Agricultural History Review, Volume 65 Part 1 (2017), p. 150

This attractive, well-produced volume came out of a conference to celebrate the life of Joan Thirsk (1922–2013). It features contributions by those who knew Professor Thirsk well, together with papers by newer students of some of the subjects she held most dear. The chapters are short but often of some interest, and the book will be read with enjoyment by agricultural and economic historians alike.

After a short piece by Christopher Dyer, arguing that the most crucial stage in Thirsk’s development was her time at Leicester, the volume moves on to a short round-table discussion on sub-regions. The late David Hey argues for the importance and longevity of the ‘country’, a cultural region which he detects through the spread of surnames, especially in the 1881 census. He suggests, perhaps controversially, that people had little conception of the world outside their ‘country’, unless they had been to London. John Broad gently critiques Thirsk’s work on agrarian pays, by pointing out that they underplay the role of towns, especially London. He suggests that we should pay more attention to ‘layering’, with small farmers perhaps more ingrained in their pays, while larger, more market-oriented producers were more open to wider influences. John Chartres likewise emphasizes the role of trade and markets, facilitated by middlemen and towns, with the role of the pays declining as markets became more integrated.

Following from this, a section on ‘Farmers and Fields’ discusses an area perhaps most closely associated with Thirsk’s work. Tom Williamson offers a really useful discussion of Thirsk’s important work on the origin of the medieval open-field system. Though it has not been unchallenged, her theory that common fields originated out of population growth post-Conquest has aged very well. In some areas, open fields evidently date from earlier, but much recent archaeological research suggests that Thirsk’s model and chronology is broadly correct. Where she appears to have been mistaken, though, is in the geographical spread of common fields, which does not seem to have correlated with population levels. James Bowen, considering his own detailed research on early modern Shropshire agriculture, goes back to the issue of the pays, although he rather sits on the fence as to the usefulness of the concept. On the one hand, he finds, each individual manor or parish was unique, while there were social distinctions in farming practice within each community. On the other, the larger region is a useful way of allowing historians to make sense of rural complexity. Finally Nicola White, in a thought-provoking paper which focuses on Norfolk, wonders whether historians have been too keen (explicitly or implicitly) to associate enclosure with modernity, when it could be just as customary as commoning. Indeed, both enclosed and non-enclosed land could be subject to common rights of some sort, most notably (in Norfolk), the ‘foldcourse’. She ponders whether feminist scholarship on the growth of privacy might provide insights into the history of enclosure. This is a promising line of enquiry, not least because both boundaries and enclosure could be supported by a discourse of neighbourliness: good fences, of course, were supposed to make good neighbours.

A third section tackles innovation. Craig Muldrew delicately questions Thirsk’s famous thesis that industry was located in pastoral areas because farmers’ families there had more free time for wage labour, pointing out that industry generally needed to settle in areas where fulling mills were viable, and this meant hilly countryside with fast-flowing waterways. These, of course, were often also pastoral areas. He also suggests that the growth in textile production in the first half of the sixteenth century made a major contribution to household incomes, and thus was an important spur to a growth in consumption. John Stobart, meanwhile, in a particularly fascinating contribution, offers insights from a study of rural shops in Cheshire. These became more common in the period 1660–1760, offering an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of consumer items. Their keepers, partly evidenced by whom they chose to execute their wills, had unusually strong links to local towns, suggesting that shops occupied a liminal space between town and country.

In a final section on ‘Consumers’, Susan North describes the bewildering variety of fashionable clothing and accessories in England from 1552 to 1665, Mark Dawson explores the oat-eating world of the Peak Country, while Richard Hoyle offers an analysis of the consumption behaviour of a Lancastrian farmer-minister, Peter Walkden. Each article shows different aspects of a developing consumer world, with North highlighting diversity and vibrancy in the clothing trade, Dawson pointing to important (and still relatively understudied) regional variation in diet, and Hoyle showing an early eighteenth-century farmer whose own participation in the new world of consumer goods was largely restricted to tobacco. In the latter case, though, a fascinating gender dimension is added, for, as Hoyle argues, it seems that Walkden’s wife Catherine was the one who was making the key decisions between leisure and production on which Jan De Vries’ industrious revolution hypothesis was based.

It is, of course, impossible to do justice to Joan Thirsk’s work in one conference and in one volume. Nonetheless, the contributions here will be of great interest to those working in agrarian and economic history. Many of the most interesting papers describe fresh research, and even if they tend to be short and quite specific, these at least give fascinating pointers towards bigger projects.