Like last year, two books stood out. The first, Spike Gibbs’ ‘Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in late Medieval and Early Modern England’ (Cambridge University Press), is a book that the panel agreed will shape the historiography for many years to come. The second, Steve Hindle’s ‘The Social Topography of a Rural Community: Scenes from a Labouring Life’ (Oxford University Press), is a wonderful, illuminating microhistory of one early modern Warwickshire community.
Issue 46 carries articles on the diaries of Violet Dickinson; oral history and environmental land management; rural resistance to land dispossession in the Western Isles; and county magazines.
This issue features an article by Christopher Dyer on medieval peasants’ contributions to the countryside; Elizabeth Pimblett on women’s roles in the story of cider; Tony Pratt on the British cattle census of 1866; and Paul Warde on land valuation and surveying in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.
Peasants were not rich or powerful, but they had a capacity, often when operating together in a community, to make decisions and change the world around them. The peasant contribution to the medieval countryside has emerged gradually in the thinking of historians and archaeologists.
The February 2023 edition of Rural History Today leads with an article by BAHS President Professor Nicola Verdon on Ruth Uzzell, a trailblazing campaigner and the second woman to serve on the Executive Committee of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, elected in 1922. Ian Godwin contributes an article on Seale-Hayne College in Devon; Penny Lawrence on early twentieth-century British calf clubs; Marc Collinson, Shaun Evans, Matthew Rowland, Mari Wiliam, and Catrin Williams on the Bodorgan Estate in the south-west of Anglesey and the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates (ISWE) at Bangor University; and Angus J.L. Winchester on common land in Britain.