The way historians think and write about the countryside has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Until the 1980s, most British historians regarded the economic history of farming as by far the most important aspect of the history of the countryside.  The Agricultural Revolution, seen as the essential precursor for the Industrial Revolution, was the central focus and a succession of studies focusing on farming methods, technology and output ensued, exemplified by J. D. Chambers’ and G. E. Mingay’s The Agricultural Revolution (1966).  From the late 1970s, this was challenged by a new generation of historians influenced by the ‘history from below’ movement, who were concerned on the one hand to put people back into the history of the countryside and on the other to expose the vast inequalities of power and wealth that had accompanied the process of agricultural ‘improvement’ from the eighteenth century onward.  Among the key works were Howard Newby’s Green and Pleasant Land? (1979), which showed how idyllic images of the countryside cast a veil over the reality of low wages and persistently sub-standard housing for many farmworkers, Keith Snell’s Annals of the Labouring Poor (1985), which deployed rigorous quantitative methods to demonstrate that inequality, poverty and unemployment actually became worse in rural England during and after the Agricultural Revolution and a succession of studies by Alun Howkins focussing on the efforts of farmworkers to resist their exploitation, for example through forming trade unions.  Perhaps the pivotal moment was the foundation of a new journal, Rural History, in 1990, dedicated to exploring the social, cultural, and political history of the countryside, in conscious rejection of what was perhaps a little unfairly dubbed the ‘cows and ploughs’ remit of the older tradition.

Since then, historians have worked hard to recover the histories of neglected, marginalized and exploited rural groups.  Historians such as Nicola Verdon and Briony McDonagh, among others, have done much to open up the history of women in the countryside, at every social level from the field workers Verdon focuses on to the elite landowners McDonagh has studied.  Mark Freeman has written about the ‘Hodge’ stereotype demeaningly applied to farm workers in the nineteenth century, a stereotype that regrettably lives on in terms such as ‘yokel’ and ‘country bumpkin’.  The most exploited and vulnerable farm workers were often seasonal migrants, who were typically employed just for a few weeks during harvest, and in some cases moved around the country wherever there was work to be done.  In the nineteenth century many of them came from Ireland and faced ethnic discrimination as well as low wages, economic insecurity, and poor working conditions.  Harvest workers were often employed in the infamous agricultural gangs, which became a notorious Victorian scandal and were legislated against under the 1867 Agricultural Gangs Act.  The gangs largely disappeared for much of the twentieth century but became a major feature of UK agriculture again in the late twentieth century, leading to the re-emergence of highly exploitative conditions of a kind that many mistakenly believed we had put behind us.  Historians such as Philip Conford have done their best to draw attention to these disturbing parallels. 

The environmental crisis we are living through has sharpened historians’ awareness of the extent to which rural labour always affects and is affected by the non-human world.  Some of the most interesting research has highlighted how environmental values cannot be detached from their social context.  What is construed as environmentally benign by one group of people may not be seen as such by others.  Carl Griffin and Iain Robertson have written illuminatingly about this, using the concept of ‘moral ecologies’ developed by Karl Jacoby.  They show how elite ecological discourses, for example in relation to forestry, were often deployed in ways that delegitimized and led to the suppression of vernacular and indigenous ecological practices and understandings.  As always, history shows us that values, however neutral, incontrovertible, and universal they may appear to be, always arise in particular social and historical contexts and express the experiences, commitments, and inevitably, the power structures that prevail in those contexts. 

Yet for all the often-concealed problems, difficulties, and tensions that beset the countryside (and which historians have worked so hard to expose), it continues to be cherished by millions of people.  Harvey Taylor and Helen Walker’s pioneering research made us aware of just how much the countryside mattered to millions of ramblers, cyclists and other outdoor enthusiasts. More recent research, for example by Nicola Whyte, Paul Readman, Kerri Andrews, Matthew Kelly and myself, has begun to explore not only the often idealized representations of the countryside but also its more grounded and experienced-based significance in the lives of ordinary people.

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Dr Jeremy Burchardt is an Associate Professor in Rural History at the University of Reading, specialising in different experiences of landscapes across time and space.

All comments and opinions presented in this article are that of the author.

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