Agricultural history, rural history, or countryside history?

Historical Journal

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 465-481

  Burchardt, Jeremy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF READING   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGRICULTURAL HISTORY; ECONOMIC HISTORY; RURAL HISTORY;

ENGLAND; EURASIA; EUROPE; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 34548621844     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X07006152     Document Type: Review

References (85)

1. Rural tourism was worth nearly £14 billion in the UK in 2001. Tourism supported 380,000 jobs in England in that year, compared to 374,000 in farming. The Wye Group Handbook, Rural households' livelihood and wellbeing (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 2005).
2. R. Munton, 'Farming families in upland Britain: Options, strategies and futures' (paper presented to the Association of American Geographers, Toronto, April 1990);
3. D. Symes, 'Changing gender roles in productionist and post-productionist capitalist agriculture', Journal of Rural Studies, 7 (1991), pp- 85-90;
4. Terry Marsden, Jonathan Murdoch, and S. Williams, 'Regulating agricultures in deregulating economies: Emerging trends in the uneven development of agriculture', Geoforum, 23 (1986), pp. 333-45;
5. Philip Lowe, Jonathan Murdoch, Terry Marsden, R. Munton, and Andrew Flynn, 'Regulating the new rural spaces: The uneven development of land', Journal of Rural Studies, 9 (1993), pp. 205-22;
6. N. Ward, 'The agricultural treadmill and the rural environment in the post-productivist era', Sociologia Ruralis, 23 (1993), pp. 348-64.
7. E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, chance and change: The character of the industrial revolution in England (Cambridge, 1990);
8. idem, Poverty, progress and population (Cambridge, 2004);
9. M. Overton, Agriculture revolution in England: The transformation of the agrarian economy, 1500-1850 (Cambridge, 1996).
10. Donald N. McCloskey, 'The enclosure of open fields: Preface to a study of its impact on the efficiency of English agriculture in the eighteenth century', Journal of Economic History, 32 (1972), pp. 15-35;
11. idem, 'English open fields as behaviour towards risk', Research in Economic History, 1 (1976), pp. 124-70;
12. idem, 'The open fields of England: Rent, risk and the rate of interest', in David W. Galenson, ed., Markets in history: Economic studies of the past (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 5-49;
13. F. M. L. Thompson, 'The second agricultural revolution', Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 21 (1968), pp. 62-77;
14. idem, 'An anatomy of English agriculture, 1870-1914', in Michael E. Turner and B. A. Holderness, eds., Land, labour, and agriculture, 1700-1920: Essays for Gordon Mingay (London, 1991), pp. 211-40;
15. Patrick K. O' Brien, 'Agriculture and the industrial revolution', Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 30 (1977), pp. 166-81.
16. M. E. Turner, J. V. Beckett, and B. Afton, Agricultural rent in England, 1690-1914 (Cambridge, 1997);
17. idem, Farm production in England, 1700-1914 (Oxford, 2001).
18. Robert Bakewell, of Dishley, Leicestershire (1725-95), breeder of improved cattle and sheep, notably the New Leicester sheep;
19. Thomas Coke, of Holkham, 'Coke of Norfolk', 1st earl of Leicester (1754-1842), pioneer of crop rotations;
20. Arthur Young (1741-1820), the most influential agricultural journalist of his time. Convertible husbandry is 'the system where the distinction between permanent grass and permanent arable is broken; arable land rotates around the farm' (Overton, Agricultural revolution in England p. 116).
21. T. W. Fletcher, 'The great depression of English agriculture, 1873-1896', Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 103 (1961), pp. 417-32.
22. Gordon E. Mingay, ed., The Victorian countryside (2 vols., London, 1981);
23. idem, The gentry: The rise and fall of a ruling class (London, 1976);
24. and idem, English landed society in the eighteenth century (London, 1963).
25. F. M. L. Thompson, English landed society in the nineteenth century (London, 1963);
26. idem, 'English landed society in the twentieth century, I: Property: collapse and survival', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser., 40 (1990), pp. 1-24;
27. idem, 'English landed society in the twentieth century, II: New poor and new rich',
28. ibid., 6th ser., 1 (1991), pp. 1-20;
29. idem, 'English landed society in the twentieth century: III, self-help and outdoor relief',
30. ibid., 6th ser., 2 (1992), pp. 1-23;
31. and idem, 'English landed society in the twentieth century, IV: Prestige without power',
32. ibid., 6th ser., 3 (1993), pp. 1-22.
33. E.J. T. Collins, ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales , VII: 1850-1914 (2 vols., Cambridge, 2001). It is striking that the unusual term 'agrarian' was preferred to 'rural' - a title such as the Cambridge history of rural England and Wales would, one imagines, have been equally acceptable. 'Agrarian' suggests, rightly, that those who conceived the series wanted to indicate that agriculture was at the heart of everything that had taken place in the countryside, even if the countryside was not exclusively agricultural.
34. Thompson, 'The second agricultural revolution'.
35. E. J. T. Collins, 'The coppice and underwood trades', in G. E. Mingay, ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales, VI: 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 484-501.
36. E.J. T. Collins, 'Harvest technology and labour supply in Britain, 1970-1870', Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 23 (1969), pp. 453-73;
37. idem, 'Migrant labour in British agriculture in the nineteenth century', Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 29 (1976), pp. 38-59;
38. idem, 'Agricultural hand tools and the industrial revolution', in Kevin Langford and Negley Harte, eds., Land and society in Britain, 1700-1914: Essays in honour of F. M. L. Thompson (Manchester, 1996), pp. 57-77;
39. and idem, 'Power availability and agricultural productivity in England and Wales, 1840-1939', in J. P. Bas van Bavel and Erik Thoen, eds., Land productivity and agro-systems in the North Sea area: Middle Ages - 20th century: Elements for comparison (Brepols, 1999), pp. 209-28.
40. Liz Bellamy, K. D. M. Snell, and Tom Williamson, 'Rural history: The prospect before us', Rural History, 1 (1990), pp. 1-4.
41. K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the labouring poor: Social change and agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1985). Whilst Snell's use of data in Annals has since been criticized, the methodological approach he pioneered remains valid.
42. See Norma Landau, 'The laws of settlement and the surveillance of immigration in eighteenth-century Kent', Continuity and Change, 3 (1988), pp. 391-420;
43. idem, 'The regulation of immigration, economic structures and definitions of the poor in eighteenth-century England', Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 541-72;
44. idem, 'The eighteenth-century context of the laws of settlement', Continuity and Change, 6 (1991), pp. 417-39;
45. and idem, 'Who was subjected to the laws of settlement? Procedure under the settlement laws in eighteenth-century England', Agricultural History Review, 43 (1995), pp. 139-59.
46. For Snell's response, see 'Pauper settlement and the right to poor relief in England and Wales', Continuity and Change, 6 (1991), pp. 375-415;
47. and idem, 'Settlement, poor law and the rural historian: New approaches and opportunities', Rural History, 3 (1992), pp. 145-72.
48. 'Hodge' was a contemptuous generic term for an agricultural worker, widely current amongst the educated in the nineteenth century; see Mark Freeman, 'The agricultural labourer and the "Hodge" stereotype, c. 1850-1914', Agricultural History Review, 49 (2001), pp. 172-86.
49. Trevor Wild, Village England: A social history of the countryside (London, 2004).
50. J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700-1820(Cambridge, 1993) should also be mentioned. Neeson offers rich qualitative insights, but neither the scale nor sophistication of data analysis can match Snell's Annals.
51. Reshaping rural England: A social history, 1850-1925 (London, 1991) included a chapter on England after the Great War, but was brief and derivative. Most of Howkins's other work does not extend beyond 1914, although he has recently begun to write more extensively on the mid- and late twentieth century. This will be assessed in more detail below.
52. Arguments confirmed and extended by Nicola Verdon, Rural women workers in nineteenth-century England: Gender, work and wages (Woodbridge, 2002).
53. Howard Newby, The deferential worker: A study of farm workers in East Anglia (London, 1977), similarly argues that deference was an attribute of situations rather than persons.
54. Peter E. Dewey, British agriculture in the First World War (London, 1989).
55. The wheat extraction rate is the proportion of the grain milled into flour.
56. E. J. T. Collins, 'Productivity and output growth in British agriculture, 1870-1940' (unpublished paper, Economic History Society conference, Glasgow, 2002);
57. Paul Brassley, 'Output and technical change in twentieth-century British agriculture', Agricultural History Review, 48 (2000), pp. 60-84.
58. John Martin, The development of modern agriculture: British farming since 1931 (London, 1999).
59. See R. D. Brigden, 'John Spedan Lewis and the Leckford estate' (Ph.D. thesis, Reading, 2001).
60. Ministry of Works and Planning, Report of the committee on land utilisation in rural areas Cmd 6378, 1942.
61. Alun Howkins, 'The discovery of rural England', in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds., Englishness: Politics and culture, 1880-1920 (London, 1986), pp. 62-88.
62. Patrick Wright, On living in an old country: The national past in contempory Britain (London, 1985).
63. Simon Miller, 'Urban dreams and rural reality: Land and landscape in English culture, 1920-1945', Rural History, 6 (1995), pp. 89-102.
64. Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative leadership and national values (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 244-50.
65. Peter Mandler, '"Against Englishness": English culture and the limits to rural nostalgia, 1850-1940', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 7 (1997), pp. 155-75.
66. See, for example, Jeremy Burchardt, Paradise lost: Rural idyll and social change in England since 1800 (London, 2002), pp. 98-9.
67. There is an extensive literature on the economic consequences of rural nostalgia. Amongst the more notable contributions were Hartmut Berghoff, 'Public schools and the decline of the British economy, 1870-1914', Past and Present, 129 (1990), pp. 148-67;
68. M. Dintenfass, The decline of industrial Britain, 1870-1980 (London, 1992);
69. W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, culture and decline in Britain, 1750-1990. (London, 1993);
70. C. H. Feinstein, 'Success and failure: British economic growth since 1948', in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey, eds, The economic history of Britain since 1700 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1994), pp. 95-122;
71. M. Sanderson, Education and economic decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s (Cambridge, 1999);
72. and F. M. L. Thompson, Gentrification and the enterprise culture: Britain, 1780-1980 (Oxford, 2001).
73. Other examples include works by literary critics, such as Jan Marsh, Back to the land: The pastoral impulse in Britain from 1880 to 1914 (London, 1982);
74. and Georgina Boyes, The imagined village: Culture, ideology, and the English folk revival (Manchester, 1993),
75. by the art biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, The simple life: C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds (London, 1991),
76. and by the cultural commentator, Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A history of walking (London, 2001).
77. Karen Sayer, Country cottage: A cultural history (Manchester, 2000).
78. Bunce's contrast between pastoral English and agrarian US rural idylls is potentially reductionist. It underlines the need to develop a more nuanced, finely graded understanding of popular perceptions of the countryside than the notion of a unitary national ideal permits. Avner Offer's distinction between a Tory country-house emphasis on landscape and a more activist urban Liberal involvement in rambling and nature makes a start here. Avner Offer, Property and politics, 1870-1914: landownership, law, ideology and urban development in England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 328-49. Compare David Matless's distinction between organicist and planner-preservationist outlooks.
79. Unlike Wiener and the 'Englishness' claque, I would argue that the primary shift is away from an absorption in the national past among most sections of the cultural nation, while the shift towards a swooning nostalgia for the rural past takes place only among a small, articulate but not necessarily influential avant-garde (or, rather, a derrière-garde)'; Mandler, 'Against "Englishness"', pp. 159-60.
80. In the NEDC report Work in the countryside (1989), the Countryside Commission reported that 18 million people visit the countryside on a fine summer Sunday.
81. Peter Howard, 'Painters' preferred places', Journal of Historical Geography, 11 (1985), pp. 138-54, makes pioneering use of the catalogues of the Royal Academy summer exhibitions to chart changing locational preferences for landscape paintings. Howard's quantitative approach points the way ahead although as he himself notes 'The major limitation of [this] work is that it concentrates on the changes in taste of a tiny fraction of the population, albeit probably an influential fraction. To discover if public tastes have changed in step with the changes outlined here would seem to be an obvious next stage' (p. 153).
82. Trevor Wild's Village England suggests that the location, age, and architecture of rural houses bought by incomers correlates with their wealth (pp. 166-71). Very wealthy incomers purchase 'picturesque' houses in the centre of open villages, or in estate villages. The moderately wealthy buy new, typically 'urban style' houses in cul-de-sacs on the edge of open villages. A more nuanced version of this classification could provide the starting point for an interesting research agenda.
83. See, for example, Phil Macnaghten and John Urry, Contested natures (London, 1998).
84. Melanie Tebbutt, '"Men of the hills" and street corner boys: Northern uplands and the urban imagination', in Rural and urban encounters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Regional perspectives, proceedings of the CORAL conference, September 2002 (Manchester, 2004).
85. Alun Howkins, 'Qualifying the evidence: Perceptions of rural change in the second half of the twentieth century', in David Gilbert, David Matless, and Brian Short, eds., Geographies of British modernity: space and society in the twentieth century (Oxford, 2003), pp. 97-112.