The Hiring Fairs of Northern England, 1890-1930
A Regional Analysis of Commercial and Social Networking in Agriculture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4162525 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen Caunce (corresponding author), A Caunce, S A Caunce |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 217 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 213-246 |
| Publication date | 2012-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Past & Present (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pastj/gts024 |
| OpenAlex | W2027481486 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
In considerations of rural England, the century after 1850 is too often portrayed, especially outside academic circles, simply as a period of decline. Sometimes the mood is nostalgic, but often the narrative is of depression and exploitation, showing farm labourers to be universally badly treated and seriously underpaid. Thus, a recent review by Terry Eagleton of Roy Strong’s Visions of England in the Guardian rightly castigates visions of an ‘Arcadian paradise of rosy-cheeked peasants’ and also dismisses any ‘dream of rural harmony’; but Eagleton then completes a breathtaking sequence of misunderstandings, anachronisms and myths by his own simplistic account of ‘peasants ... who had been reduced to landless labourers by market forces and the Enclosure Acts, or driven into the satanic mills of early industrial England’.1 The accuracy of such generalizations is not just a peripheral issue, for two reasons: first, because the 1851 census showed the rural population of England reaching its all-time maximum, with farm labourers still forming the largest single occupational group; and, second, because the British experience has been widely drawn on as the basis for modelling economic development processes. Some counties certainly suffered general and serious rural distress for most of the nineteenth century; but others emphatically did not. In the decades around 1900 successive Royal Commissions, inspired by concern about the state of agriculture, gathered vast amounts of evidence about rural life, which reveals a great diversity of regional experiences. Indeed, it is clear that the very structures of rural life differed significantly across the country.
Economic history · Estate · Geography · Guardian · Narrative · Political science · Population · Sociology · Vision · Cooperative Studies and Economics · Demography · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Rural development and sustainability
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,67 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2024 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |