The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time when many of the landed classes chose to be absent from their estates. However, this same period also saw the early stages of a so-called ‘revolution’ in agricultural methods and techniques. This article, therefore, evaluates the impact of non-residency on estate management structures and agricultural progress. Specific issues examined here include the role of the steward, leasing policy, the promotion of new farming techniques and estate investment by the landlord. In this context, comparisons will be made between absentee, semi-resident and resident estates for the region of Woodland High Suffolk.

This article focuses on the property relations in Belgian and Flemish agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The main question is: what was the relationship between land use, land ownership and land rents? By analysing the position of the (small) farmers and of the (small) landlords we could confirm that the dominance of small-scale farming coincided with a specific pattern of property distribution and surplus extraction. The high and increasing returns of the land were almost entirely pruned away by private landowners. The extreme fragmentation of the land, the large proportion of leaseholds and the high rents grew to a maximum in the second half of the nineteenth century due to competition both on the property market and on the leasehold market. This put the Flemish farmer in the worst possible situation, with a sad contrast between brilliant harvests and the miserable existence of those who generated them.

The fencing of boundaries so as to confine or exclude cattle was a major preoccupation in the most densely populated parishes of Jamaica in the mid nineteenth century. Part-time labourers (who constituted a new semi-peasantry) were being settled on the fringes of the old estates in increasing numbers, having been granted licenses or pretended leases for land on which they grew their crops. The same ‘attorneys’ who managed the older declining plantations where such squatting was arranged also tended to be introducing cattle in place of sugar and they wished to shift the costs of fencing onto their small ‘peasant’ occupiers. However, English law, which imposed an obligation to fence in cattle, initially assisted the peasantry. The attorneys therefore looked to New World models that would require those growing crops to fence out animals. This article examines actions in court and the agitation in more detail so as to suggest that fencing was a major source of inter-racial friction in the period before and after the Morant Bay rebellion, but with the outcome strongly favouring a late-century resurgence in the plantation economy.

In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, anxieties developed about the impact of advertisements on the English landscape. Large posters and hoardings in rural areas were increasingly seen as having a damaging effect on the scenic beauties of the country, and a campaign to have their use restricted was started up in the 1890s. This article focuses on that campaign, and on the activities and ideology of the organisation (the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising — SCAPA) which spearheaded it. In doing so, it seeks to engage with the wider historiographical debate about the nature of ‘Englishness’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an examination of the agenda of SCAPA and other preservationist bodies (such as the National Trust), it suggests that it is misleading to conclude that English culture in this period was pervaded by backward-looking ‘rural-nostalgic’ obsessions. However, it also emphasises that English national identity was nonetheless to an important extent related to ideas about land and landscape. It does not do to write off phenomena like opposition to the ‘disfigurement’ of picturesque English scenery as insignificant, the concern only of a very marginal section of elite culture.

Against the background of the economic and cultural environment of inter-war rural Britain, this article seeks to trace the history of the ‘Kinship in Husbandry’, a group of like-minded ruralists opposed to modernising tendencies in agricultural and the rural economy. Inspired largely by the thinking of the landowner, poet, forester and fold-danger Rolf Gardiner and chronicled by the writer H. J. Massingham, the ‘Kinship’ had little immediate influence, although its organicist, holistic and localist ideas form the basis of much current thinking on rural development. In considering the ‘Kinship’, the article also investigates the personal relationship between Gardiner and Massingham.