Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 109

This collection of eight essays is the Agricultural History Society’s tribute to the enduring influence of founding member, and two-time President, the eminent and energetic Joan Thirsk. Almost all of the authors were her students, and everyone celebrates her curiosity and originality as they explore and expand themes and subjects that she pioneered.

The collection begins and ends with essays on rural industry: David Hey opens with a finely-drawn reconstruction of the industrial woodland township of Barlow, south of Sheffield, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Paul Brassley concludes with an equally-acute account of the genesis of the Oxford Rural Industries Survey of 1926/7. Three essays take single commodities for their focus and examine them for their wider significance: Christopher Dyer assesses the extent of medieval goat-keeping, Richard Hoyle looks at the high politics of growing woad in England and Ireland in the 1580s, and John Chartres considers the value to small producers of the eighteenth-century spade-cultivated crop, liquorice. Two essays look more closely at rural social relations: Peter Edwards describes conflicts over common wastes and drainage schemes in early modern Shropshire, and Elizabeth Griffiths uncovers landlords’ management strategies in late seventeenth-century Norfolk. Finally, in a wide-ranging contribution to a collection marked by its attention to both detail and significance, John Broad surveys the regional development of English dairying from 1650 to 1850.

The themes, then, are industries in the countryside, economic policy and projects, peasant economy (including commons and common right), and ‘alternative agriculture’. The last is defined in Thirsk’s book of the same name (1997) as the agriculture adopted when low prices for ‘mainstream’ cereals and meat prompt innovations that change both farming and consumption forthe long term. How do these essays add to our knowledge of these inter-related themes?

Hey’s description of Barlow’s charcoal, whitecoal, lead, iron and coal industries recovers a landscape now almost entirely lost. Here is an England of industrial woodland and transhumance to summer moorland pastures. These Peak District woods flourished because they were, in themselves, another crop. Closed to farmers, they attracted iron workers from the Weald and ore-hearth workers from the Mendips. Elsewhere in England, rural industry absorbed local labour and enabled families to settle for generations, but, as far as this scrupulous account can determine, the economies and communities of these farmers, smelters and colliers were as separate as their geographical origins. They invite comparison with the economy of multiple employments followed by free miners in other parts of the Peak, and with the proletarian miners of Whickham.

Deliberate economic policy encouraged some rural industries, either in principle or as specific projects. Hoyle and Brassley look at the politics behind government attitudes to rural industry. In the 1580s, ministerial speculation led to attempts to discourage woad-growing in England and encourage it in Ireland. Private gain was the aim, not finding work for the poor in either place. Woad-growers in England carried on regardless. Thirsk’s view that scandals ‘were but the scum on the surface of a healthy current of water’ seems confirmed. In the aftermath of the First World War momentary ministerial interest in finding alternative occupations to keep agricultural labouring families on the land enabled the survey of England’s rural industries by two women (Mrs Helen FitzRandolph and Miss Doriel Hay), themselves far from indifferent. Although official interest quickly waned, industrial employment had become a way to support agriculture and rural culture in general.

Peasant practice in keeping goats and cows, grazing fen commons, and growing niche-crops in gardens allows discussion of Thirsk’s notion of alternative agriculture. To this end Dyer rescues the medieval goat (smelly, ugly, lusty, sinister, devilish, destructive, presumptuous and comic) from the silence of the 110 the agricultural record. He finds them in hilly and wooded places, on demesnes as well as small farms, in the north west but also in the south east and elsewhere. Good at reclaiming poor land, they were also labour intensive and so women’s work. Never as numerous as sheep, which outnumbered them ten to one at Domesday, goats nonetheless survived as ‘a large and persistent’ population in the north west in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Their presence suggests that in addition to the oscillation of mainstream and alternative agricultures there was a more continuous subsistence agriculture in the hands of peasants or small farmers: an agriculture more for use than for sale. Perhaps some of the turves, peat, conies, fish and fodder taken from fen commons, well-described by Peter Edwards in his essay on intercommoning conflicts in Shropshire, served a similar purpose. These came under threat in the late sixteenth century when population growth made drainage a profitable operation for those with ‘mainstream’ ambitions.

Growing medicinal liquorice was a long-term peasant practice that fits Thirsk’s view that ‘alternative’ products were well-suited to small operators who were often their originators. It flourished in the deep, friable soils of Pontefract in the eighteenth century. Chartres notes the scot and lot franchise here and suggests that the votes of the growers also protected their enterprises – though merchants won the lion’s share of the profits. In contrast to liquorice, little peasant dairying survived the eighteenth century. Broad, like others including Deborah Valenze who offers a more gendered account, sets the onset of its decline in the second half of that century. His contention that few peasants kept cows in pastoral-industrial villages is more surprising, though no one would argue that cows could be kept without land or extensive commons – as Thirsk pointed out many years ago. The standardization of cheese types in response to the demands of wholesalers completes this description of the tendency ofpopulation growth in England to undermine both diversity and small producers.

A final illustration of the strategies pursued in periods of alternative agriculture is the practice of ‘letting to halves’ in which the landlord shared some of the costs of production and took a share of the return. Elizabeth Griffiths suggests that landlords were more willing to take on responsibilities like this in the late seventeenth century than they were later on. She proposes that a ‘cultural shift’ occurred in the early eighteenth century as gentry families moved from a close connection with the running of their estates to a more distant reliance on leases and land stewards. Some years ago, Trevor Raybould and John Beckett noted a similar pattern in the exploitation of minerals on aristocratic estates, but here history review initial engagement gave way to rentier status a century later. Perhaps the different development of industrial and agricultural ‘crops’ determined the need for a landlord’s involvement, causing this cultural shift to occur at different times in different places. That it happened infarming in the early eighteenth century offers a cultural context for the engrossment of farms and the parliamentary enclosures that followed.

These essays are a fitting tribute to an exceptional historian. They are meticulously researched, alert to large questions, and written with both wit and affection. Together they add to the rich diversity of writing about rural history that Joan Thirsk has done so much to encourage.