This collection of essays designed to honor the work of E. J. T. Collins focuses on a strangely neglected group in rural society. A lot has been written about farming in England since the seventeenth century, but much of this has been from the perspectives of the landowner and the estate. This is hardly surprising, as great estates tended to generate masses of standardized documentation. Farmers, on the other hand, did not. Where day books, accounts, or other documentation produced by farmers have survived, interpretation is often problematic because farmers were writing for their own convenience, rather than a landlord's. The farmers knew what they meant, but we cannot necessarily share their understanding, a problem that surfaces throughout the book.

Richard Hoyle, the editor, provides a substantial introduction discussing problems of terminology and the interpretation of sources. Then follow eleven chapters in roughly chronological order, looking at particular farmers, or groups of them, at specific periods and with distinctive characteristics. The importance of women as farmers, whether on a temporary or a longer-term basis, is emphasized from the start. Jennifer Holt looks at the farming career of Sarah Fell of Swarthmoor Hall, in Lancashire, through the details of her cashbook. Although this source does not give full details of her activities, it is clear that her horizons were far from being completely local, and Fell was competent in business as well as farming. The role of women as farmers is also taken up by Nicola Verdon, in the setting of Victorian England. Hoyle's chapter on why there was no crisis in English farming in the 1690s revisits and improves the model developed by A. B. Appleby, examining corn yields and prices and considering why Scotland and France did so much worse than England; Hoyle concludes that English consumers had the option of trading down and eating cheaper grains during difficult times while Scottish and French farmers did not, developing his argument via a case study from the detailed farm accounts of John Crakenthorpe of south Cambridgeshire. Andrew Gritt looks in detail at the remarkable account book of Richard Latham, who owned a small holding of about twenty acres at Scarisbrick, southwest Lancashire, in the mid-eighteenth century. The combination of variant spellings and obscure local terminology make Latham's accounts particularly difficult to interpret. Joyce Burnette shows how farm accounts between 1740 and 1850 can shed light on the seasonality of English agricultural employment. John Broad looks at the role of farmers in the process of improvement between 1780 and 1840, a theme that is continued by Susanna Wade Martins in a study of farmers on the Holkham estate.

Considering more recent times, Hilary Crowe examines a collection of local government papers relating to the upper Eden Valley in Westmorland, charting the upland farmers' response to the plough-up campaign of 1916–18. This area had the distinction of achieving the greatest proportional expansion of arable land in England during the First World War, but at the expense of mining the soil of its fertility and damaging it in the long term. John Martin considers the career of Rex Paterson (1903–1978), a pioneer of grassland dairy farming, while Philip Conrad looks at the work of another pioneer improver, the organic farmer Robert L. Stuart.

Because of the tight focus of the contributions, certain themes emerge and reemerge in successive chapters, notably the flexibility, diversity, and endurance of smaller farmers throughout England. Their resilience in the face of environmental difficulties is captured well by Hoyle, and several of the chapters stress the farmers' flexibility and willingness to embrace agricultural improvement. This is an excellent, well-presented book that will richly repay detailed study.