The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time when many of the landed classes chose to be absent from their estates. However, this same period also saw the early stages of a so-called ‘revolution’ in agricultural methods and techniques. This article, therefore, evaluates the impact of non-residency on estate management structures and agricultural progress. Specific issues examined here include the role of the steward, leasing policy, the promotion of new farming techniques and estate investment by the landlord. In this context, comparisons will be made between absentee, semi-resident and resident estates for the region of Woodland High Suffolk.

This paper seeks to place the seventeenth-century enclosure riots at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, in both their local and national contexts and to consider the Crown's changing attitudes towards enclosure during the period under consideration. The surviving local records are such that it is not only possible to trace the economic and social backgrounds of many of the rioters, but also to ascertain the eventual outcome of the unrest and the factors that contributed to it: an investigation that many historians of enclosure riots, in their reliance on central records, have been reluctant to undertake. As a manor of the Duchy of Cornwall, Berkhamsted was, in the early decades, subject to the attention of a powerful landlord, with a great deal of legal muscle. In 1640, however, the tables were turned, partly due to opposition to the Crown in other royal manors and in government. It appears that having the Crown as landlord ultimately ensured the rioters' success. A local landlord would have been able to concentrate his energies on the enclosure. Berkhamsted Common was preserved for posterity.

The focus of postmodernist historians on language and representation clashes with the more traditional approach of the social historian to material structures and processes. This article adopts the suggestion of Wahrman that a ‘space of possibilities’ exists where these apparently competing perspectives might be connected. The concept of a ‘space of possibilities’ is pursued through a case study of a marginal group, the fishing communities of west Cornwall in the late nineteenth century. The article explores points of contact and contrast between the artistic and the fishing communities, between the painterly gaze and the subjects of that gaze. It is proposed that, while the artistic colonies and their representations might be explained as a result of discourses reproduced in the centre, their specific choice of location in Cornwall can also be related to the local economic and social history that granted them a space of possibilities.

This article focuses on the property relations in Belgian and Flemish agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The main question is: what was the relationship between land use, land ownership and land rents? By analysing the position of the (small) farmers and of the (small) landlords we could confirm that the dominance of small-scale farming coincided with a specific pattern of property distribution and surplus extraction. The high and increasing returns of the land were almost entirely pruned away by private landowners. The extreme fragmentation of the land, the large proportion of leaseholds and the high rents grew to a maximum in the second half of the nineteenth century due to competition both on the property market and on the leasehold market. This put the Flemish farmer in the worst possible situation, with a sad contrast between brilliant harvests and the miserable existence of those who generated them.

In the 1980s two vigorous debates commanded the attention of economic and feminist historians alike, and they played a key part in shaping the historiography concerning rural women in Australia. One debate revolved around the use of the nineteenth-century census in determining women's occupations, including those of farming women. The other debate, part of a wider feminist conversation about women's agency, focused on the question of the nature of white women's lives within colonial families and society. Despite the centrality of rural women to these debates, and the role colonial women's histories played in shaping the historiography, these debates did not impact upon the writing of rural history in Australia. This article revisits these debates in the light of new research into the lives of never-married women on Australia's family farms and uses their histories to question the conclusions arrived at by feminist and economic historians. It also questions the continuing invisibility of rural women in histories of rural Australia and hopes to provoke more discussion between rural and feminist historians.

The fencing of boundaries so as to confine or exclude cattle was a major preoccupation in the most densely populated parishes of Jamaica in the mid nineteenth century. Part-time labourers (who constituted a new semi-peasantry) were being settled on the fringes of the old estates in increasing numbers, having been granted licenses or pretended leases for land on which they grew their crops. The same ‘attorneys’ who managed the older declining plantations where such squatting was arranged also tended to be introducing cattle in place of sugar and they wished to shift the costs of fencing onto their small ‘peasant’ occupiers. However, English law, which imposed an obligation to fence in cattle, initially assisted the peasantry. The attorneys therefore looked to New World models that would require those growing crops to fence out animals. This article examines actions in court and the agitation in more detail so as to suggest that fencing was a major source of inter-racial friction in the period before and after the Morant Bay rebellion, but with the outcome strongly favouring a late-century resurgence in the plantation economy.

The literature concerning recreational landscapes is substantial, but its contents are heavily biased towards the parks and gardens of the aristocratic and land-owning classes. Surprisingly, very little of a landscape historical nature has been published on the countrysides created and maintained for the purpose of grouse shooting, even though the areas concerned are some of the most admired and most ecologically sensitive parts of Britain. The pursuit of grouse shooting has been followed in the Yorkshire Dales for more than 250 years and the activity (in this context ‘sport’ is an emotive term) and its varied impacts upon the landscape have been conditioned by a variety of factors. Some are social, and relate to perceptions of what constitute acceptable forms of upper class recreation and association; some are technological and involve the development of firearms; some are logistical and pertain to improvements in access to the upland grouse moors, while some are ecological and concern the improvement and deterioration of the habitat and fluctuations in the grouse population. All these factors found expression in the landscape, on the grand scale, by the systematic burning, swaling or swiddening of the moors and at the local level, for example, by constructing butts in relation to topography, prevailing wind direction and the flight paths favoured by the game.

In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, anxieties developed about the impact of advertisements on the English landscape. Large posters and hoardings in rural areas were increasingly seen as having a damaging effect on the scenic beauties of the country, and a campaign to have their use restricted was started up in the 1890s. This article focuses on that campaign, and on the activities and ideology of the organisation (the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising — SCAPA) which spearheaded it. In doing so, it seeks to engage with the wider historiographical debate about the nature of ‘Englishness’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an examination of the agenda of SCAPA and other preservationist bodies (such as the National Trust), it suggests that it is misleading to conclude that English culture in this period was pervaded by backward-looking ‘rural-nostalgic’ obsessions. However, it also emphasises that English national identity was nonetheless to an important extent related to ideas about land and landscape. It does not do to write off phenomena like opposition to the ‘disfigurement’ of picturesque English scenery as insignificant, the concern only of a very marginal section of elite culture.

Against the background of the economic and cultural environment of inter-war rural Britain, this article seeks to trace the history of the ‘Kinship in Husbandry’, a group of like-minded ruralists opposed to modernising tendencies in agricultural and the rural economy. Inspired largely by the thinking of the landowner, poet, forester and fold-danger Rolf Gardiner and chronicled by the writer H. J. Massingham, the ‘Kinship’ had little immediate influence, although its organicist, holistic and localist ideas form the basis of much current thinking on rural development. In considering the ‘Kinship’, the article also investigates the personal relationship between Gardiner and Massingham.

This essay uses the film A Canterbury Tale (The Archers, 1944) to consider the relationship between the countryside and modernity in English culture during the 1930s and 1940s. While previous analyses have argued that A Canterbury Tale film is unambiguously conservative, this paper adopts a Gramscian framework to suggest that its conservatism is intimately bound up with an emergent, modernising structure of feeling. The paper therefore studies those scenes in which the serene rurality of the narrative engages in a visual and aural dialogue with the modern world. The paper argues that three motifs in the film are particularly meaningful: the development of unexpected class and gender inflections in the concept of pilgrimage, the detachment of America from its status as a signifier of ‘bad’ modernity in the English countryside, and the incorporation of the cinematic into the rural.