bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
To Be Free and Independent: Crofting, Popular Protest and Lord Leverhulme's Hebridean Development Projects, 1917–25
Authors: Gold John R. , Gold Margaret M.
Published: October 2008

The ‘land question’ occupies a central role in the history of Highland Scotland. The system of estate ownership and tenure introduced in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden (1746) commodified the land as private possession. In its wake came mass evictions of tenants in large-scale ‘Clearances’ designed to convert crofting-lands to other agrarian or sporting uses. During the main period of Clearances (1780–1855), protest by the crofters remained spontaneous and sporadic. It was not until the last part of the nineteenth century, especially during the so-called Crofters' War (1881–96), that a resurgent crofting community engaged in sustained protest. The threat of civil unrest prompted some ameliorative measures, most notably the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886. This stabilised the situation and gave protection from further mass evictions but did not restore lands to the landless population from which their ancestors had been displaced. The demand for restitution, therefore, remained a powerful rallying cry.
Jam Making, Cuthbert Rabbit and Cakes: Redefining Domestic Labour in the Women's Institute, 1915–60
Authors: Morgan Maggie
Published: October 2008

I have discussed elsewhere the role of the British Women's Institute Movement within twentieth-century feminism. This paper will take this argument further by focusing on the way in which the W.I. redefined domestic labour as skilled and thus provided scope for rural women to gain status and validation from their involvement in it. First, however, I want to propose a different perception of the Women's Institute Movement from the more common idea of ‘Jam and Jerusalem’ popular in the 1990s, and describe its activities for those unfamiliar with the Movement.
Interpreting Maps of the Rural Landscape: An Example from Late Sixteenth-Century Buckinghamshire
Authors: Bendall Sarah
Published: October 2008

To deconstruct a map, said Brian Harley, it is necessary to read between the lines and to place the cartographic facts within a specific cultural perspective. He used the ideas of literary critics to make historians of cartography aware that there is more to maps than initially meets the eye and that ‘facts’ are rarely what they first appear to be. By viewing a map as a product of a particular society, one can begin to understand why a map was made in the way it was, how it was used and valued, and its role in representing and transforming contemporary attitudes and perspectives. To search for the wider meaning of local maps, it is usually necessary to make inferences based on research into their backgrounds; one rarely finds documents giving explicit directions on how, and why, a map was to be drawn and decorated. If, as in many past studies in the history of cartography, maps are taken at face value, they can leave many of their secrets unrevealed and, indeed, can easily be misinterpreted.
Agriculture, Technology, and Industrialization: The Rural Textile Sector in the Netherlands, 1830–1860
Authors: Mastboom Joyce M.
Published: October 2008

In 1833 in a small village in the eastern Netherlands, a school opened for training weavers in using a new technology imported from England: the flying shuttle. The school began by training boys and girls between the ages of 11 and 16; when that proved successful it opened its doors to all weavers sent by manufacturers from the greater region, which soon necessitated several branch schools. By far the majority who came were home-based workers and after their training, a matter of a few weeks for those not new to the task, they could take a new loom with them on a payment plan. Once home, they in turn trained others, while local carpenters learned to build new looms. As a result, weaving in the rural textile regions of Twente and the Achterhoek (see figures 1 and 2) was transformed rapidly so that by 1836 no more new pupils came, and the schools were closed.
Rights, ‘Riot’ and Ritual: The Knole Park Access Dispute, Sevenoaks, Kent, 1883–5
Authors: Killingray David
Published: October 2008

On two cool mid-summer nights in 1884 the small west Kent market town of Sevenoaks was disturbed by what one of the County newspapers, echoing the Chief Constable's words, called ‘riotous and tumultuous proceedings’. During the evening of Thursday 18th June a large crowd of townspeople broke down obstacles blocking the entrance to Knole Park and ceremoniously and noisily dumped them in front of the main door of Lord Sackville's large Tudor mansion. On the next night an even larger crowd, reported as numbering 1,500 or more, also invaded the park and besieged the house. A dispute over rights to use a bridle way across the Park which had dragged on for many months united many of the people of Sevenoaks and neighbouring villages against what was seen as the obstructive, illegal and high-handed behaviour of a wealthy and arrogant aristocrat. Attempts by the Local Board to find a resolution to the dispute had been rebuffed by Sackville and in the end the people of Sevenoaks took the law into their own hands.
Rural Ambivalence Toward Mass Society: Evidence from the U.S. Parcel Post Debates, 1900–1913
Authors: Kielbowicz Richard B.
Published: October 2008

For rural Americans, the debate over establishing a parcel post evoked all the hopes and anxieties associated with the expansion of mass society at the turn of the century. Parcel post, today an accepted and seemingly inconsequential government service, was originally seen as a linchpin in the emerging industry of mass culture. The media of mass communication advertised products and ran stories acclimating readers to a consumer society, thereby encouraging demand for mass-produced goods that were distributed, finally, by parcel post. Opponents of parcel post foresaw a decline of small towns, a centralization of production and distribution, a disruption of the ‘natural’ relations among labor, retailers, and consumers, and the aggrandizement of urban culture. At the other extreme, proponents claimed that parcel post would increase consumer choice, reduce the cost of living, and bridge the widening chasm between urban and rural life. Thus, the simple act of carrying a parcel from Chicago to a farmer's lane became freighted with a panoply of issues agitating the nation.
The Women's Harvest: Straw-Plaiting and the Representation of Labouring Women's Employment, c. 1793–1885
Authors: Sharpe Pamela
Published: October 2008

Increasing attention has recently been given by historians to the many informal ways in which women made economic contributions to rural labouring households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Jane Humphries and Peter King have shown how important the exploitation of common rights, by gleaning for example, could be to the family economy. This is not to overlook the fact that certain types of women's and children's employment, such as lace-making and straw-plaiting were formally established in some rural communities. The research which has been carried out into straw-plaiting the hand twisting of straw for use in hat making – in certain agricultural counties of southern England, has shown that the plait work of wives and children could provide a substantial financial boost to the household income of poorly paid agricultural labourers. Indeed there were times when their combined earnings could far outstrip those of the man. Single plaiters were also reputed to be able to collect something of a dowry to put towards their marriages out of their plait earnings. Industries such as straw-plaiting, which employed mainly women and children are, not before time, beginning to be considered as sources of the gain in productivity potential of Britain in the Industrial Revolution era. It seems likely that the income earned in these industries will, at last, be included in measurements of labouring family budgets and standards of living.
Rural-Urban Migration of Women and their Employment in Towns
Authors: Hill Bridget
Published: October 2008

There has in recent years been a considerable focus on migration by historians. We now know far more about rural/urban migration patterns within Britain, both short term and long term. This is particularly so for the period since the mid nineteenth-century censuses. But evidence suggests that mobility, notably among the young and single, was very high from the seventeenth century. Long before the first censuses a steady flow of population from rural areas to towns and cities had begun. ‘Rural depopulation’, we are told, ‘is common to most mature industrial societies of the twentieth century’. In fact, experience of the last half century in the Third World, as well as in pre-industrial England, suggests such movement precedes the development of a ‘mature industrial society’. In parts of England, it was the ‘major urban phenomenon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’. Many areas of the Third World have experienced very rapid urbanisation particularly since 1950 when the vast majority of the population still lived in rural areas.
Women, Men and Pre-Lenten Carnival in Northern Greece: An Anthropological Exploration of Gender Transformation In Symbol and Practice
Authors: Cowan Jane K.
Published: October 2008

My very first encounter with Sohos, a small market and agricultural town in the mountains northeast of Thessaloniki, a few days before the start of Lent in 1976, is recorded in a set of black-and-white photographs. Their harsh contrasts evoke the chill bleakness of late winter while the images tell a story of social marginality. To my eye, as a young female American university student exploring the central marketplace, men and youths were visible everywhere – in the streets, the shops and restaurants – yet women and girls were difficult to find. My camera captured them hovering at the margins: leaning out of windows or standing in doorways.
The Problems, Difficulties and Advantages of Women's Oral History in Rural Society
Authors: Sutton Maureen
Published: October 2008

My introduction to women's oral history in rural Lincolnshire came about as a result of my joining a local Workers’ Education Association class, entitled ‘Women's role’ My interests finally resulted in the book We Didn't Know Aught: a Study of Sexuality, Superstition and Death in Women's Lives in Lincolnshire During the 1930s, '40s and '50s. My background and approach were in some ways unlike the normal ‘academic’ ones, and so it may be worth initially recounting to readers how this study developed, before discussing some of the difficulties in considering a range of topics that often raised many sensitive and moral issues.
Class Conflict and Village War Memorials, 1914–24.
Authors: Mansfield Nick
Published: October 2008

‘I am persuaded that the Memorial Crosses, in the Churchyards, on the village greens, where the roads meet, will for many years to come cry eloquent but silent protest against all that divides and degrades village life.’ The Bishop of Hereford, 1920.
Women's Quest For Occupational Equality: The Case Of Jewish Female Agricultural Workers in Pre-State Israel
Authors: Katz Yossi , Neuman Shoshana
Published: October 2008

There is a common belief that Israeli women have achieved gender equality over and above that attained in America and European countries. Evidence cited to support this is the fact that women routinely serve in the Israeli army and the country elected a woman, Golda Meir, as prime minister. Equality between men and women is claimed to date back to the days at the beginning of the century when both sexes worked shoulder to shoulder in road construction and land reclamation (Bernstein, 1992: 2). The years 1904–14 and 1919–23, known in Zionist history as the Second and ThirdAliyah(waves of immigration), were indeed formative times during which the dominant values of the society were shaped and the infrastructure of future organizations was laid (Eisenstadt, 1967; Izraeli, 1981). The immigrants who arrived during this period, known ashalutzim(male pioneers) andhalutzot(female pioneers) were idealistic nationalists from Eastern Europe. They were young and single, and came with the express purpose of rebuilding Zion and creating a new type of egalitarian and labor-oriented society.
Rural Gentrification and Livestock Raising: Texas as a Test Case, 1940–1995
Authors: Friedberger Mark
Published: October 2008

One characteristic of an affluent society is that wealthy individuals often seek a place in the country to spend weekends and summer vacations. In the United States second homes in rural areas first became popular in the Gilded Age when elites in the northeast tried to ape English patterns of leisured country living. Americans, however, had to contend with hot and humid summers. As a result, access to water became a vital ingredient in any choice of a country retreat. An alternative motivation for migration to the countryside in the late nineteenth century came when elites desired to take part in field sports, especially foxhunting. In New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and of course, Virginia, where reasonably mild winters permitted activities to continue with some frequency throughout the winter, foxhunting became part of the yearly ritual of small numbers of urban based elites. Horse ownership went hand in hand with livestock raising. By the twenties cattle breeding had become another hobby pursuit of the gentry in northeastern states; herds of Angus or other breeds grazed in paddocks on either side of a long driveway which led up to a large country home.
In Small Things Forgotten: The Georgian World View, Material Culture and the Consumer Revolution
Authors: Courtney Paul
Published: October 2008

The publication of The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology, a festschrift in honour of James Deetz, makes a useful starting point for assessing the remarkable development of American historical archaeology over the last four decades. The discipline of ‘historical archaeology’ is the New World equivalent of British post-medieval archaeology. It is the study of the material culture of colonial and industrial America. Unlike its highly marginalised British counterpart, the discipline has seen an enormous growth in America over the last two decades, reflected in the creation of numerous posts both in universities and public-sector archaeology. This article seeks firstly to discuss some of the main contributions to the festchrift and areas of promise for future research. Secondly it will assess the relevance of some recent contributions on the history of consumption to Deetz's concept of the ‘Georgian world view’ and the notion of radical change in eighteenth-century material culture.
Environmental History
Authors: Merricks Linda
Published: October 2008

A cursory examination of publishers’ catalogues reveals a number of titles likeEnvironmental History, Green HistoryandAn Environmental History of Britainwhich suggest an upsurge of interest in what has come to be called ‘environmental history’. This weight of scholarship suggests that demands for the ‘greening of history’, or for more studies of the impact of human actions on the countryside, which have been made throughout the present decade, have been answered. It is worth noting the shift of title from ‘Green’ to ‘Environmental’. ‘Green’ is increasingly attached to the political movements and social groups concerned with environmental issues and even, in the case of the German Greens, to political parties whose concerns include ecology as only one of a number of interests. ‘Environmental’ has a much broader range, but, as the titles below demonstrate, this is by no means an absolute distinction. Closer consideration of many of these works reveals that although ‘History’ appears in many titles, the books are actually written by archaeologists, by sociologists, by political theorists, by Green activists and, most frequently, by geographers - all with ‘historical’ appended to their discipline.The Social Construction of the Pastis a collection of essays from the Second World Archaeological Conference;Environmentalismproves to be ‘the view from Anthropology’ but contains at least one essay which appears to be a model of what environmental history could be.Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes,rather confusingly, has chapters on historical transformations and a discussion of the ‘history’ in historical ecology. This is perhaps not surprising. History has always prided itself on interdisciplinarity and on its universal appeal. The usual justifications for undergraduate history begin from the premise that a knowledge of one's own history is necessary for any understanding of society, and that history has so many variations that there is bound to be some congenial corner for anyone interested in the past. What is still lacking, however, is British environmental history, written by historians.
An Oxford College, Two Parishes and a Tithe-Farmer: The Modernisation of Tithe Collection
Authors: Purdue A. W.
Published: October 2008

The agricultural economy of eighteenth-century England exhibited many paradoxes, being in part progressive and even entrepreneurial, yet existing in a legal context which preserved many ancient customs, rights, duties and taxes. Within the one county of Northumberland we find the Culley brothers with their business-like attitudes and innovative and scientific farming methods and, in contrast, antique manorial regimes with courts, fines and heriots, such as prevailed in the manors of Hartleyburn and Bellister. We also find, as throughout England, the ‘contentious tithe’ and what must have been one of the most lucrative examples of tithe-farming, by which one of the North East's leading merchants and its first banker made a considerable part of his fortune out of a lease on this venerable tax from the appropriators, Merton College, Oxford.
Eighteenth-Century Mexican Peonage and the Problem of Credits to Hacienda Labourers
Authors: Ouweneel Arij
Published: October 2008

The transition to modern, capitalist agriculture is usually marked by the replacement of traditional forms of farm service by a free labour market based on short-term contracts and cash payments. This process is often described in terms like ‘pauperisation’ and ‘proletarianisation’. But, of course, proletarianisation is not an inevitable consequence of the rise of day-labouring in capitalist agriculture; a point emphasized, for example, with particular reference to eighteenth-century Scotland by Alex Gibson and Alastair Orr. Contrary to much of southern England, where the forces of production developed rather fast, in Scotland traditional forms of farm service survived largely intact well into the nineteenth century despite the development of capitalist agriculture. As late as 1861 over 60 per cent of the total agricultural work-force in some Scottish regions were servants on long hires as opposed to day-labourers.
Raphael Samuel, 1934–96
Authors: Howkins Alun
Published: October 2008

Raphael Samuel, who died tragically of cancer at the end of last year, was one of the outstanding social historians of post-war Britain. A founding figure of the History Workshop movement as a tutor at Ruskin College, he went on with others from that movement to found the History Workshop Journal in 1976. He was also series editor, as well as an editor and author, for the 30 or so books published in the History Workshop Series between 1975 and 1991.
Modernisation Revisited: Market Structures and Competent Farmers in Södermanland County, Sweden, during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Niskanen Kirsti
Published: October 2008

During the last two decades interpretations of agrarian modernisation have been the subject of critical debate. In neo-classical tradition, agrarian economists and economic historians have traditionally laid emphasis on the diffusion of technology and on the commercialisation of production. They have customarily been interested in the development of agricultural output and incomes, and basically understood modernisation as an evolutionary process by which commercial, market oriented production was substituted for traditional, subsistence production. During the 1970s and the 1980s agrarian sociologists and historians posed the question in more social and historical terms, seeking to determine which type of producers, large farmers or family farmers, were the bearers of modernisation. The traditional Marxian standpoint, as is well known, was that capitalist farming — in spite of delays and problems inherent in agricultural production — would come to dominate the agrarian sector through technical innovation and large scale production. Opposing this, neo-Marxian/neo-Chayanovian interpretations claimed that family farming, due to the innate characteristics of that particular production form, provided family farmers with a competitive advantage in relation to large scale production. According to this, more ‘social’ historical tradition, the social organisation of family based production was the key to understanding the viability, or even superiority, of family farming in the industrialised and urbanised societies of western Europe and North America.
Pottery Production and Proto-Industrialisation: Continuity and Change in the Rural Ceramics Industries of the Saintonge Region, France, 1250 to 1800
Authors: Musgrave Elizabeth
Published: October 2008

The Upper Saintonge region of western France was one of the primary production centres for the supply of exotic pottery to Britain and northern Europe between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The principal manufacturing sites were rural workshops in the parishes neighbouring La Chapelle-des-Pots, on the wooded, limestone plateau north east of Saintes and some fifty kilometres down the river Charente from the maritime port of La Rochelle. The expansion of rural industries, producing for extra-regional markets, was a Europe-wide phenomenon between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The theory of proto-industrialisation has been used to explain this process. It has been argued that regionally-dense, rural industries grew up as urban merchants sought cheap production methods to profit from growing overseas demand for manufactured goods, especially textiles and metals. By the later eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, the participation of large numbers of country people in industrial work altered traditional regional demographic and agrarian regimes, resulting in population growth, land-holding fragmentation and the creation of mercantile profit. This provided labour, finance and motive for a ‘second phase’ in the transition from feudal to capitalist economic relations in some regions of Europe and fully-developed industrialisation in others.
Livestock Production in the Scottish Highlands Before and After the Clearances
Authors: Dodgshon Robert A.
Published: October 2008

Livestock production has long been important to the Highland economy, before no less than after the clearances for sheep that first spread across the region from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. However, key questions about how it may have developed over the century or so immediately prior to the clearances have still to be answered, as well as questions about how the clearances actually changed farm output. Using stocking data primarily for the southern Highlands and Islands, this paper proposes to examine four particular questions. First, by way of an introduction, it will briefly consider the role of stock within the traditional or pre-clearance township economy. Second, it will use detailed data for the closing decades of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century to characterise the broad stocking balance of townships at the point when detailed figures first become available. Third, it will look at stocking figures for the eighteenth century with a view to establishing how livestock production may have altered during the century or so prior to the clearances. Fourth, and finally, it will consider how the clearances changed the character of livestock production.
Improving the Housing Conditions for the Irish Migratory Potato Workers in Scotland: The Work of the Bishops' (Gresham) Committee, 1920–1923
Authors: Holmes Heather
Published: October 2008

In central and south-western Scotland, squads or groups of Irish migratory seasonal workers, largely comprised of women and teenagers from Mayo, Donegal and Galway, were employed by Scottish potato merchants to harvest the potato crop throughout the harvesting season which extended from June until late October or November. As migratory workers, they started their employment in Ayrshire and Wigtownshire, to deal with the first earlies, and then moved eastwards into the Lothians, and northwards into Fife, Perthshire and Angus, to harvest the later ripening first earlies, second earlies and maincrops. As they moved their employment from farm to farm, staying at each from a few days to as long as six weeks, they lived on or close to the farms where they worked. They were usually accommodated in ‘bothies’, farm buildings such as byres, stables, lofts, stores, barns, stables, potato sheds, disused farm cottages and farm houses, all of which were converted into temporary accommodation for the workers. This accommodation was subject to much criticism and many attempts were made to try to improve its condition, not only by legislative control, but through other action, for example by trade unions and specially appointed committees. Of these channels, the latter (non-legislative means) has received very little attention by scholars and much of it is little known.
Farming through Enclosure
Authors: Beckett J.V. , Turner M.E. , Cowell Ben
Published: October 2008

The legal process of gaining an enclosure could be long, complicated and expensive …. It could take up to six years, during which time a farmer did not know what was happening or how to farm. (S. Wade Martins,Farms and Fields(1995), p. 81).

The impact of parliamentary enclosure in England has been a subject for debate since at least the 1870s. A series of issues has been identified and discussed including the costs of enclosure; the effect of enclosure on small farmers, small owners, and cottagers; the role of the commissioners; the implications for farm sizes; the impact on agricultural productivity and rents; and the significance for the landscape. Yet the quotation with which we open this paper suggests that there is a subject which has slipped through the historical net, the impact of enclosure on farming. In their work published early in the twentieth century the Hammonds noted of the enclosure of Stanwell in Middlesex (Act 1789) that the nominated commissioners were empowered to direct the course of husbandry ‘as well with respect to the stocking as to the Plowing, Tilling, Cropping, Sowing, and Laying down the same’. W.H.R. Curtler, in 1920, quoted the main substance of the clauses from the Cold Aston (Gloucestershire) enclosure act of 1795: ‘from the passing of the Act until the Award the Commissioners were to direct the course of husbandry in the open fields’. He noted also that earlier acts had stated that the existing course of husbandry should be retained until the award was completed. W.E. Tate wrote as recently as 1967 that during enclosure ‘the general course of agriculture in all the open fields was being carried out under directions laid down by the commissioners’.
Yeomen and Peasants? Landownership Patterns in the North Yorkshire Pennines c. 1770–1900
Authors: Hallas Christine S.
Published: October 2008

‘Everything which can be said [about the land question] … must already have been said in the numerous books, pamphlets and articles’. Thus said Cuthbert Brodrick writing in 1881 in the preface to his substantial book on English land and landlords. Although it was accepted that, as Caird had clearly put it in 1878, the English countryside was dominated by the simple tripartite system of landlord, tenant and labourer, with a few owner-occupiers forming another simple, but tiny and diminishing group, considerable debate surrounded the structure of landownership particularly in terms of size of estates, the rate of decline of the ‘traditional yeoman’, and the significance of ‘open’ and ‘close’ parishes. Despite his preliminary comments Brodrick demonstrated in the course of his book that the land question was still an unexhausted topic in the final part of the century. Nor did the debate on these issues cease then, for it has continued into the twentieth century. Despite a few dissenting voices, the idea of the single coherent English tripartite system still persists. As with much of our perception of the dynamics of the countryside, this view has derived largely from the experience of the arable areas to the south and east of the country and to the statistics presented at national level. It fails to embrace the complexities of landholding in the nineteenth century. Even where it is accepted that owner-occupiers existed, there is little recognition of the fact that these should not be regarded as a single group.
The Stone Workers of Purbeck
Authors: Edgar Michael , Hinde Andrew
Published: October 2008

In his book Green and Pleasant Land, Howard Newby used the term ‘occupational communities’ to describe the villages of rural England in the nineteenth century. By using this term he intended to convey simultaneously the notions that the populations of these villages were dependent upon a single economic activity, agriculture; that social and economic life within them therefore revolved around the agricultural cycle; and that social relations in such villages were defined and understood on the basis of occupational relationships within agriculture.
Conservation, Class and Custom: Lifespace and Conflict in a Nineteenth-century Forest Environment
Authors: Short Brian
Published: October 2008

Cannon… is busy now bringing fern from the moor to use as bedding, he has cut it about a mile off up the lane behind Belle Green. It is a rough road to bring it down. I think I will go up next time with the cart and help the children to rake it, it is such a nice crackly fern.

At the East Grinstead Petty Sessions in March 1868 Charles, sixth Earl De La Warr brought ten poor men forward charged with oak and beech underwood cutting and trespass. George Edwards the Reeve had discovered six men cutting and tying, another three with handbills but who were not actually cutting at the time, and Abraham Card ‘a woodbuyer, etc.’ loading the wood onto his wagon. Edwards had cautioned the men against cutting: ‘When I got to them I read a paragraph from Mr Hunt's letter [Hussey Hunt, De La Warr's steward, warning against litter cutting]. They laughed and went on cutting. I then gave them all into custody’. It appears that the men were handcuffed and led away. Daniel Heasman, one of the men once again, was convicted and originally imprisoned for 21 days, the other defendants were originally fined 1s. damages, 1s. penalty and costs.
The Promotion of Agricultural Education for Adults: The Lancashire Federation of Women's Institutes, 1919–45
Authors: Thompson Lynne
Published: October 2008

A recent article inRural Historyillustrated how the Women's Institutes between the wars Were influenced by contemporary feminism. The argument of the article was that in seeking to change the material condition and status of countrywomen, and in effect, emulating craft trades union strategies, the WI movement sought to alter perceptions of women's labour in the home by enhancing their skills, encouraging co-operative endeavour and promoting an ‘active domesticity’. Furthermore, the domestic arena was extended to cover all aspects of rural life related to the home, garden, farm or allotment.

However, as time passed between the wars, less interest was shown in agricultural work outside the home, and, as Morgan states elsewhere, the agricultural ‘side’ of the movement became ‘severely diminished’. Whilst one might not seriously quarrel with this statement with reference to some periods of WI history, it is, nevertheless, a somewhat reductive approach to have taken when considering the interwar period. During that time, there is evidence to suggest that in some regions at least, WI members maintained more than a passing interest in agricultureper se. This was not simply in relation to the production and preservation of food, but rather as a means of maintaining the influence of women in rural policy making. This interest can be best detected in the educational sphere, from the promotion of classes in a wide range of agricultural activities and demonstrations at agricultural and horticultural shows, to WI membership of local agricultural education committees. Furthermore, the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI) fought in many ways to maintain the agricultural ‘side’ of the movement because it was an integral part of its wider mission to educate countrywomen, particularly those who were destined to live and work in the Empire
Drowning Voices and Drowning Shoreline: A Riverside View of the Social and Ecological Impacts of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project
Authors: Cox Heather M. , DeMelle Brendan G. , Harris Glenn R. , Lee Christopher P. , Montondo Laura K.
Published: October 2008

The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project was a massive restructuring of the St. Lawrence River bordering Canada and the United States. The river had always been used for human transportation, and a shipping canal for commercial vehicles was constructed and enhanced throughout the nineteenth century. However, the river grew increasingly incapable of handling an international fleet composed of larger boats during the twentieth century. Proposals to undertake major renovations for shipping were debated at the highest levels of policy for several decades. Finally, the St. Lawrence River was substantially altered during the 1950s. These changes created a Seaway able to accommodate vessels with deeper drafts and permitted the development of hydro-electric generating facilities through the construction of dikes and dams. All of this activity involved numerous agencies in the governments of the United States, Canada, the Iroquois Confederacy, New York, Ontario, other states and provinces, as well as commercial and industrial entities in the private sector.
‘Sitting on his Penny Rent’: Conflict and Right of Common in Faversham Blean, 1595–1610
Authors: Hipkin Stephen
Published: October 2008

In October 1606, London merchant Bevil Lewes proffered a bill of complaint in Star Chamber alleging assault, repeated riot and destruction of property in ‘a great wood and certain lands’ near Faversham in Kent purchased in December 1602 from the local magistrate Sir William Lovelace. His story of tribulations at the hands of ‘inhabitants there, being men of their own disposition contentious and not willing to live answerable to your majesty's most sound and wholesome laws’, recounted one episode in a struggle which began in 1595 and involved at least half a dozen attempts at unilateral enclosure before finally subsiding after May 1609, following Lewes's dispossession and descent into a mire of debt litigation. None of the enclosures survived longer than a few months, one lasted barely a week, and another, by dint of pre-emptive riot, was never completed at all. Defendants confirmed that fences, hedges and ditches were destroyed on four occasions, usually under cover of darkness, and that in 1606 a farmhouse under construction was demolished and crops on the ground were flattened. Bevil Lewes alleged two further rounds of hedge-breaking and property destruction that year, and an earlier riot involving the burning of a timber house-frame. Between 1596 and 1610 allegations of assault, riot, trespass, property destruction and perjury generated litigation in Common Pleas, King's Bench and Chancery, five bills of complaint in Star Chamber, and indictments and convictions at the county sessions and assizes.
Feathered Women and Persecuted Birds: The struggle against the Plumage Trade, c. 1860–1922
Authors: Moore-Colyer R. J.
Published: October 2008

In the personality of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, undisputed mistress of Whig society in the two closing decades of the eighteenth century, were combined a heady mixture of formidable intellectual qualities and a recklessness and frivolity extraordinary even by the standards of the day. Leaving aside her involvement in high politics, the ambivalence of her personal relationships and her adventures at the card table, she would be memorable alone as a fashion icon whose excesses, particularly where her milliner and coiffeuse were concerned, were legendary. From the moment she appeared in public with a three-foot hair tower created with pads of horsehair and set off with an exotic arrangement of stuffed birds and ostrich feathers, female society high and low began its lengthy love affair with feathers.1 Fashions might ebb and flow, yet feathers, in some form or another, would intermittently adorn women's clothes (and the uniforms of some units of the Army) for the next century or so. This article is largely concerned with the efforts of various individuals and groups to bring an end to the trade in exotic plumage which fed upon the demand for the feathers of birds from tropical and subtropical territories.
A Pleasure Ground for the Noisy Herds? Incompatible Encounters with the Cotswolds and England, 1900–1950
Authors: Brace Catherine
Published: October 2008

This paper draws on and forms part of the growing body of literature which examines critically the relationships between landscape and Englishness in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular this paper develops our understanding of the moral geographies of outdoor recreation and the popular discovery of rural England. It also shows how national identity itself was seen to be threatened by first, the alteration of the English landscape to accommodate new kinds of visitors, and second, by the apparent inability of those visitors to enjoy the English countryside in an appropriate way. These issues are explored through the variety of ways in which the Cotswolds were being discovered and encountered in the first half of the twentieth century. This was occurring at a time when rural England more generally was being ‘discovered’, explored, constructed and re-created both physically and in print through non fictional rural writing, guide books and topographical works. Discovering the Cotswolds and England was a deeply contested activity fraught with tensions and paradoxes which were themselves informed by ideas of class and culture.
Pollards in Nidderdale: A Landscape History
Authors: Muir Richard
Published: October 2008

In the Yorkshire Dales, where the destruction of the rural setting is less advanced than in most other parts of England, countrysides frequently exist as historical palimpsests that incorporate elements from various earlier phases of colonisation and exploitation. The region is noted for the survival of antiquities of many kinds. In places, pollarded trees are significant components in the scenic pastiche, though prior to this survey there was no general recognition that their distribution is closely linked to the main themes that have conditioned the process of landscape development. The survey, which collected details on 186 ancient trees within a study area around 17 miles long by 8 miles wide, was undertaken according to the perspectives of landscape history. These not only seek to discover the evolution of landscapes, but also recognise that evidence is embedded in features like trees, fields, trackways and so on.
An English Paradise to Regain? Ebenezer Howard, the Town and Country Planning Association and English Ruralism
Authors: Heathorn Stephen
Published: October 2008

Although not a figure now widely known, Sir Ebenezer Howard has had a profound influence on British and, indirectly, on European and American urban planners. The historian Robert Fishman noted in 1978 that while Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright had become legendary as visionary architects and urban planners, Howard, probably more influential in the evolution of urban planning than either of them, has remained relatively obscure. Howard, like his more famous contemporaries, has always been characterized as Utopian by some because he imagined that city planning could aid in the creation of an entirely new society. For Howard, this society was to be one in which social divisions would be eliminated and the standards of living of all citizens would be raised through participatory social democracy organized at the city level. Howard attempted to realize this new society through building experimental communities to serve as models to be emulated elsewhere.
Property Rights in Pheasants: Landlords, Farmers and the Game Laws, 1860–80
Authors: Fisher John
Published: October 2008

The deference shown by English tenant farmers to their landlords was the despair of English radicals in the nineteenth century. This was especially the case for Cobden and Bright, the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League. As firm believers in Ricardo's theory of rent, according to which only landowners gained from the Corn Laws, they felt that tenant-farmers should have been the natural allies of the League. Unfortunately, they proved unable to convince farmers of this logic. Their attempts to drive a wedge between landlord and tenant remained unavailing – until 1845, when John Bright raised the question of the game laws in the Commons. The select committee that followed tapped a rich vein of farmer resentment and hostility, one that led nowhere at the time but remained to be exploited for the next forty years.
The ‘Folk-Song’ Competition: An Aspect of the Search for an English National Music
Authors: Francmanis John
Published: October 2008

On 10th April 1902 a sometime landscape artist and self-educated musical antiquarian took his seat in the Drill Hall at Kendal in Westmorland. Frank Kidson, an acknowledged authority on the subject, had been invited there to judge the first ever Folk-Song Competition. In introducing his guest the general adjudicator ‘could only say Mr Kidson was a walking encyclopoedia on these things’.

The perceived need for a characteristically English art music bestowed considerable significance on folk-song, for both theory and practice in continental Europe suggested that such material comprised the essential ingredient of any such national music. To contextualise the importance of Kidson's task this article begins by briefly examining the condition of music in England in the late nineteenth century before considering the requirements to be made of this as yet largely untapped national resource.
Organising the Irish Migratory Potato Workers: The Efforts in the Early Twentieth Century
Authors: Holmes Heather
Published: October 2008

In the writing on institutional organisation and collective strike action among agricultural workers in Lowland Scotland during the early twentieth century until the outbreak of the Second World War, Richard Anthony has provided an extensive discussion on farm servants.2 However, in general, little attention has been given to casually employed workers. One such group, known as the Achill workers or the Irish ‘tattie howkers’, employed to harvest the potato crop in south-western and central Scotland, attempted to organise themselves and pursued collective strike action on a number of occasions. That group, which comprised some 1,500 to 2,000 workers, undertook strike action in 1907. That action was followed by intensive campaigns in 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, and 1938; a further attempted strike was also reported in 1912. Much of their collective action was assisted by institutional support from unions which were already organising workers. But workers also attempted to organise themselves with the assistance of these existing unions in the years 1918 to 1921, 1925, 1926 and 1929, and to form their own union in 1909, 1910 and 1938. This paper will examine these attempts during this period.
‘Distant Lands’: The Management of Absentee Estates in Woodland High Suffolk, 1660–1800
Authors: Theobald Jonathan
Published: October 2008

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.
Back To Basics: Rolf Gardiner, H. J. Massingham and ‘A Kinship in Husbandry’
Authors: Moore-Colyer R. J.
Published: October 2008

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.
Crown Policy and Local Economic Context in the Berkhamsted Common Enclosure Dispute, 1618–42
Authors: Falvey Heather
Published: October 2008

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.
Gestationsdiabetes – praktisches Vorgehen im klinischen Alltag
Authors: Lapaire Olav , Hartog Moritz , Zanetti-Daellenbach Rosanna
Published: October 2008

Der Gestationsdiabetes ist eine der schwerwiegendsten schwangerschafts-assoziierten Erkrankungen. Die Inzidenz beträgt je nach Kollektiv und Screening Test bis zu 14%. Die ansteigende Rate in den letzten Jahren wurde hauptsächlich durch das ansteigende mütterliche Durchschnittsalter, sowie dem ansteigenden maternalen Body Mass Index bedingt. Aufgrund der hohen Inzidenz auch in der Schweiz und den Therapieoptionen ist ein universelles dem selektiven Screening vorzuziehen. In der vorliegenden Übersichtsarbeit werden die relevanten klinischen Aspekte diskutiert.