Two questions will no doubt greet the arrival of this journal: why rural history? and why now? The current economic climate is hardly favourable for ventures of this kind. But recent developments in the numerous fields which touch on matters rural indicate a real academic need for a new forum for interdisciplinary exchange. Much exciting and innovative work has been carried out over the past decade – on the nature and structure of rural communities; on regional differences and identity; on how rural workers are defined and represented by others and by themselves; on the relationship between the urban and the rural. Yet this research has been scattered across a range of disciplines and subdisciplines, many of which tend to be regarded as marginal to the central thrust of historical investigation. In areas like folklore studies or art history, ideas of the rural have developed apace, and the terms of the analysis of the rural community have acquired considerable methodological complexity. Yet the study of ‘rural history’ continues to be rather narrowly defined, confined by an essentially economistic agenda that has excluded much of the most fascinating recent work. Rural history is often seen as synonymous with agricultural history, and although the latter has generated a great deal of valuable and interesting research, its privileging of the economic perspective has tended to preclude the methodological inclusiveness that now seems necessary to foster cross-fertilisation between the disparate areas in which the study of rural society is being pursued.

On May 29 1986, a storm tracked across central Macedonia. In the hills north of the small market town of Langadhas, a violent fall of hail flattened ripening cereal crops, but the destruction was very patchy: some fields belonging to the village of Assiros were devastated, but others were unharmed and the storm spared a neighbouring village before causing renewed damage further along its path. Farmers hit by the storm were lucky – they received compensation for their losses from the European Economic Community – but their neighbours were less fortunate. Across the whole region, the winter of 1985/6 had been virtually rainless and some farmers unaffected by the storm barely recouped their sowing costs.

This essay considers whether it is possible for landscape archaeologists, particularly those concerned with prehistory or with periods not significantly text-aided, to go beyond the pursuit of methodological virtuosity and the production of local studies, and make useful contributions to discussions on mainstream social and economic issues in human history. A major problem for landscape archaeologists – and indeed for prehistorians – is that as soon as they stray beyond routine archaeological description and analysis, they face the scepticism of anthropologists, historians and human geographers. I argue that we can learn from scholars from these other disciplines but should not try to ape them. We need to define more clearly our own field of operation. It has become fashionable to consider past landscapes as texts; comparisons between the contexts of ‘messages’ conveyed by documents and by landscapes lead me to suggest that ignorance of the nature of oral tradition and its articulation within material culture is one of the prehistorian's greatest blind spots. In choosing the most useful scale for analysis, the prehistorian should develop the concept of the small community, rather than the ‘site’ or the region, and consider the modification of such a community's ‘mental map’ of the landscape as a critical indicator of social process.

The game of camping or camp-ball, best described as a blend of football and handball, was played for centuries in the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex. It survived well into the nineteenth century, and indeed was consciously revived after the Napoleonic Wars. Furthermore, as a traditional form of recreation, it began to attract antiquarian interest at an early date, and was mentioned by several county and parochial historians of the eighteenth century Our evidence for the game is still regrettably scattered and circumstantial, but its quantity has increased appreciably in recent years. This, therefore, seems a good time to offer some new ideas on the subject, in the hope of getting closer to the real nature and social significance of a once popular regional sport.

The archaeology of rural settlements is a comparatively new branch of history. Its genealogy is easy to trace. Spurred on by the growth of economic and social history in the inter-war years, Dutch archaeologists, like A.E. van Giffin, and younger Danish archaeologists, such as Gunther Hatt and Axel Steensburg, undertook large open-area excavations of North Sea Migration period settlements. Van Giffin's excavation of the terp at Ezinge during the ‘thirties is a typical example. Using open-area excavation, a controlled form of the clearance excavation being employed on the large classical sites in Mussolini's Italy, it became feasible to examine the Migration-period architecture (as an architectural historian might) and the evolution of the settlement (as a classical topographer might do it). Neither would have been possible if a site such as Ezinge had been trenched. As far as we can tell today, van Giffin et al. did not intend to rewrite history, so much as to use archaeology to confirm prevailing ethnically-oriented theses about Migration period peoples. In some ways this was also the case when W.G. Hoskins and Maurice Beresford began to undertake small excavations of deserted medieval villages in England in 1947. Both hoped that small excavation trenches might help them to date the desertion of some of these settlements. In practice, of course, what they discovered in the course of nineteen excavations merely proved to be confusing (cf. Hurst, 1971: 83). Hoskins turned to other matters, but Beresford pursued the possibilities of archaeology at Wharram Percy, a fine example of a so-called deserted medieval village.

More books and articles are being published about medieval rural history, archaeology and geography than ever before. This is not just because academics have been told to improve their productivity, but mainly reflects the enthusiasm of authors and the demand of a numerous reading public. Publishers find that books on medieval subjects have a steady sale, both among young students, who, despite gloomy predictions, are still attracted to the Middle Ages, and among the thousands of older people who attend adult education classes. There are more ideas in circulation, more stimulating differences of opinion, and more cross-fertilisation between disciplines. One might sometimes regret a certain narrowness of view which prevents some experts reading the works of others, even to the point when their footnotes consist almost entirely of citations of their own publications. And one wishes that British scholars had more contacts with their counterparts in continental Europe. But in general these are expansive and stirring times in which to be involved with the study of the medieval countryside, and we can look forward to more important advances in the next decade. The long term is a different matter, in view of the decline in the numbers of postgraduate students, the pursuit of a spurious ‘relevance’ by such funding bodies as the Economic and Social Research Council, the squeezing of economic and social history as a separate discipline out of many universities in the interests of ‘rationalisation’, and the continued financial uncertainties for public archaeology.

But to return to the 1990s.

The welfare state emerged in 1948 when the National Assistance Act finally abolished the New Poor Law Forty-two years later, as politicians and bureaucrats struggle to keep increasing expenditure within bounds, the existence of the welfare state in its present form is under threat. Just over 150 years ago, the Old Poor Law was presenting parish ratepayers with a similar problem of rising costs, leading in 1834 to a fundamental reorganisation into the New Poor Law It may therefore be profitable to see how effective in practice the New Poor Law was when it replaced a system widely regarded as profligate, and to consider the extent to which benefits payable through the welfare state were available a hundred years or more ago.

This study examines in detail how the New Poor Law, and other forms of relief, affected the whole population of the rural parish of Colyton, in south Devonshire, during the thirty years from 1851 to 1881. It will first describe the sources from which a poor person in Colyton in the mid nineteenth century could look for relief; next discuss how widespread poverty was and who the poor were; then look at what kinds of relief were available, under what conditions; and finally assess the comparative importance to the poor of the different agencies providing assistance.

More bad history has been written about sex than any other subject. Our ignorance about the sexual attitudes and behaviour of people in the past is compounded by a desire to rush to rash generalisation. This is unfortunate, for (consciously or not) our perceptions of the present are shaped by our assumptions about the past. Britain's current preoccupation with ‘Victorian values’ is but a politically visible example of a more general phenomenon. And, more specifically, we do not know a great deal about lower-class sexuality in nineteenth-century England. There are studies of bourgeois desires and sensibilities, but little on the mores of the vast bulk of the population.

As Jean Robin has demonstrated recently, one of the most fruitful approaches to the subject is the detailed local study – the micro-study. It may not appeal to those with a penchant for the broad sweep, but such an approach can provide a useful entry into the sexual habits of the people of the past. This article is intended as a follow-up to Robin's work. It deals with a part of rural Kent and, like Robin's work, it covers an aspect of nineteenth-century sexuality – in this case, the social context of illegitimacy. More particularly, this study (and here I differ from Robin) will question the usefulness of the concept of a ‘bastardy-prone sub-society’ (more of which later), a term still favoured by many historical sociologists. The experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.

In this paper my intention is to discuss the diversity of rural landscapes, still detectable in spite of two centuries and more of industrialisation, and to point to the roots of this diversity, in a time when local differences in habitat were bonded to contrasts in culture, economy and society. The stimulus, perhaps even the courage, to write this essay came from reading Braudel's The Identity of France: History and Environment, for his joyous exploration of that country generates an awareness of the need for a deep sense of place as a foundation for understanding rural history. For me one key to this is seen in figure 1, a new map of settlement in England and Wales in the middle years of the last century, a product of my work on rural settlements. Everitt, using the case of Kent as a basis for an evaluation of the use of landscapes as a historical source, has emphasised the importance of countrysides in understanding the evolution of the landscapes of field, forest, heath, fell, fen, marsh, down and wald (Everitt, 1986: 6–13, 338–40; for wald see Everitt, 1986: passim and Ekwall, 1970: 491–2). Figure 1 is one measure of the diversity and a source of this discussion.

It is now roughly a quarter of a century since the proponents of a new social history of early modern England offered students of the period a novel agenda and an unprecedented opportunity. Prior to the 1960s social history had been variously understood as the history of everyday life, of the lower classes and popular movements, or as a junior partner in the relatively recently-established firm of economic and social history (occupied in the main with the study of social institutions and social policy). As such, it had produced more than a few pioneering works of outstanding quality and lasting value (some of them about to enjoy a revived recognition after decades of relative neglect). But it was not a field close to the centre of historical preoccupation. It was at best contextual, at worst residual.

From the early 1960s, however, came a call for a social history of a new type, one conceived as the history of social relationships and of the culture which informs them and gives them meaning. The new agenda was deeply influenced by the social sciences and envisaged an ever closer relationship with sociology, social anthropology and demography. Peter Laslett wrote of ‘sociological history’ or ‘historical sociology’ and Keith Thomas of the need for a ‘more systematic indoctrination’ in the concepts and methodologies of the social sciences. As applied to history, all this was both radical and liberating. In the face of an established curriculum which appeared in many respects restrictive and in some dessicated, it proposed a massive and necessary broadening and deepening of historical concern: the creation of a range of historical enquiry appropriate to the preoccupations and understandings of the late twentieth century.

A landscape is never so valuable as when it is under threat, and the English rural countryside has been the subject of alarm for centuries. Raymond Williams identified an ‘escalator’ on which literary representation continually looked back upon a past golden age of rural virtue, ensuring that the idea of a ‘true’ rural England has persisted into the twentieth century with extraordinary power Thus Howard Newby can write of the ‘stereotypes and myths which surround the popular image of the rural world’, while, at the same time, he claims this fallacious perception is ‘one of the major protecting illusions of our time’. This illusion has been reinforced by the nature of English society. Sir Lewis Narnier believed English society to be ‘amphibious’ in the eighteenth century, with no sharp divide between town and country among the interests of the ruling classes. By the end of the nineteenth century the countryside, under the influence of Romanticism and a changing class structure, had become the preserve of an upper-class society increasingly separated from industrialism and the great towns. Yet this upper class was cemented by the public schools and the universities to include not only landowners, but an array of occupations, including many intellectuals. Until the First World War, despite increasing mechanisation and specialisation in the countryside, the land presented a rural face largely unspoiled by the intrusion of industrial and urban uses. Land was held in large estates, farmed by tenants in a world of mostly irregular fields, lanes and hedgerows, with buildings that preserved vernacular styles.

United Kingdom (UK) accession into the European Economic Community (EEC), which became a political likelihood in 1970 and an actuality in 1973, led to a major change in agricultural policy away from a deficiency payments system supporting farmers' incomes towards the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) method of assistance through farm prices above the market level. Such a basic alteration in government activity not only imposed well-known and thoroughly researched costs on the British economy in the form of higher food prices and an additional burden of protection, it also undermined dominant post-1945 historical trends.

Firstly, it reversed a thirty year old process towards greater British self-sufficiency Between 1938 and 1946 UK agricultural production rose in value from 42% to 52% of the country's food imports, while under the deficiency payments scheme, permanently established in peacetime by the 1947 Agriculture Act, the proportion of UK food consumption supplied by domestic producers grew steadily until it reached a level of just under 72% in 1972. EEC membership, involving compulsory adoption of the CAP, initially reversed this movement; British agricultural self-sufficiency fell to 66% in 1977, the year when the Common External Tariff (CET) was first applied in full. The higher import bill that inevitably resulted imposed a severe strain on the UK balance of payments, estimated by the pro-market. Heath government in 1970 at a net annual deterioration in the range of 18% to 26%.

Markets are ubiquitous, dominant, integrating all production nationally: that is interlocking markets in a national purchase and sale network at money price, organised on an economy-wide basis, a market network essential to all industrial and agricultural lines of production… Practically all farm output was sold for cash. All factors of production, land, labour, tools, transport, artificial fertilisers, were available on national markets for purchase at money price… Here we have total market dependence, for livelihood and the ubiquitous use of cash.

As part of research into the local history value of Rural Community Council (RCC) documentation, I would be interested to hear from anyone who holds archive material relating to the activities of RCCs since they were formed in the 1920s. This could cover not only items produced by the RCCs themselves, but also their allied concerns and organisations: for example, the development of the mobile library network, early rural adult education, support for parish councils and village halls, rural arts and crafts, the relief of the rural poor, and the setting up of Old Peoples Welfare Councils, Citizens Advice Bureaux and the like.

A frequent complaint among English historians is that the farm workers were a ‘secret people’ who seldom interacted with the written or recorded word. If vaguely discernible in this or that statistic, or anonymous act of physical protest, the labourer's cultural and political consciousness was entombed (it is sometimes inferred) in that drudging physical pantomime which many nineteenth-century commentators assumed to be the primary attribute of ‘Hodge’. Even the labourers' contemporary friends harboured a ‘Hodge’ stereotype in their assumption that the labourers' aspirations, or ‘cottage charter’, were best represented and publicised by ‘articulate’ outsiders. William Cobbett, who for three decades argued that farm workers were capable of profound thought and articulation, implied as much in his observation that ‘Nobody (excepting himself) tells the tale of the labourer.’ In 1848, as a better known Charter was re-stated to the nation from the mass radical platform of the metropolis, Sidney Godolphin Osborne lamented that the labourer ‘has few to speak for him, few who care to face the odium of exposing the conduct of those individuals, or classes, or laws, who or which oppress him’. Five years later, with reference to the ‘peasant’ worker, Karl Marx made a similar assumption: ‘they must be represented’, he argued, and their representative ‘must appear as their master, as an authority over them.’ Even as late as 1880, shortly after the formation of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union, Richard Jefferies confidently proclaimed that ‘the country labourer possessed no clearly defined ‘Cottage Charter’ and no genuine programme of the future; that which is put forward in his name is not for him’.

The history of the labouring poor in the late nineteenth century has been shaped by different and often competing ‘ways of seeing’. Rural labourers occur in histories of social policy as clients or victims of the Poor Law; to the historian of crime they are social bandits or deviants; even to the historian of conventional politics they are the ‘objects’ of reform. All these ways of seeing are important, but I want to concentrate on one in particular, that ‘created’ by the discourse of ‘labour history’. This area laid down, and to a limited extent still continues to define, a structure which concentrates on the formal and quasi-formal organisations of labour. As such it still owes a good deal to the Webb's view of a kind of inevitable and desirable progress from ‘barbarianism’ or non-organisation, through struggle with unjust wages and hard masters, to the organised union with the general secretary and the enlightened employer sitting down together to fix a fair day's work and a fair day's pay.

As a ‘rural geographer’ it has been fascinating over the past few years to witness and participate in the rather ponderous lurch being made by the subject towards new theoretical approaches. In particular, ideas and concepts within the broader movement of critical social science, and under the umbrella of political economy, are now being widely discussed, but a fundamental and widespread adoption of new ideas has been both slothful and in some cases grudging. This is not to suggest that research in rural geography has remained unchanged through the 1980s. Indeed, a growth in the scale of rural research has been evident, and this research has become more applied and policy-oriented than ever before. Until quite recently, however, rural geography has lacked a vigorous push towards new theoretical ground and towards the analytical comparisons of these theories.