Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 353

No one could accuse this book of being too narrow in its scope or content. It offers a very wide-ranging analysis of many aspects of rural society in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire covering topics such as population change, enclosure and agricultural development, employment, housing, diet, poverty, farm machinery, village life and social relations. Its structure is therefore largely thematic although it also follows the broad chronological sweep of agricultural change in the nineteenth century. The book is attractively produced and well illustrated with many maps of enclosures and forests and photographs of rural workers.

One of the main contentions of the book is that the pattern found in rural Hertfordshire was not so different from other counties to make it atypical of the (southern) English experience as a whole. Although contemporary farming writers tended to by-pass the county in favour of more famous pioneering high farming regions, Hertfordshire’s agricultural history largely replicated the blueprint set by other arable counties. Its prosperity over the middle decades of the century was underpinned by the increased use of scientific and market-orientated farming methods (Chapter 4). The impact of mechanization was slow, with the dominance of cheap labour and horse-power ensuring farm machinery was not fully embraced until the twentieth century (Chapter 5). Male day labourers, who were poorly paid, their families poorly housed and their diet meagre and inadequate, dominated the farm labour force (Chapters 6, 11, 12). This led some of them to join the short-lived labourers’ union in the early 1870s (Chapter 13) whilst others left the land and joined the flight to the local towns (Chapter 2). Yet there are some crucial exceptions to Hertfordshire history in this period that break the mould. The most important was the presence of a thriving domestic industry in the south of the county – strawplait. This industry employed a very high proportion of the county’s women (although their numbers are likely to be under-estimated in the census due to the blinkered nature of recording married women’s work), offering them a degree of autonomy and influence not found in other counties (Chapter 10). Agar argues that it also protected working class families against the worst ravages of poverty and insecurity and offers an explanation for the relative absence of serious rural disorder (with Swing and anti-poor law riots making little impact in Hertfordshire). The industry faced competition from cheap foreign exports in the last quarter of the century, and coupled with the depression in agriculture, the county’s prosperity was badly hit.

Agar’s enthusiasm and knowledge of the region are obvious throughout and he has produced a book that offers a useful and interesting broad account of Hertfordshire’s rural history in the nineteenth century. The academic reader may find some gaps. I found the lack of local data on population and employment structures for example left many questions unanswered. However this book adds to our general understanding of rural society at the local level and will undoubtedly appeal to a wide audience.