First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Volume VIII of the Agrarian History of England and Wales was first published in 1978, and provides a technical, social and economic history of rural England and Wales in the years 1914 1939. This period included four years of war, during which there was a rapid rise in prices, the post-war deflation and the depression. The author assesses the effects of these political and economic conditions on farming and farm workers. She describes regional variations in patterns of farming and the changes in methods of production by which farmers tried to reduce costs and increase output. She also examines the extension of government control over farming and the introduction of the marketing boards, and discusses the development of agricultural technology. Above all, she describes considers the conditions of life for the diminishing numbers of farm workers.

The agrarian history of Britain begins not with the earliest written documents but with the archaeological evidence marking the advent of the first agriculturalists from the European continent before 3000BC. The foundations of the farming community, which was encountered by the Romans and the subsequent Germanic settlers, were laid by stone-using peoples growing cereal crops and domesticating animals, and the later development of metal technologies enabled these peasant communities to intensify their exploitation of the natural environment. This volume was originally published in two parts, the first edited by Stuart Piggott and the second by H. P. R. Finberg. Part II was actually published in 1972, with the first following in 1981. The volume surveys, for the whole of Britain, this evolution of the man-made landscape over the period of some three millennia before the Roman conquest, utilising in particular the surviving evidence in the British countryside, unique in Europe, for the agrarian pattern of prehistoric settlement.

This 1988 volume deals with the agrarian history of England and Wales from the beginning of the reign of Edward the Confessor to the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348. It divides the counties into regions and deals with each under the headings of new settlements, agriculture and pastoralism (crops and stock), yield ratios and techniques (including field systems, crop nutrition and drainage). There are also sections on the Late Saxon period, Domesday England, wages and prices, vernacular architecture, and the life of the people. The volume as a whole offers a detailed description of trends, both economic and social, between 1042 and 1350 and of the complexities of an economy and society split into many and various sub-economies and sub-societies, all very different from one another but closely knit and interdependent.

This 1967 volume was the result of a project which originated a decade before its publication, when scholars from eleven British universities met under the presidency of the late R. H. Tawney and decided to create a work of co-operative scholarship covering the entire social and economic history of rural England and Wales from the neolithic period to the twentieth century. This was the first of eight volumes to appear, and deals with such topics as the structure of farming regions, agricultural techniques, and estate management by the crown. Based as it is on studies that span the entire kingdom, a picture of Tudor and early Stuart England and Wales emerges which differs at many points from the conventions of textbooks. Full account has been taken not only of previous scholarship, but also the national archives, while the manuscript deposits in the various county record offices have been freely tapped.

This volume of essays in honour of Professor R. H. Hilton is presented by some of his numerous friends and pupils. It attempts to reflect his wide-ranging interests while highlighting certain themes and preserving some distinct degree of unity. The essays illustrate his abiding concern with the social structure, the rural economy and the mentalite of the Middle Ages. They also indicate that his interests have have always been pursued with the use of the widest possible range of sources so that archaeological and literary evidence are employed, as in his own work, alongside the sources more usually familiar to social historians. This book will be of permanent interest to all historians and particularly those specialising in social and economic history.

Chapters from The Agrarian History of England and Wales, volumes IV and V part II, now appear for the first time in five paperback volumes, designed primarily for a student readership. Dealing respectively with pieces, wages, profits and rents; estate management and the condition of the farm labourer; agricultural techniques and enclosure; marketing; and rural building, these studies bring together the fruits of co-operative scholarship from authorities on the social and economic history of rural England and Wales in the early modern period. To set each subject in context and to update material where necessary, new introductions have been written by the authors of each volume.

This pioneering book examines different aspects of the inheritance customs in rural Western Europe in the pre-industrial age: for families and whole societies, the roles of lawyers in reducing them to a common system, and the recurring debate on the merits of various inheritance customs in shaping particular kinds of society. At first sight the study of inheritance customs may appear to be a dull affair, concerned with outdated practices of hair-splitting lawyers; certainly, little academic interest has been shown in the subject. Yet inheritance customs are vital means for the reproduction of the social system, by the transmission of property and other rights through the family. Various family structures and social arrangements are linked by different means of inheritance. This book will interest a wide range of historians, students, postgraduates and teachers alike, whether they are concerned with social, economic, demographic or legal history, in the medieval, early modern or modern periods, and whether their interests are directed to England or other countries of Western Europe; it will also be valuable to social anthropologists, sociologists and historians of ideas. A comprehensive glossary of technical terms has been added for the non-specialist.

No one has done more to emphasise the significance of the land in early modern England that Joan Thirsk, whose writings are both an important contribution to its history and point the way for future research. The subjects of this collection include the origin and nature of the common fields, Tudor enclosures, the Commonwealth confiscation of Royalist land and its subsequent return after the Restoration, inheritance customs, and the role of industries in the rural economy, among them stocking knitting.

No one has done more to emphasise the significance of the land in early modern England that Joan Thirsk, whose writings are both an important contribution to its history and point the way for future research. The subjects of this collection include the origin and nature of the common fields, Tudor enclosures, the Commonwealth confiscation of Royalist land and its subsequent return after the Restoration, inheritance customs, and the role of industries in the rural economy, among them stocking knitting.

This book explores changes in the English diet and the specific differences between each generation. What did ordinary people eat and drink five hundred years ago? How much did they talk about food? Did their eating habits change much? Our knowledge is mostly superficial on such commonplace routines, but this book digs deep and finds surprising answers to these questions. We learn that food fads and fashions resembled those of our own day. Commercial, scientific and intellectual movements were closely entwined with changing attitudes and dealings about food. In short, food holds a mirror to a lively world of cultural change stretching from the Renaissance to the industrial Revolution. This book also strongly challenges the assumption that ordinary folk ate dull and monotonous meals.

What did ordinary people eat and drink five hundred years ago? How much did they talk about food? Did their eating habits change much? Our documents are mostly silent on such commonplace routines, but this book digs deep and finds surprising answers to these questions. Food fads and fashions resembled those of our own day. Commercial, scientific and intellectual movements were closely entwined with changing attitudes and dealings about food. In short, food holds a mirror to a lively world of cultural change stretching from the Renaissance to the industrial Revolution. This book also strongly challenges the notion that ordinary folk ate dull and monotonous meals.

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. Yet crops from the past like flax, hemp, and woad, are gradually reappearing in our modern countryside, which may in the past have looked at the same time both more and less familiar than we imagine. Joan Thirsk reveals how the forces which drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture -- a glut of mainstream meat and cereal crops, changing eating habits, the needs of medicine -- have striking parallels with earlier periods of our history, emphasizing that we can still find solutions to todays problems in the experience of people from the past.

It is possible to see the countryside around us changing as the search for an alternative agriculture becomes more urgent throughout Europe and America. However, this is not the first time that these changes have occurred: agriculture has, from time to time, undergone closely similar experiences since the mid-fourteenth century. In this study, Dr Thirsk illuminates the parallels between the circumstances surrounding agricultural developments in three other historical periods (1350-1500, 1650-1750, and 1879-1939), and explains why the same key factors are once again coming to prominence in today's society, and the consequences of acknowledging this recurrence. This work is not only a history of alternative agriculture, but also an alternative history of agriculture. Its fresh perspective and European context should alert readers to the necessity of ensuring that political change is not made in a historical vacuum, and offers valuable interpretations of the past as essential lessons for the present and the future. This book is intended for students of economic and social history, English agricultural history, and English historical geography; students of agriculture, environmental pl