Jeremy Burchardt

AGRICULTURAL HISTORY, RURAL HISTORY, OR COUNTRYSIDE HISTORY?

This article assesses the state of modern English rural history. It identifies an ‘orthodox’ school, focused on the economic history of agriculture. This has made impressive progress in quantifying and explaining the output and productivity achievements of English farming since the ‘agricultural revolution’. Its celebratory account was, from the outset, challenged by a dissident tradition emphasizing the social costs of agricultural progress, notably enclosure. Recently a new school, associated with the journal Rural History , has broken away from this narrative of agricultural change, elaborating a wider social history. The work of Alun Howkins, the pivotal figure in the recent historiography, is located in relation to these three traditions. It is argued that Howkins, like his precursors, is constrained by an increasingly anachronistic equation of the countryside with agriculture. The concept of a ‘post-productivist’ countryside, dominated by consumption and representation, has been developed by geographers and sociologists and may have something to offer historians here, in conjunction with the well-established historiography of the ‘rural idyll’. The article concludes with a call for a new countryside history, giving full weight to the cultural and representational aspects that have done so much to shape twentieth-century rural England. Only in this way will it be possible to move beyond a history of the countryside that is merely the history of agriculture writ large.

Rethinking the Rural Idyll: The English Rural Community Movement, 1913–26

ABSTRACT This article examines the contribution of the rural community movement to representations of the English countryside. It argues that the movement played an important part in formulating and promoting a new understanding of the relationship between countryside and community after the First World War. Whilst nineteenth-century criticism of the isolating, anomic characteristics of urban life had often invoked idealized historical rural communities, in the inter-war period community was increasingly seen as an attribute of the contemporary countryside. The article traces the intellectual origins of this conceptual shift to two influences: American ideas about rurality, especially as transmitted by Sir Horace Plunkett, and the philosophy of T.H. Green. The emergence of this new understanding was not, however, a rarefied, self-contained intellectual event. On the contrary, the article argues that it corresponded to the rise of a new social group, public-sector professionals, which sought to project an idealized version of its own likeness onto the countryside. This construction of rural community played a prominent part in mid- and late-twentieth-century perceptions of the English countryside, calling into question the prevailing historiographical assumption that such perceptions were generated by, or at least served the interests of, the rural elite. The article concludes that more attention should be paid to the specifically middle-class contribution to the development of the English rural idyll.

Reconstructing the rural community: village halls and the National Council of Social Service, 1919 to 1939.

Although rural leisure in the half-century before the First World War is an under-researched subject, its most striking features seem to have been (at least according to the existing historiography) that it was dominated by the gentry and clergy, and restricted both in scope and quantity. The robust rural popular culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had come under increasing pressure from gentry and clerical attempts to reform and sanitise it, initially through evangelical organisations such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 1790s, but by the 1840s on a broad front due to the middle-class vogue for promoting ‘rational recreation’. Partly as a result of this, many popular pastimes either fell into disuse or became emptied of much of their former spontaneity in the second half of the century, a commonly cited example of the former being cock-fighting and of the latter maypole-dancing. In their place came carefully marshalled dinners and prize-givings sponsored by the gentry and clergy. On these occasions the labourers (and sometimes their families too) were sat down at trestle tables in some appropriate venue, often the squires park, and edifying speeches were made by representatives of local landed society. The role of the rural workforce in all this was entirely passive, except for one or two labourers who might be singled out to give a speech of gratitude to the presiding landowner for his beneficence, and the ritual ‘loyal toasts’.

State and Society in the English Countryside: The Rural Community Movement 1918–39

This paper assesses the relationship between state and society in interwar rural England, focusing on the hitherto neglected role of the Rural Community Councils (RCCs). The rise of statutory social provision in the early twentieth century created new challenges and opportunities for voluntaryism, and the rural community movement was in part a response. The paper examines the early development of the movement, arguing that a crucial role was played by a close-knit group of academics and local government officials. While largely eschewing party politics, they shared a commitment to citizenship, democracy and the promotion of rural culture; many of them had been close associates of Sir Horace Plunkett. The RCCs engaged in a wide range of activities, including advisory work, adult education, local history, village hall provision, support for rural industries and an ambivalent engagement with parish councils. The paper concludes with an assessment of the achievements of the rural community movement, arguing that it was constrained by its financial dependence on voluntary contributions.

Transforming the countryside: the electrification of rural Britain

It is now almost impossible to conceive of life in western Europe, either in the towns or the countryside, without a reliable mains electricity supply. By 1938, two-thirds of rural dwellings had been connected to a centrally generated supply, but the majority of farms in Britain were not linked to the mains until sometime between 1950 and 1970. Given the significance of electricity for modern life, the difficulties of supplying it to isolated communities, and the parallels with current discussions over the provision of high-speed broadband connections, it is surprising that until now there has been little academic discussion of this vast and protracted undertaking. This book fills that gap. It is divided into three parts. The first, on the progress of electrification, explores the timing and extent of electrification in rural England, Wales and Scotland; the second examines the effects of electrification on rural life and the rural landscape; and the third makes comparisons over space and time, looking at electrification in Canada and Sweden and comparing electrification with the current problems of rural broadband.

Agents, beneficiaries and victims: picturing people on the land

This chapter analyses the conventions of rural representation in photographic and film images from the collections at the Museum of English Rural Life (University of Reading, UK). Their iconography is in dialogue with stated and unstated assumptions about the role of the English countryside, for example in relation to food production, the preservation of rural life and rural heritage, the role of technology and patterns of labour. The people visible in the MERL images were the agents of change, and its beneficiaries and victims. To study these images opens up a new way of understanding modernity and technology, changes in rural work, leisure and heritage.