Agricultural History, Rural History, Or Countryside History? Author(S): Jeremy Burchardt Source: the Historical Journal, Vol

Agricultural History, Rural History, or Countryside History? Author(s): Jeremy Burchardt Source: The Historical Journal, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 465-481 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4140139 . Accessed: 30/09/2014 16:44

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This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TheHistorical Journal, 50, 2 (2007),pp. 465-481 ? 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:Io.IoI7/Sooi8246Xo7oo6152 Printed in the United Kingdom

AGRICULTURAL HISTORY, RURAL HISTORY, OR COUNTRYSIDE HISTORY?*

JEREMY BURCHARDT Universityof Reading

A B S T R AC T. This articleassesses the state of modemrnEnglish rural history.It identifiesan 'orthodox' school,focusedon the economichistory of agriculture.This has madeimpressive progress in quantifyingand explainingthe outputand productivityachievements of Englishfarming since the 'agriculturalrevolution'. Its celebratoryaccount was,from the outset,challenged by a dissidenttradition emphasizing the social costs of agriculturalprogress, notably enclosure.Recently a new school, associatedwith thejournal Rural History, has brokenaway from this narrativeof agriculturalchange, elaborating a wider social histoy. The workofAlun Howkins, thepivotal figure in the recenthistoriography, is locatedin relationto thesethree traditions.It is arguedthat Howkins, like his precursors,is constrainedby an increasinglyanachronistic equationof the countrysidewith agriculture.The conceptof a 'post-productivist'countyside, dominatedby consumptionand representation,has beendeveloped by geographers and sociologistsand may havesomething to offerhistorians here, in conjunctionwith thewell-established historiography of the' ruralidyll'. The article concludeswith a callfor a new countrysidehistory, giving full weight to the culturaland representational aspects that have done so much to shape twentieth-centuryrural England. Only in this way will it be possibleto movebeyond a historyof the countrysidethat is merelythe historyof agriculturewrit large.

The historiography of nineteenth- and twentieth-century rural England predominantly treats agriculture and the countryside as if they were one and the same thing. Recent changes in the rural economy have made it easier to see that the conjunction is in fact temporally specific. Tourism now generates more income than farming in the countryside, as the Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001 graphically revealed.1 This came as no surprise to rural sociologists, who developed the concept of a 'post-productivist' (or consumption) countryside in the early 199os, emphasizing a shift in focus from agricultural output to consumption, lifestyle, and leisure.2 Whilst they may have become more central, these

Departmentof History, Universityof ReadingRG6 [email protected] * I would like to thank ClareJacksonand an anonymous referee for their very helpful comments on this review. Remaining errorsare, of course, my own responsibility. 1 Rural tourismwas worth nearlyD?14 billion in the UK in 2001. Tourism supported38o,ooo jobs in England in that year, compared to 374,000 in farming. The Wye Group Handbook, Ruralhouseholds' livelihoodand wellbeing (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 2005). 2 R. Munton, 'Farmingfamilies in upland Britain: options, strategiesand futures' (paperpresented to the Associationof American Geographers,Toronto, April i99o); D. Symes, 'Changing gender roles Rural in productionist and post-productionist capitalist agriculture', Journal of Studies,7 (I991), pp. 85-90; Terry Marsden, Jonathan Murdoch, and S. Williams, 'Regulating agricultures in deregulating economies: emerging trends in the uneven development of agriculture', Geoforum,23 (1986),pp. 333-45; Philip Lowe,Jonathan Murdoch, Terry Marsden, R. Munton, and Andrew Flynn, 'Regulating the new rural spaces: the uneven development of land', Journalof RuralStudies, 9 (1993), 465

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 466 HISTORICAL JOURNAL aspects of the countryside were far from new in the 199os, yet they have been largely ignored by social and economic historians. The consumption countryside is closely connected to the cultural production and reproduction of landscape, to which historians have devoted a wealth of attention. Unlike contemporary sociologists (and some geographers), however, they have rarely linked this to social change. It is time for rural historians to review the assumption that has hitherto informed and given coherence to the sub- discipline: i.e. that rural history is agricultural history writ large. Equally, it might be argued that cultural history would benefit from moving beyond tired generalizations about the countryside and national identity, based almost entirely on high culture, around which discussion has thus far centred. We need a cultural history of rural society and a social history of the rural idyll.

Agricultural historians, although few, have made a distinguished contribution to the historiography of modern Britain, arguing that rising farm output and productivity enabled and sustained the industrial revolution. Initially, the contribution of agriculture to capital formation was emphasized. Landowners like Francis, third duke of Bridgewater, or William, fourth earl Fitzwilliam, used surpluses from rising rent rolls to finance investment in canals, mines, and industry. More recently, attention has focused on the role of agriculture in prising open the Malthusian trap, in research, for example, by Tony Wrigley and Mark Overton.3 Had Britain not achieved a breakthrough in agricultural productivity, rising population would have led to higher food imports and prices and diverted resources from industry back into agriculture. Perhaps because of the centrality of agriculture to understanding the industrial revolution, several of the most distinguished historians of modern Britain have written on the subject, including, in addition to those already mentioned, D. McCloskey, F. M. L. Thompson, and Patrick O'Brien.4 There is, then, a good case that it is the economic significance of agriculture at least in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that gives the subject its wider relevance. Accordingly, many fine histories of the countryside have put agricultural change at their core. Obvious examples include Lord Ernle's Englishfarming past and present (1912), J. D. Chambers and Gordon Mingay's The agriculturalrevolution (1966), and, to take more recent examples, Overton's Agriculturalrevolution in England (1996), and Michael Turner, John

pp. 205-22; N. Ward, 'The agriculturaltreadmill and the rural environment in the post-productivist era', SociologiaRuralis, 23 (1993),PP- 348-64. E. A. Wrigley, Continuity,chance and change:the characterof the industrialrevolution in England (Cambridge, 1990); idem, Poverty,progress and population (Cambridge, 2004); M. Overton, Agriculture revolutionin England:the transformation of the agrarian economy, 15oo-185o (Cambridge,1996). 4 Donald N. McCloskey, 'The enclosure of open fields: preface to a study of its impact on the efficiency of English agriculture in the eighteenth century', Journalof EconomicHistory, 32 (1972), pp. 15-35; idem, 'English open fields as behaviour towards risk', Researchin EconomicHistory, I (1976), pp. 124-70; idem, 'The open fields of England: rent, risk and the rate of interest', in David W. Galenson, ed., Marketsin history:economic studies of thepast (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 5-49; F. M. L. Thompson, 'The second agriculturalrevolution', EconomicHistory Review, 2nd ser., 21 (1968),pp. 62-77; idem, 'An anatomy of English agriculture,1870-1914', in Michael E. Turner and B. A. Holderness, eds., Land,labour, and agriculture, 1700-1920: essaysfor GordonMingay (London, 1991), pp. 211-40; Patrick K. O' Brien, 'Agricultureand the industrialrevolution', EconomicHistory Review, 2nd ser., 30 (1977), pp. 166-81.

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 467

Beckett, and Bethanie Afton's recent books.5 In the course of the twentieth century, this approach was progressively refined in terms of the range of sources used and the sophistication with which they were analysed and interpreted. Ernle, for example, relied on accessible sources such as government inquiries and painted a broad-brush picture of the late nineteenth century as an era of almost unmitigated depression. Subsequent research drew on a much wider range of sources. The systematic analysis of probate inventories, associated especially with Overton, allowed a later generation of historians to glean much more detailed information about farming methods and technology, crop yields, and wealth before the early nineteenth century. Turner, Beckett, and Afton's use of farm records, including accounts and diaries, to chart changing yields, output, and productivity further extended the repertoire of sources available to agricultural historians and the sophistication with which the large quantity of new data is analysed. Interpretatively, the main shift has been towards emphasizing a much longer time scale for agricultural change. Whilst Ernle and other pioneers focused on Bakewell, Coke, Young, and the 1750-1850 period, it is now accepted that most of the important innovations - convertible husbandry, new crop rotations, turnips, legumes, breed improvement, drainage, the flotation of water meadows, and, of course, enclosure - date from the seventeenth century or earlier, even if output and productivity increases may indeed have been concentrated in the classic period of the agricultural revolution.6 Our understanding of what happened after the agricultural revolution has also been transformed by the deepening and refinement of research since Ernle's day. The key work here was by T. W. Fletcher, who argued in 1961 that the government inquiries on which Ernle had principally drawn, notably the Richmond Commission of 1879-82 and the Royal Commission on Agricultural Depression of 1893, were biased towards the arable south and east and had misled him into characterizing the late nineteenth century as an era of unmitigated depression. Pastoral areas, especially those with good access to urban markets like Cheshire or parts of the south-west, often switched successfully into liquid milk production. Ernle had missed a crucial regional geography of agricultural depression.7 Fletcher's emphasis has since become the new orthodoxy, echoed in Richard Perren's Agriculturein depression,1870-1940 (1995) and at greater length in the two-volume Agrarian history of England and Wales, vil: 185o-1914 (2ooo) edited by E.J. T. Collins. As is indicated by the title of the series to which Collins's volume belongs, the agricultural history tradition, closely identified over the last half century with the organization that gave birth to the Agrarian history of England and Wales, the British Agricultural History Society, had never concerned itself exclusively with agriculture. Gordon Mingay, for example, edited the two-volume compilation The Victoriancounthyside, offering chapters on non-productionist themes such as education, model housing, protest, and so forth. Mingay also wrote an impressive array of other works on aspects of rural society, including histories

5 M. E. Turner,J. V. Beckett, and B. Afton, Agriculturalrent in England, 1690-1914 (Cambridge, 1997); idem, Farm productionin England, 17oo00-1914 (Oxford, 200o). 6 Robert Bakewell, of Dishley, Leicestershire(1725-95), breeder of improved cattle and sheep, notably the New Leicestersheep; Thomas Coke, of Holkham, 'Coke of Norfolk', ist earl of Leicester (1754-1842), pioneer of crop rotations; Arthur Young (1741-1820), the most influential agricultural journalistof his time. Convertiblehusbandry is 'the system where the distinctionbetween permanent grass and permanent arable is broken; arable land rotates around the farm' (Overton, Agricultural revolutionin England,p. Ii16). 7 T. W. Fletcher, 'The great depressionof English agriculture,1873-1896', EconomicHistory Review, 2nd ser., 103 (1961), pp. 417-32.

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 468 HISTORICAL JOURNAL of the gentry and of eighteenth-century landed society.8 F. M. L. Thompson wrote an influential and highly regarded companion volume on nineteenth-century landed society as well as other works on rural social history including his four presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society, on landownership in the twentieth century.9 Collins has written widely on rural trades and industries and, like Mingay, edited one of the volumes of the Agrarianhistory of England and Wales.'o Yet a sense remains that these were forays from a perceived agricultural centre. It can be no accident that Mingay's social histories were all popularizing works, whilst he reserved his more serious academic work for agricultural change and closely connected issues such as landownership. Thompson also wrote influ- entially on agricultural change, single-handedly establishing the concept of a 'second agricultural revolution' in the mid-nineteenth century." Whilst in no sense a popularizer, he did not write as comprehensively on rural, as on urban, social history as in, for example Hampstead:building a borough(1974), The rise of suburbia(1982), or The rise of respectablesociety: a social history of VictorianBritain (1988). Collins, whilst purportedly writing about 'rural industries', in effect confined his work to those closely connected with agriculture, such as the coppice and underwood trades.12 It might also be argued that he reserved his most am- bitious work, on, for example, hand-tools, tractorization, the agricultural labour market, and agricultural output and productivity in the late nineteenth century, for themes closely related to the established concerns of the orthodox school."3 Even in Ernle's day, of course, some historians saw things differently. The Hammonds, notably in The villagelabourer (1911), can be regarded as the founders of a radical, dissenting tradition that retrospectively sought to right the wrongs of the agricultural worker. In the second half of the twentieth century, Marxist historians made the most impressive contribution to this sub-genre, notably Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude in CaptainSwing (1969) and Edward Thompson in a chapter of The makingof the English workingclass (1963) and in

8 Gordon E. Mingay, ed., The Victoriancountryside (2 vols., London, 1981); idem, Thegentry:the rise and in the fall of a rulingclass (London, 1976);and idem, Englishlanded society eighteenthcentury (London, 1963). 9 F. M. L. Thompson, Englishlanded society in the nineteenthcentury (London, 1963); idem, 'English landed society in the twentieth century, I: property: collapse and survival', Transactionsof theRoyal HistoricalSociety, 5th ser., 40 (1990), pp. 1-24; idem, 'English landed society in the twentieth century, II: new poor and new rich', ibid., 6th ser., I (Ig99), pp. i-20; idem, 'English landed society in the twentieth century: III, self-help and outdoor relief', ibid., 6th ser., 2 (1992), Pp. 1-23; and idem, 6th 'English landed society in the twentieth century, IV: prestige without power', ibid., ser., 3 (i993), pp. 1-22. 10 E.J. T. Collins, ed., Theagrarian history of Englandand Wales,vi: 185o-1914 (2 vols., Cambridge, 2001). It is striking that the unusual term 'agrarian' was preferred to 'rural'-a title such as the Cambridgehistory of ruralEngland and Waleswould, one imagines, have been equally acceptable. 'Agrarian' suggests, rightly, that those who conceived the series wanted to indicate that agriculture was at the heart of everythingthat had taken place in the countryside,even if the countrysidewas not exclusivelyagricultural. n Thompson, 'The second agriculturalrevolution'. 12 E.J. T. Collins, 'The coppice and underwood trades', in G. E. Mingay, ed., Theagrarian history of England and Wales, vi: i750-1850 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 484-501. "3 E.J. T. Collins, 'Harvest technology and labour supply in Britain, 1790-1870', EconomicHistory Review,2nd ser., 23 (1969),PP- 453-73; idem, 'Migrant labour in British agriculturein the nineteenth century', EconomicHistory Review, 2nd ser., 29 (1976),pp. 38-59; idem, 'Agriculturalhand tools and the industrialrevolution', in Kevin Langfordand Negley Harte, eds., Landand society in Britain,1700-1914: essaysin honourofF. M. L. Thompson(Manchester, 1996),pp. 57-77; and idem, 'Power availabilityand agriculturalproductivity in England and Wales, 1840-1939', inJ. P. Bas van Bavel and Erik Thoen, - eds., Landproductivity and agro-systemsin theNorth Sea area: Middle Ages 2oth century:elements for comparison (Brepols, 1999), pp. 209-28.

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 469 and hunters and Customsin common The radical non-Marxist Whigs (1975) (1991). perspective did persist, however, in major works like Robert Allen's Enclosureand theyeoman(1992). This oppositional tradition extended the range of the orthodox agricultural history mainstream, bringing the experience of farmworkers and smallholders to the centre of the picture and injecting a critical, even outraged, tone that ruffled perhaps complacently smooth waters. Nevertheless, since it was essentially an oppositional appendage to a mainstream, the radical tradition offered something narrower than a comprehensive social history. The central issue was the same: the scope and effects of agricultural change between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Only the perspective differed. Where the orthodox tradition emphasized lower food prices, the release of labour for industry and national benefit, the radical tradition argued that such gains were limited and had been paid by those who could least afford it. Virtually all the work in the radical/Marxist tradition is concerned with enclosure - which, of course, played an equally central, if mirror image, role in most orthodox agricultural history. What both disregarded were aspects of rural life that did not relate, or were peripheral to, the development of agrarian capitalism. It seems fair to suggest, then, that for most of the twentieth century, agricultural history remained centred on farming and specifically on farm production. This had great ad- vantages. It gave the subject coherence and a master narrative, albeit one subject to debate and revision. It made use of the rigorous theoretical structure and accepted statistical methods of economics. Furthermore, it placed the subject at the core of the key narrative of modern British history: the industrial revolution. The drawback was that it left out, or treated as peripheral, most of what happened in the countryside during the period in question. This was to change in the mid-I98os, with the establishment of a new journal, Rural History. The title implied a challenge to the main organ of the orthodox school, the AgriculturalHistory Review, which the editors of Rural History, Liz Bellamy, Keith Snell, and Tom Williamson accused of purveying a narrow, unimaginative, and historiographically outdated 'cows and ploughs' approach.14 The subtitle of the new journal, 'economy, society, culture', alluded to the French Annales, to which Rural History aimed to achieve a similar totality of approach, methodologically and in terms of subject matter. Accordingly, early issues of the new journal gave space to articles with a remarkable diversity of provenance, from photographic history to ethnography, and from hydrology to oral history. Some of the research associated with Rural History has lived up to the high aims the journal set for itself. Perhaps the most impressive and influential example, ironically, was published before Rural History was established: Snell's Annals of the labouringpoor (I985).1~ From one

14 Liz Bellamy, K. D. M. Snell, and Tom Williamson, 'Rural history: the prospect before us', Rural History,I(1990), pp. '-4- 15 K. D. M. Snell, Annalsof thelabouring poor: social change and agrarian England, i66o-19oo (Cambridge, 1985). Whilst Snell's use of data in Annalshas since been criticized, the methodological approach he pioneered remains valid. See Norma Landau, 'The laws of settlement and the surveillanceof immi- grationin eighteenth-centuryKent', Continuityand Change, 3 (1988),pp. 391-420; idem, 'The regulation of immigration, economic structures and definitions of the poor in eighteenth-century England', HistoricalJournal, 33 (1990),pp. 541-72; idem, 'The eighteenth-centurycontext of the laws of settlement', Continuityand Change,6 (1991),PP. 417-39; and idem, 'Who was subjected to the laws of settlement? Procedure under the settlement laws in eighteenth-centuryEngland', AgriculturalHistory Review,43 (1995),PP. 139-59. For Snell'sresponse, see 'Pauper settlementand the right to poor relief in England and Wales', Continuityand Change, 6 (i991), PP- 375-415; and idem, 'Settlement, poor law and the ruralhistorian: new approachesand opportunities', RuralHistory, 3 (1992), Pp. 145-72.

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 470 HISTORICAL JOURNAL point of view, Annals of the labouringpoor could be seen as falling squarely within the radical tradition, in that it was mainly concerned with the consequences of enclosure for the poor and for rural social relations. Snell argued that, far from creating employment - as Chambers and Mingay, amongst others, had claimed - enclosure reduced it, often im- mediately and certainly in the long run. In emphasizing the differential gender consequences of enclosure, Snell was offering a more innovative view. However, it was Snell's methodology that really demonstrated the scope for a new rural history. Annals of the labouringpoor, with its provenance from the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, was based on massive data collection and analysis, mainly using poor law settlement examinations to demonstrate that enclosure exacerbated the seasonal inci- dence of unemployment, especially in arable counties. At last rural society was receiving the same degree of sophisticated quantitative analysis that had previously been reserved for agriculture. Impressive as the quantitative aspects of Snell's work were, it was not so much these alone as their combination with an equally innovative and subtle deployment of qualitative sources that made so much historiographical impact. In his opening pages, for example, Snell drew on letters written by emigrant agricultural labourers to pour scorn on the 'Hodge' stereotype of agricultural labourers as intellectually and emotionally subnormal.16 Snell showed that, on the contrary, the first priority of most agricultural labourer emigrants was their family and that the quality of social relations was one of the foremost attractions of many favoured emigrant destinations. Subsequent chapters included one on the relationship between Thomas Hardy's work and social change in nineteenth-century Dorset, using quantitative evidence assembled earlier in the book to test Hardy's account of rural society, and Hardy's work to shed light on the implications of rural social change for family and social relationships. Few works since Annals of the labouringpoor have achieved the same demanding heights. Indeed, in some respects there has been a regression since 1985, in that recent work on agricultural change (such as Turner, Beckett, and Afton's books) has been more quantitative and narrowly focused on agricultural performance than ever, whilst many recent works of rural social history, such as, for example, Trevor Wild's VillageEngland (2004), have been almost completely lacking in quantification.1 Barry Reay's work is perhaps the most impressive exception, as, for example, in 77helast risingof the agriculturallabourers (1990), or more recently in Microhistories(1996) and Rural Englands (2004).18s Nevertheless, Rural continues to flourish and to support a much wider range of more culturally and History socially inflected articles than were being published before 1990. Loosely associated with Rural is the work of Alun Howkins, the leading contem- History porary historian of nineteenth-century English rural society. Howkins was one of the founders of Rural History,remains on the editorial board, and shares the journal's interest in the social and cultural aspects of rural history. Yet in the main Howkins is a pure social historian, using sources such as reports, memoirs, diaries, and the like, whereas the

16 'Hodge' was a contemptuousgeneric term for an agriculturalworker, widely current amongst the educated in the nineteenth century; see Mark Freeman, 'The agriculturallabourer and the "Hodge" stereotype,c. 1850-19I4', AgriculturalHistory Review,49 (2001), pp. 172-86. 17 Trevor Wild, VillageEngland: a socialhistory of thecountryside (London, 2004). 18 J. M. Neeson, Commoners:common right, enclosure and social change in England,1700oo-82o (Cambridge, 1993) should also be mentioned. Neeson offers rich qualitative insights, but neither the scale nor sophisticationof data analysiscan match Snell's Annals.

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 47I hallmark of the best Rural History work is the combination of rigorous quantitative and qualitative methods. Whilst Howkins is a superb synthesizer of other historians' quantitative findings, his own research generally eschews that dimension. This may partly explain why Howkins's judgements are often so qualified, emphasizing diversity and contrast rather than any overall pattern. Where, then, should we place Howkins historiographically? At one level, he fits readily into the radical/Marxist tradition. The strongest influence on his early work was Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop movement. Howkins has always emphasized his Marxist credentials - his Communist Party past, his early involvement in agricultural trade unionism and his identification with the farmworkers' political struggle. In many ways this comes through in the subject matter of his work and the sympathy with and respect for farmworkers it evinces. Yet Howkins cannot be so easily categorized. Unlike most of the other major figures in the radical/Marxist tradition, Howkins has little to say about enclosure. Perhaps this is inevitable in a historian whose focus is post-185o but in other respects, too, Howkins stands apart from the Hammonds, Thompson, Hobsbawm, and Allen. Each of these is associated with a controversial argu- ment, or series of arguments, directly challenging the value judgements of the orthodox school. Howkins is in practice less oppositional. Professionally he has been closely associated with the orthodox school, serving as a long-term member of the British Agricultural History Society and contributing to the Agrarianhistory of England and Wales, vii. His work is principally structured around the economic fortunes of agriculture, just as is the orthodox school's. More important than attempting to pigeonhole a historian who is so plainly no respecter of historiographical boundaries is to assess the contribution he has made to our understanding of modern rural history. Two aspects of Howkins's work are especially important: wide-ranging synthetic accounts of social change in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century rural England, and monographs and articles on the working lives, culture, and politics of agricultural workers during the same period.19 His work on perceptions of the countryside is also very interesting, if less fully developed. Throughout, Howkins has emphasized the complexity and diversity of rural society, highlighting, for example, regional, farming system-related, occupational, gender, and denominational contrasts. This aware- ness of diversity is particularly apparent in his work on agricultural workers, on which most of his own primary research has focused. Howkins insists that the experience of the arable south and east of England was atypical and has repeatedly called for more work on the north, Wales, and upland areas, where smallholdings and yearly hiring were common. Equally he argues that women's paid work remained a vital element of family incomes in much of the country for longer than hitherto recognized.20 Whilst emphasizing the extent and influence of landowner paternalism, Howkins warns us against the mechanistic assumption that paternalism 'produced' deference, drawing attention both to the pervasiveness of markedly undeferential responses from rural workers (anonymous threatening letters, for example) and to the cynical, calculating quality that

19 Reshapingrural England: a socialhistoy, 1850-1925 (London, i99I) included a chapter on England after the Great War, but was brief and derivative. Most of Howkins's other work does not extend beyond 1914,although he has recentlybegun to write more extensively on the mid- and late twentieth century.This will be assessedin more detail below. 20 Arguments confirmed and extended by Nicola Verdon, Ruralwomen workers in nineteenth-century England:gender, work and wages (Woodbridge, 2002).

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 472 HISTORICAL JOURNAL forelock-tugging behaviour often had.21 Perhaps Howkins's most distinctive contribution, however, has been the identification of an independent rural working-class culture based on nonconformity, especially Primitive Methodism, and trade unionism. Howkins has emphasized the dignity and strength of this culture, its links to the wider world of working- class solidarity - through ties to the railwaymen and dockers, for example - and the tragedy of its disappearance under the impact of agricultural mechanization and the collapse in the farm labour force from the mid-twentieth century onwards.

One of the major challenges facing historians of the modern English countryside is to extend the range and sophistication of insights of nineteenth-century agricultural and rural history into the twentieth century. The dawn of the twenty-first century appears to have made a difference here. For many years, the twentieth-century countryside attracted little interest from historians, perhaps partly because the sub-discipline remained fixated on the agricultural revolution and its consequences. Few heeded the greater agricultural revolution going on around them: for since the Second World War, British agriculture has achieved far greater and more rapid increases in output and productivity than during the 'classical' agricultural revolution. Twentieth-century rural history was not, of course, entirely neglected before the turn of the century. Three major works very much in the orthodox tradition had been published. The first, Edith Whetham's Agrarian history of England and Wales, vil: 1914-i939, argued that after the 'great betrayal' of 1921, English and Welsh agriculture suffered severely from low prices and foreign competition. The title of one of the chapters, 'The waygoing', fairly reflects Whetham's overall conception of the period as one in which agriculture was not only in decline, but becoming irrevocably marginal to the nation. Whilst there is as yet no Agrarianhistory of England and Wales, Ix, B. A. Holderness's British agriculturesince 1945 (Manchester, 1985) is from much the same stable. Holderness duly outlines the achievement of agriculture in these years. More recently, Peter Dewey has written an impressive revisionist history of agriculture during the First World War.22 Drawing on a wide range of statistics, Dewey demonstrates that the performance of agriculture was nowhere near as impressive as the laudatory official accounts suggest. In fact, Britain was prevented from starving mainly by food economy rather than production measures, especially the increase in the wheat extraction rate.23 These works can be seen as attempting to extend the agricultural history tradition through the twentieth century. But partly because there has been less time for a mature historiography to develop, Whetham and Holderness are a long way behind Allen, Overton, or Turner, Beckett, and Afton, or indeed Dewey, in the scale of their data collection or the precision with which it is analysed. We need a Fletcher to query, for example, the performance of agriculture in the interwar years. To some extent, this is already being done by economic historians. Both E.J. T. Collins and Paul Brassley have produced estimates implying that productivity and even output actually increased during

21 Howard Newby, Thedeferential worker: a studyoffarm workers in EastAnglia (London, 1977),similarly argues that deference was an attributeof situationsrather than persons. 22 Peter E. Dewey, Britishagriculture in theFirst WorldWar (London, 1989). 23 The wheat extraction rate is the proportion of the grain milled into flour.

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 473 this period.24 Brassley's work in particular opens up the possibility of a new periodization for twentieth-century agricultural change. He notes that, in policy terms, the uptake of technology and rising output and productivity, the 1930oshave much in common with the post-war period. Were the foundations of the post-war 'great leap forward' laid, not during the war as traditional accounts imply, but a decade earlier? Meanwhile, John Martin has applied Dewey's sceptical revisionism to agricultural output during the Second World War, suggesting that more effective pest control may have made as much difference to rising output as the celebrated 'plough campaign'.25 Yet these are tentative beginnings, based on limited data, and leave open key questions about the scale, nature, timing, and geography of twentieth-century agricultural change. To what extent does Howkins's path-breaking The deathof ruralEngland: a social historyof the countrysidesince 19oo (2003), the first social history of twentieth-century rural England, provide answers? The book is structured, in 'orthodox school' style, around the fortunes of agriculture. The years up to 19I4 are seen as offering modest recovery from the depression of c. 1873-c. 1896; the war years from 19I4 to 1921 were prosperous, whilst the 1920osand witnessed a a in view of the I930os 'profound depression', perhaps questionable judgement findings of Collins and Brassley. As so often, Howkins emphasizes regionality, arguing that 'live-in' farm service remained common in the pastoral north and Wales even as late as the Second World War. He picks up on the increasing emphasis in the specialist literature that, aided by subsidies and production grants, recovery was well under way by the end of the 1930s. The post-war era is, conventionally, treated as a unity, with the emphasis on output and productivity. Characteristically, some of Howkins's most interesting insights pertain to rural workers. His emphasis on the contribution of non-agricultural workers, notably railwaymen, to proletarian political culture goes some way to correcting the impression given in other accounts that farmworkers were almost hermetically sealed from influence by other groups of workers. He has equally interesting observations to make about gender, and his account of the effects of the mechanization of dairying is a model of its kind. Milking machines only came to dominate dairying surprisingly late, during and after the Second World War. Together with the rise of the specialized dairy farm (a response to urban demand and the availability of cheap imported feeds) and the increasing use of the tractor on dairy farms, this spelled the end of the longstanding association between women and dairying: 'milk- maids' were replaced by 'dairymen'. Yet such insights remain episodic: the almost non- existent secondary literature on mid- and late twentieth-century agricultural history hampers Howkins's efforts to probe the nature and causes of rural socio-economic change more deeply. He is unable, for example, to clarify which strategies proved most successful in maintaining agricultural incomes in the face of falling prices between the wars, although the period witnessed strikingly contrasting responses, from the heavy investment in machinery, buildings, and modern business practices of progressive estates like that of J. S. Lewis at Leckford, to the low-input/low-output 'ranch farming' adopted by the Wilson brothers of Ramsbury, Wiltshire, and on a smaller scale by tens of thousands of 'dog and stick' farmers across the country.26 Nor do we learn much about whether the

24 E.J. T. Collins, 'Productivity and output growth in British agriculture, 1870-1940' (unpublished paper, Economic History Society conference, Glasgow, 2002); Paul Brassley, 'Output and technical change in twentieth-centuryBritish agriculture', Agricultural History Review, 48 (2000), pp. 60-84. The since 25 John Martin, developmentof modern agriculture: British farming i93I (London, 1999). 26 See R. D. Brigden, 'John Spedan Lewis and the Leckford estate' (Ph.D. thesis, Reading, 2001).

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 474 HISTORICAL JOURNAL retreat of landowners from paternalism allowed farmers to assume social leadership in the countryside, or whether new forces such as the rise of local government or the changing social composition of the countryside created a more complex picture. The death of rural England should be seen as an outline of what a social history of twentieth-century rural England might look like rather than a definitive account. There is, however, a more fundamental issue: how Howkins defines his subject. Despite Howkins's attempts to include 'the new countrymen and women' (mainly middle-class incomers), domestic servants, and, briefly, miners, quarrymen, and transport workers, the book remains firmly rooted in the notion of the countryside as agriculture. Yet it might be argued that, here, the book is the prisoner of its own subject matter. For the 'countryside- as-agriculture' is a particular version of the countryside, and one which was in many respects formulated during the period in question. The Scott Report of 1942 is, perhaps, the locus classicus.27This is not an accident, for the countryside was probably more purely agricultural between about I87o and 1930 than it had been since the rise of the rural textile industry in the fifteenth century. Competition from mechanized, urban industry had un- dermined many 'traditional' rural industries by the 187os, whilst most of the countryside remained out of commuting range. But even in these years many others lived, and even worked, in the countryside besides agriculturalists and much else happened besides farming. The claim that the countryside and agriculture are one-and-the-same is an ideological one, a product of a particular time, place, way of seeing, and most importantly a product of particular interests. Rather than reproducing it in its scope, themes, and approach, a history of the twentieth-century countryside should hold up such an ideology to critical scrutiny.

III

There is, however, another historiographical tradition focused on one of the pivotal non- agricultural aspects of the countryside: the rise of the 'rural idyll'. The key work in this canon is Raymond Williams's monumentally influential The countryand the city (1973). Williams was careful to avoid the obvious fallacy of attributing a uniquely English provenance to town versus country contrasts. He showed how classical literature (Theocritus, Horace, and Virgil in particular) gave rise to the pastoral tradition and how this was revived during the Renaissance and transplanted to England by, among others, Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Williams argued that the town versus country contrast had played a crucial and unusually central role in English literature, explaining this with reference to the precocious development of agrarian capitalism in England. Following Williams, it has become almost axiomatic that the countryside was fundamental to English national identity and a wide range of consequences have been attributed to this, ranging from alleged economic backwardness to political conservatism. Perhaps the most significant work after Williams's was Martin Wiener's English cultureand the decline of the industrialspirit (1981), which generated a large body of controversy and responses. Wiener took up Williams's emphasis on the pervasive character of town-country themes in English literature and linked it to a wider reaction against industrialism dating from the mid- nineteenth century, also involving the public schools and land purchases by businessmen.

27 Ministry of Works and Planning, Reportof thecommittee on landutilisation in ruralareas, Cmd 6378, 1942.

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For Wiener, town and country were not so much a means of charting the ravages of agrarian capitalism, but a method by which the aristocracy and their hangers-on were able to keep the middle class in check, with disastrous consequences for English entrepreneur- ship, competitiveness, and, ultimately, prosperity. Wiener was followed by a long line of historians and literary critics who reiterated his emphasis on the centrality of the countryside to English national identity, albeit in differing ways. One of the first of these was, again, Alun Howkins. In an important chapter in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd's Englishness:politics and culture,i880-1920 (1986), Howkins examined the particular character of the landscape ideal that, in Wiener's view, had so influenced English culture.28 According to Howkins, from the late nineteenth century onwards it was the so-called 'south country' that lay at the heart of English ruralism. The south country was not literally the countryside of southern England, although the actual landscapes of that region figured prominently. Rather, the south country consisted of a package of constantly quoted images of rural England: thatched cottages, medieval churches and manor houses, a chequer-board pattern of fields and hedgerows, rolling hills, and so forth. This was a settled, centuries-old, aristocratic landscape from which conflict had been written out and it echoed the domination of Britain's political and economic life by the landowner-financier nexus residing chiefly in the Home Counties. Patrick Wright broadened the discussion by setting the specific field of force between rurality and English national identity in the larger context of 'modernity'. Wright argued that contemporary capitalism is characterized by a dynamic destruction of customary norms and that this generates anxiety, dislocation, and a sense of loss.29 The result, in Wright's view, is a powerful latent popular appetite for nostalgia. The pattern was acute in the English case due to the early onset of industrialism, the experience of empire and its loss, and the availability of a recent heroic past in the shape of the Second World War. Wright argued that on to this inherent popular nostalgia had been grafted an elite version of the national past, in which the idealization of rural landscapes was a prominent element. Wright's work has, not altogether surprisingly, found little acceptance among historians. He writes as a literary critic and interpreter of contemporary culture and his work often reads as a series of elaborately embroidered assertions, plausible and interesting but rarely supported by much evidence. Furthermore, these assertions characteristically operate at the dizzily abstract level of' national culture' as a whole. When Wright does descend from such heights, he typically goes to the other extreme, offering a detailed textual commentary on the life of a purportedly 'representative' individual, as in his chapter on Mary Butts in On living in an old country(1985). But it is worth taking notice of Wright. In three respects at least, his work alerts us to crucial elements in the cultural significance of the countryside that remain undeveloped in orthodox historical literature. Perhaps the foremost of these is Wright's situation of rural nostalgia in the wider context of 'modernity'. This is, to say the least, a questionable term but more important than rejecting the over-generalized, ahis- torical nature of Wright's conceptual apparatus is to note the crucial shift in the location of the historical problem from 'England' to industrialized urban societies more generally. Wright avoids the lazy, parochial, and demonstrably false assumption that anything important about the English relationship to the countryside must be uniquely English. Looking to the social conditions generated by urbanized industrialism is an altogether

28 Alun Howkins, 'The discovery of rural England', in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds., Englishness:politics and culture, 1880-I920 (London, 1986), pp. 62-88. 29 PatrickWright, Onliving in an oldcountry: the national past in contemporaryBritain (London, 1985).

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 476 HISTORICAL JOURNAL more promising avenue of investigation than harping on about the cultural peculiarities of the English. Secondly, and relatedly, Wright begins to shift the focus away from the obsession with national identity that has transfixed the gaze of rural cultural historians for the last quarter of a century. In doing so he opens up a space to assess the many aspects of attitudes to the countryside that have little or nothing to do with 'the nation'. Thirdly, Wright draws attention to the relationship between elite and popular apprehensions of rural landscapes. Whilst Wright's methods will not provide us with detailed knowledge of the social co-ordinates of ruralism, he does at least recognize popular ruralism as a phenomenon in its own right. In other accounts, from Williams onwards, popular attitudes to the countryside are repeatedly seen as passively derivative from the determining elite culture. If Wright questioned the sources of ruralism, Simon Miller questioned its implications. The prevalent view since Williams, reinforced by Howkins, Newby, and many others, has been that ruralism was a sort of cultural confidence trick perpetrated by landowners and their apologists on the urban public. Miller almost reverses the equation. He argued in an important article in Rural History in 1995 that celebration of the rural landscape as a uniquely English haven of untarnished peace and natural beauty went hand-in-hand with celebration of the industrial city as the source and embodiment of Britain's global industrial and commercial might.30Just as worshipping the spiritual superiority of the 'angel in the home' underpinned the practical authority of the Victorian male, so revering the countryside as an unpeopled, non-economic sphere of spiritual refreshment had the effect of marginalizing the real needs of rural people and cementing urban industrial dominance. By way of example, Miller cites Stanley Baldwin's proclivity to outbursts of lyrical ruralism against his brutally hard-headed refusal to countenance agricultural protection; Baldwin's ruralism has, however, recently been denied by Philip Williamson.3' Miller's suggestion that we may need to look to the factory or the director's office rather than the country house to track down the beneficiaries of ruralism is, in many ways, - attractive. It avoids the tired and over-worked villainization of the aristocracy but only to replace it with the alternative bugbear of urban exploitation. The major problem is Miller's assumption that 'agriculture' was a united interest. Whilst there is little doubt that a more stable and pro-active government commitment to agriculture in the 1920s could have boosted agricultural output and profits, where the spoils would have gone is another question entirely. Miller ignores the huge disparity of incomes within the agricultural sector and the extent to which farmworkers' interests, such as better wages, housing, employment conditions, and benefits, were aligned with urban workers rather than farmers and landowners. The traditional assumption that the principal victim of ruralism is the farmworker seems preferable to Miller's defence of a reified 'agricultural interest', even if we accept his larger point that ruralism should be seen, contraWiener, as a servant of urban capitalism, rather than as an unassimilated, oppositional vestige of an aristocratic past. Whilst Howkins, Wright, and Miller differed in varying degrees from Wiener in their assessment of the specific connotations of English ruralism, even Wright largely endorsed his central claims that it was pervasive, distinctive to England, and backward-looking in character. Peter Mandler, however, did not, pointing to the strongly present-centred,

30 Simon Miller, 'Urban dreams and rural reality: land and landscape in English culture, 1920-1945', RuralHistory, 6 (1995),pp. 89-o02. 31 Philip Williamson, StanleyBaldwin: Conservative leadership and nationalvalues (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 244-50.

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 477 anti-historical features of literate culture in the last third of the nineteenth century and to the greater force and more insistently anti-industrial character of ruralism among many of Britain's competitors at the time, notably Germany.32 It has often been objected that Mandler overdoes it, wilfully understating the centrality of ruralism in English culture, as for example in his doubtful characterization of the folk movement as culturally marginal in the early twentieth century.33 A more careful reading of Mandler's article, however, indicates that his main target is not ruralism as such (he acknowledges, albeit rather briefly, that the countryside became more popular than ever after the First World War), but the influence of nostalgic, anti-industrial, versions of ruralism. The importance of Mandler's article today, however, lies perhaps less in its relevance for the thesis that ruralism damaged British economic growth, a ghost which has been largely laid to rest, but in again pointing to the crucial importance of situating English ruralism in a comparative context and in questioning the simplistic characterization of it as nostalgic.34 One of the most interesting recent works on English ruralism takes the last point much further, exploding the assumption that ruralism was necessarily conservative and anti- modernist. Landscape and Englishness (1998), by the cultural geographer David Matless, contrasts two versions of Englishness that, in Matless's view, defined the terrain in the first half of the twentieth century. One of these he terms 'planner-preservationist' and the other 'organicist'. Whilst the organicist version of Englishness shared many of the attributes described by Wiener and his successors, the planner-preservationist mode, influential in government and among the cultural establishment, was insistently and even aggressively modernizing in its ethos. Planner-preservationists like Abercrombie and his associates in organizations like the Council for the Preservation of Rural England admired the clean modernist lines of autobahns and pylons and, rather than a traditional countryside, sought a tidy landscape, ordered by expert planners, with town and countryside sharply demar- cated, each in their appointed place. Matless's work has the characteristic virtues, and some of the vices, of the recent vogue for cultural history, often pursued by non-historians.35 Cultural history has produced a dazzling range of ideas and interpretations, but typically avoids explanation, preferring to construct kaleidoscopic patterns of shifting cultural 'meanings'. Karen Sayer's recent work on the cottage idyll, one of the best of its kind, illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of

32 Peter Mandler, "'Against Englishness": English culture and the limits to rural nostalgia, 1850-1940', Transactionsof the Royal Historical Society,6th ser., 7 (1997), PP. 155-75- 33 See, for example, Jeremy Burchardt, Paradise lost: rural idyll and social changein England since i8oo (London, 2002), pp. 98-9. 34 There is an extensive literature on the economic consequences of rural nostalgia. Amongst the more notable contributions were Hartmut Berghoff, 'Public schools and the decline of the British economy, 1870-1914', Past and Present, 129 (1990), pp. 148-67; M. Dintenfass, The decline of industrial Britain, 1870o-198o (London, 1992); W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism,culture and decline in Britain, 1750-1990 (London, i993); C. H. Feinstein, 'Success and failure: British economic growth since 1948', in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey, eds, The economic history of Britain since 1700 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1994), PP- 95-122; M. Sanderson, Educationand economicdecline in Britain, 187o to the 99gos (Cambridge, 1999); and F. M. L. Thompson, Gentrificationand the enterpriseculture: Britain, 178o-198o (Oxford, 2001). 5 Other examples include works by literary critics, such as Jan Marsh, Backto theland: the pastoral impulse in Britainfrom 188o to 1914 (London, 1982); and Georgina Boyes, The imagined village: culture, ideology,and the Englishfolk revival (Manchester, 1993), by the art biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, The simplelife: C. R. Ashbeein the Cotswolds(London, i99g), and by the cultural commentator, Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust:a historyof walking(London, 2001).

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 478 HISTORICAL JOURNAL the genre.36 The last sentence of the book is, to Sayer's credit, a fair summary: 'the cottage and its image is a constantly contested sign built on the shiftingsands of nostalgia, time, sex, sexuality, gender, class and race' (p. 209; my italics). Whilst it is interesting, thought- provoking, and at times entertaining to learn about the wide range of different meanings the country cottage has carried, this is description, not explanation. An associated problem is that Sayer sometimes writes as if the cultural meaning of the country cottage was transhistorical: 'the cottage homes of England, still part of the grammar of heritage, are meant to embody steady vernacular domesticity in contrast to the progressive expression of individualism found in the city' (p. 116). Meant where, when, and by whom? A firmer, more detailed, chronological framework is needed. This would enable Sayer to relate the swirling patterns of representation she describes to the wider historical context. Otherwise it is impossible to understand why representations of country cottages changed and what, if any, were the consequences.

Perhaps the most persistent flaw of studies of the countryside and English culture since Williams, however, is that most have fallen into the trap of English exceptionalism, the double logical error of assuming that England was different and that major features of English culture must have been constitutive of this difference. Two works, neither of which has received appropriate attention, point the way forward here: the art historian Alex Potts's '"Constable country" between the wars', published in the first volume of Raphael Samuel's Patriotism:the makingand unmakingof British national identity(1989) and the geographer Michael Bunce's The countrysideideal: Anglo-Americanimages of landvcape(1994)- Potts was well ahead of his time in arguing that reverence for the countryside was not distinctively English: 'every bit as potent as the English meadow and the English village was the German forest (Wald) and German village (Dorf)' (p. 162). He was also one of the first to recognize that English ruralism could be progressive and modernizing and has interesting points to make about the changing content of the English rural idyll (pp. 163, 167). Potts's most valuable observations, however, relate to the social provenance and causes of the rural idyll: 'Discovering the beauties of the English countryside became a commitment and an obsession among a not-so-privileged middle class who on many counts felt marginal and who wished to possess a true inner identity more valuable than its external social persona' (p. 164). Potts indicates how the changing content of the rural idyll can be linked to its social basis:

Preciselythose connotationsof the beautifulcountryside as something threatenedby change ... made it the successfulicon of a national identity no longer poised securely at the centre of things, or of the aspirationsof large sectorsof the middle classes that were not in a position to view change with much confidence.(pp.177-8) However, in the space available to him (twenty-six pages) Potts could hardly develop these remarks, and most of his evidence derives from 'high' culture, particularly his own field of art history. Yet Potts's hypotheses offer a way out of what has become a sterile recycling of high-cultural quotations, and deserve much fuller investigation.

36 Karen Sayer, Countrycottage: a culturalhistory (Manchester, 2000).

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Bunce endorses Potts's claim that the countryside ideal was a cultural formation peculiarly attractive to, and dependent on, the middle class, a response, in the first instance, to the sharply defined horizontal stratification of the nineteenth-century industrial city. Middle-class residents were anxious to demarcate themselves from the working class, and sought to do so by retreating into private suburban domesticity. By surrounding itself with the trappings of gentry lifestyle, the middle class assured itself of its status. It was also the middle class that provided the market for the new literary sensibility towards nature and the countryside developed, especially, by the Romantic poets. Bunce marks an advance on Potts in the detail of his work and, as his subtitle indicates, in its systematically comparative approach. According to Bunce, the English rural idyll focused overwhelmingly on the countryside as landscape: as an aesthetic experience in which the countryside is regarded as an amenity, reflecting its origins in gentry attitudes to landscape. The American ideal, in contrast, involved a greater emphasis on people, due to the powerful connections between European settlement, agrarian independence, and the origins of American democracy. Furthermore, it also reflected the different historical geographies of the two countries. Most of the American countryside is, Bunce claims, relatively homogeneous and hence of limited landscape interest, whilst the English landscape is remarkably varied. Equally, England has little if any true wilderness, whilst (especially in the context of the formative role of the idea of the frontier in American tradition), the USA has been intensely conscious of the distinction between settled and wild land. Aesthetic idealization of the countryside in the USA and Canada has therefore focused on the wilderness, although a parallel to the English idealization of the settled countryside can be found in the most Anglicized area of old settlement, i.e. New England. Despite these contrasts, the roots of the countryside ideal in England and North America are essentially similar: the loss of contact with nature, tradition, and community characteristic of urbanized modernity, and the rise of an affluent, mobile, and leisure orientated middle class able to seek a refuge from this by a literal or figurative return to the countryside.37 The work of Potts and Bunce suggests that we may have been looking at the countryside through the wrong lens. Whilst writers since Williams have been right to emphasize the cultural significance of the English countryside, what may turn out to matter more is how much England had in common with other industrialized countries rather than the blind alley of national identity. As Williams concluded, the history of town and country is ultimately the history of capitalism, and that of course is very much an international rather than narrowly English story. It is also as much an urban as a rural story. Here we have been poorly served by the slender, almost entirely high cultural evidence base of the existing historiography. As Mandler has argued, it cannot be assumed that attitudes amongst the cultural elite mirror

37 Bunce'scontrast between pastoralEnglish and agrarianUS ruralidylls is potentiallyreductionist. It underlinesthe need to develop a more nuanced, finely graded understandingof popular perceptions of the countrysidethan the notion of a unitary national ideal permits. Avner Offer's distinction between a Tory country-houseemphasis on landscape and a more activisturban Liberal involvement in ramblingand nature makes a starthere. Avner Offer, Propertyand politics, 1870-1914: landownership, law, ideologyand urban development in England (Cambridge, i98I), pp. 328-49. Compare David Matless's distinction between organicistand planner-preservationistoutlooks.

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 480 HISTORICAL JOURNAL those of society more widely."3 At present we know very little about the significance of the countryside in the lives of ordinary Englishmen and women, but there are indications that it may have mattered a great deal. Figures from the Countryside Commission in 1989 indicate that on a typical sunny summer Sunday, as many as 18 million people were to be found in the countryside - almost a third of the population.39 What remains unclear is who these people were. Howkins's The death of rural England emphasizes that the countryside appealed to the urban working class as well as to the literary-intellectual middle class, but to say that 'everyone' loved the countryside is only a small step forward from insisting that the rural idyll was a purely middle-class phenomenon. It would have been interesting to chart the changing appreciation of rural landscapes, from the early twentieth-century admiration for the Surrey heaths, to the interwar enthusiasm for the Cotswolds, to the post-war celebration of the upland moors of the north and west.40 Similarly, one would like to know in much more detail who moved to the countryside, where to, and why; and who visited the countryside and what they did there.41 The concept of 'spatial practices', developed by cultural geographers, may provide a useful analytical framework.42 It embraces activities with a spatial dimension such as walking, cycling, visiting 'beauty spots', nature observation, or reading at home. Clearly, the countryside mattered in different ways to different people at different times. Once we have established some parameters in these respects, we may be in a better position to ask the most important question - why the countryside mattered so much to so many people (if indeed it did). In broad terms, Williams, Wright, Potts, and Bunce's suggestion that attitudes to the countryside are a product of urban alienation is plausible. But just as we need to get away from bland generalizations about the countryside and national identity, so we need look behind the catch-all explanation of 'alienation' to identify the specific forms of it that led to ruralism, rather than to alternative responses such as political action, apathy, immersion in consumerism, and so forth. What is envisaged is a new, socially contextualized approach to the rural idyll, relating it to the workplace, leisure, and family situations of its creators, popularizers, and consumers. As yet, this has hardly been attempted. To a degree, Patrick Wright did so in his study of Mary Butts but this was vitiated by his characteristic lack of interest in evidence. A more useful prototype is

38 cUnlike Wiener and the 'Englishness' claque, I would argue that the primary shift is awayfrom an absorptionin the national past among most sections of the culturalnation, while the shift towardsa swooning nostalgia for the rural past takes place only among a small, articulate but not necessarily influentialavant-garde (or, rather, a derriere-garde)';Mandler, 'Against "Englishness"', pp. 159--60. 39 In the NEDC report Workin thecountryside (1989), the CountrysideCommission reported that i8 million people visit the countrysideon a fine summer Sunday. Peter 'Painters' 40 Howard, preferredplaces', Journalof HistoricalGeography, II (1985), PP. 138-54, makes pioneering use of the catalogues of the Royal Academy summer exhibitions to chart changing locational preferencesfor landscapepaintings. Howard's quantitativeapproach points the way ahead although as he himselfnotes 'The major limitation of [this] work is that it concentrateson the changes in taste of a tiny fractionof the population,albeit probablyan influentialfraction. To discover if public tastes have changed in step with the changes outlined here would seem to be an obvious next stage' (p.153)- 41 Trevor Wild's VillageEngland suggests that the location, age, and architecture of rural houses bought by incomers correlateswith their wealth (pp. 166-71). Very wealthy incomers purchase 'pic- turesque' houses in the centre of open villages, or in estate villages. The moderatelywealthy buy new, typically 'urban style' houses in cul-de-sacs on the edge of open villages. A more nuanced version of this classificationcould provide the startingpoint for an interestingresearch agenda. 42 See, for example, Phil Macnaghten andJohn Urry, Contestednatures (London, 1998).

This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 16:44:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 48I

Melanie Tebbutt's study of northern working-class rambling in the 1930s. Tebbutt draws on the diaries of the Sheffield rambler G. H. Ward to elucidate what Ward believed he was doing when he went out for a walk and the connections to Ward's spiritual, ethical, and political values.43 Howkins, although most of his work on perceptions of the countryside has remained at the 'high culture' level, has used the collection of Mass Observation diaries held at the University of Sussex to gauge popular attitudes to farming, in a chapter in Matless and Short's Geographiesof British modernity(2003), and briefly in The death of rural England.44These are small beginnings but diaries are a promising new source, offering the prospect of charting popular attitudes to the countryside more systematically than hitherto possible. Only through this painstaking attention to the circumstances of individual lives and their intersection with the countryside and its representations will the wider social significance of the rural idyll eventually become clear. A social history of the rural idyll of this kind is essential if we are to construct a history of the twentieth-century countryside that moves beyond the limitations of the 'countryside- as-agriculture' approach. As I argued in Paradise lost: rural idyll and social change (2002), attitudes to the countryside have influenced the development of twentieth-century rural England at almost every point, whether we think of landscape and the environment, preservation and planning, tourism and leisure, counterurbanization, or the politics of the countryside. Each of these aspects, and others less directly linked to the rural idyll such as the wider rural economy, transport, housing, services, and living standards, will need to be considered if we are to achieve a 'countryside' rather than 'agricultural' history of twentieth-century England. This is a daunting prospect, not only because of the immense research programme implied but the complex, disparate nature of the non-agricultural countryside. Yet the raw materials for such a history are to hand. If we can establish a firmer social grounding for our understanding of the rural idyll, take advantage of the concepts developed and evidence assembled by non-historians, especially sociologists and geographers, and integrate quantitative rigour with rich qualitative insights in the manner of the best work on nineteenth-century rural England, it should eventually be possible to construct a history of the twentieth-century countryside that is something more than a history of agriculture masquerading in its stead.

43 Melanie Tebbutt, '"'Men of the hills" and street corner boys: northern uplands and the urban imagination', in Ruraland urbanencounters in the nineteenthand twentiethcenturies: regional perspectives, pro- ceedingsof theCORAL conference, September 2002 (Manchester,2004). 44 Alun Howkins, 'Qualifying the evidence: perceptions of rural change in the second half of the twentieth century', in David Gilbert, David Matless, and Brian Short, eds., Geographiesof British modernity:space and society in thetwentieth century (Oxford, 2003), pp. 97-112.

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