The poetry of John Clare, the most articulate voice of the rural working class of early nineteenth-century England, can be read as a meditation upon the relationship between memory and social relations. Clare drew upon the local traditions with which he had been brought up, setting them as golden memories against the harshness of the social conditions of the time at which he was writing. Within Clare's vision of agrarian history, parliamentary enclosure had fractured a distinct set of social relations, one characterised by paternalism, decency and kindness. In The Shepherd's Calendar, Clare conjures up a lost world of social harmony, when masters drank and socialised with their workers. Clare shows us an old farm labourer working with his younger workmates:

The last two generations of early modern social historians have demonstrated that, whatever else they were, English villages before large-scale parliamentary enclosure were not rural idylls; yet Clare's poetry routinely presents them as such. If the task of the historian lies in the search for unmediated, objective truth, then Clare's work might easily be dismissed as nostalgic retrospection.