John Constable has a lot to answer for. The celebrated landscape artist was responsible for the introduction of the picturesque from continental Europe in the early 19th century, a convention that still dominates perceptions of the English countryside to this day. Most visitors to the countryside expect to find something ‘as pretty as a picture’ and that picture is epitomised by Constable's paintings. The most celebrated is The Hay Wain, in which a sturdy yeoman is seen driving his cart across the River Stour, in Dedham Vale on the Essex/Suffolk border. However, all is not what it seems.

Constable's portrayal is not an accurate one, nor was it intended to be. It is an elegy to a lost past, which if it existed at all had long disappeared by the 1820s when the painting was conceived. The open common land across the river had been subjected to enclosure and the independent yeoman would by now have been a destitute farm labourer casually employed, if employed at all.

Conditions were so bad that they provoked extensive social unrest – the Captain Swing riots – with widespread arson, the maiming of animals and destruction of crops. East Anglia was where the rioting was most commonplace and where the authorities cracked down hardest. A picturesque rural idyll it was not.

As the 19th century proceeded poverty became increasingly viewed as an urban problem as the new industrial centres grew apace and the living conditions of the poor became only too obvious. In the countryside poverty remained mostly unacknowledged. For the rural poor Methodism provided some solace, but trade union organisation largely failed, notwithstanding the efforts led by Joseph Arch in the 1870s. Poverty still remained hidden. The poor made little fuss and slipped away to better-paid employment when they could. There was often a view that they were poor but happy; whereas the urban poor were poor and miserable.

Although there was a considerable exodus from rural areas of able men to fight in the First World War, low farm wages continued to prevail, so that this remained the economic basis of rural poverty. It took another World War to produce an extraordinary transformation in the nature of the rural economy and the demographic characteristics of the rural population.