based on research into their backgrounds; one rarely finds documents giving explicit directions on how, and why, a map was to be drawn and decorated. If, as in many past studies in the history of cartography, maps are taken at face value, they can leave many of their secrets unrevealed and, indeed, can easily be misinterpreted.

Although rural leisure in the half-century before the First World War is an under-researched subject, its most striking features seem to have been (at least according to the existing historiography) that it was dominated by the gentry and clergy, and restricted both in scope and quantity. The robust rural popular culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had come under increasing pressure from gentry and clerical attempts to reform and sanitise it, initially through evangelical organisations such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 1790s, but by the 1840s on a broad front due to the middle-class vogue for promoting ‘rational recreation’. Partly as a result of this, many popular pastimes either fell into disuse or became emptied of much of their former spontaneity in the second half of the century, a commonly cited example of the former being cock-fighting and of the latter maypole-dancing. In their place came carefully marshalled dinners and prize-givings sponsored by the gentry and clergy. On these occasions the labourers (and sometimes their families too) were sat down at trestle tables in some appropriate venue, often the squire's park, and edifying speeches were made by representatives of local landed society. The role of the rural workforce in all this was entirely passive, except for one or two labourers who might be singled out to give a speech of gratitude to the presiding landowner for his beneficence, and the ritual ‘loyal toasts’.

This paper examines the relief of travellers in Warwickshire, England. By using an unusually rich set of Constables’ Accounts for the parish of Grandborough, it interrogates the relationship between charity, local justice, and both official and popular perceptions of migration. It argues that the large number of migrants who passed through rural parishes were categorised by the local constable according to cultural and discretionary criteria. This ‘typology’ of travellers determined the nature and extent of the relief they might receive and the actions that might be taken against them. Socially threatening migrants, such as poor pregnant women, the sick, and vagrants, also found themselves affected by this same ‘proscriptive calculation’, often to their detriment.

It can be argued, based upon a limited range of surviving evidence, that the land-locked centre of Buchan formed a distinctive upland zone functioning alongside and interwoven with the surrounding lower lands during the thirteenth century. The area can be characterised as less densely settled and engaged in extensive pastoral farming regimes that contrasted with contemporary arable farming of a more intensive nature on the lower-lying lands. Subsequent demographic and agricultural changes have rendered that former environment invisible and the limited documentary sources of the thirteenth century have compounded its mystery. Although a relatively remote upland area, its economy was at least as successful per capita than the rich grain lands surrounding it. Rather than representing a place of secondary importance, it may well have been instrumental in fuelling Aberdeen’s rich thirteenth-century export trade of sheep products to the Low Countries and, perhaps, shared a symbiotic relationship with the lower, arable lands.

This article suggests that there has been a tendency to understate the degree to which officeholding during the early modern period was embedded within the community, moulded by local influences and fulfilling a range of different functions in the parish. An over-emphasis upon national processes of social and cultural change has resulted in a failure to appreciate the complexity of the politics of officeholding. There has been only limited recognition of both the presence of constraints upon the actions of parochial elites and the mechanisms through which particular groups established and maintained control over parochial institutions. A detailed analysis of officeholding within seven parishes lying on the north Norfolk coast stresses the extent to which ‘parochial traditions’ determined the way in which things were done. It is argued that the effective linkage of officeholding to these shared understandings and to ideals of participation and inclusion created a powerful rhetoric through which the exclusion of a large minority of the populace and uneven distributions of officeholding were justified.

The representation of the car in the countryside was central to selling the benefits of motoring and owning a car in the interwar period. Motor traffic was a key part of the debate and legislation on the countryside, in the context of land for building and food production, and scenery for pleasure and reassurance of what it meant to be English. This essay focuses on the impact of the motor car as it generated a new economy for rural Britain with new services, buildings and roads that changed the landscape and made the countryside more accessible. It shows how the motoring press and advertising campaigns exploited an imagined ‘Beautiful Britain’ and brought about a modernisation that set in place aspects of the use, values and culture of the British countryside that have remained to the present.

Documentary evidence relating to tenurial agreements and service obligations survive for a number of estates in north-east Scotland, spanning the fifteenth to late eighteenth centuries. Close inspection demonstrates the development of terminological usage as semantics alter with reference to changing socioeconomic mechanisms underpinning the structure of society. This article also explores the possibility that these changes may be linked to a developing philosophical view within which the growth of capitalism was rationalised.

This article first examines the recent historiography of the Poor Law, notes the dearth of historical writing on this topic with respect to Wales and then uses an incident which took place in the rural Welsh town of Llantrisant in the early 1840s which clearly exemplifies both particularly Welsh characteristics and those of the medical services of the New Poor Law. It is contended that further study of the welfare regime in nineteenth-century Wales is important for both Welsh history and for the broader historical understanding of the Poor Laws in rural areas.

In 1976 the RSPCA finally adopted a policy of opposition to fox hunting and the shooting of birds for sport after a long history of highly controversial internal debate and external lobbying by pressure groups. This article explores the possible long-term historical reasons behind the change of policy. It seeks to begin to fill a gap in the historical literature and explain the changes in public opinion towards hunting that occurred during the course of the twentieth century by looking at key episodes in the history of the RSPCA up to the 1970s. It shows there was a decline in aristocratic dominance on the ruling council of the RSPCA after the 1920s, but other reasons for the change in policy included the increasing influence of an urban/metropolitan view of the countryside after the 1950s; changing public attitudes towards farmers, who had been traditional supporters of hunting; and the increasing importance of environmentalism and ecology after 1960. By the end of the twentieth century it was no longer possible to argue that hunting was an essential feature of rural society and culture, despite the continuing popularity and survival of fox hunting with hounds.

The myriad forms of ‘popular culture’ have attracted an increasing amount of attention from historians of early modern and modern England. Students of English social relations are now familiar with several episodes of ‘cultural conflict’ in which there was putative friction between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ (or ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’) notions of acceptable behaviour. As the epigraphs to this article suggest, two particular era of ‘cultural polarisation’ have attracted considerably more attention than any others. On the one hand, historians of the Reformation, and especially of its ‘enforcement’ in late Elizabethan and Jacobean local communities, have identified the suppression of traditional, festive culture as one of the ‘cultural reverberations’ of the spread of protestantism. On the other, Edward Thompson has encouraged students of eighteenth-century England to think in terms of a tension between ‘patrician society’ and ‘plebeian culture’, and of the possibilities that this ‘field of force’ raised for ‘class struggle without class’.

This article surveys 226 affiliation cases from South Wales between 1870 and 1900. Detailed study reveals both the reasons why most women did not try to get maintenance, but also why they had high levels of success when they did so. Once a woman got to the hearing, the interests of magistrates and the poor law guardians helped them ‘find fathers’ for their children. The guardians in particular assisted women in bringing cases by the 1890s. The fact that affiliation suits centred on sexuality by definition meant that magistrates did not penalise women for sexual nonconformity any more than the men involved, although both sexes faced limitations on their behaviour. These cases also reveal a great deal about local customs and attitudes towards sexuality. In the end, affiliation suits merely removed the most glaring abuses rather than tackling the larger issue of support for unmarried mothers and their children.

The form taken by the spatial diffusion of rioting offers valuable clues for the understanding of collective protest. Careful analyses of the space and time dimensions of collective protest reveal considerable variation with respect to the cause of the riot, the role of communications and accessibility, and the agency of radical leaders and state and local authorities. Some historians have failed to understand this. Even Wells who has been sympathetic to the potential of the spatial viewpoint in explaining popular disturbances has written of food riots in 1801 that “(r)iots spread. It is immaterial whether the cause was imitation, or a uniform reaction along lines of communication‘. Stevenson has gone further and written in the context of food rioting that “it is misleading to speak of riots spreading’. Both take a narrow, rather over simplified, position, particularly when discussing waves of concerted collective action. Such occurrences are rare and provide us with one of those “privileged instances which one can apprehend on the level of observation when the totality of society and its institutions is set in motion’. They present us with an opportunity to begin to identify those peculiar conditions under which massive mobilisation of people in different communities takes place. In this essay I consider several case studies of the spatial diffusion of disturbances in England and Wales between 1750 and 1850. These protests differ dramatically in their patterns of spatial diffusion.

In the study of popular culture, the significance of gifts and tokens in the making of marriage has not been given the attention it deserves. The surviving artefacts alone merit closer examination and the role of such objects in dramatic and pictorial representations has yet to be adequately explored. If their full social and symbolic importance is to be understood, however, a close examination is necessary of acts of giving in precisely defined historical contexts. The richly detailed evidence of ecclesiastical depositions surviving for the diocese of Canterbury permits just such an examination. This evidence provides examples from rural communities in woodland, downland, marshland and lowland pays in Kent to the south and east of the River Medway, and shows their connections with local towns. And among these, the case of Divers v. Williams provides unusually extensive information.

In 1776, baron Salomon von Otter, governor of the neighbouring county of Halland and jus patronatus of the local parish, stood opposite the men of Öja parish at a meeting outside the church. The powerful nobleman was for the third time arguing for the praiseworthy and legally required task of building a combined school and poor-house in cooperation with the neighbouring parish (where he happened to own most of the land). The peasants of Ö for a third time refused, both in writing and orally, on the grounds of their alleged right to self-government. The baron continued with his persuasions, and presented the support he had from the local nobility, among them the bishop. He was still met with a firm refusal. Eventually the baron ordered that they should build the house, referring (probably without much legal foundation) to his position as jus patronatus. Now everybody surrendered, except one farmer who refused to join in the final decision. This fact was carefully noted by the local clergyman, together with assurances that this unwise stubbornness would not suffice to impede the project.

In the burgeoning literature on war memorials and the commemoration of the war dead in Britain after 1918, the growth of village halls in rural areas has not been extensively analysed. K.S. Inglis has alerted us to the dichotomy of monuments to mourn the dead and amenities to serve the living. He noted that where a preference was made for utility over monumentality, local war memorial committees did not confine their attention to commemorating those who died on active service and made the Great Sacrifice, but also had in mind those who served and returned. The complex locally-determined processes of negotiating ways which would bring solace or comfort to the bereaved, through the creation of an object of mourning, has been examined with great care and detail, but analysis of urban-centred initiatives predominates.

Consequently, the linkage which might be made between the experience of war and the participation of ex-servicemen in village war memorial debates, the demise of old elites and the quest for improved social and material conditions in rural areas, the diminishing support for parish churches as the focal point of community life and the emergence of undenominational social centres, all point towards the need for further examination of the proceedings of local committees, where parish records allow. As British participation in the Great War contained the powerful rhetoric of a religious crusade and was not connected to the improvement of social conditions until the publication of war aims in January 1918, many committees gave priority to the creation of sacred objects of mourning, with much use of exhortatory moral language and Christian iconography.