The English Rural Community Image and Analysis

This book examines the English rural community, past and present, in its variety and dynamism. The distinguished team of contributors brings a variety of disciplinary perspectives to bear upon the central issues of movement and migration; the farm family and rural labour force; the development of contrasting rural communities; the portrayal of rural labour in both 'high' and popular culture; the changing nature of religious practice in the English countryside; the rural/urban fringe, and the spread of notions of a rural English arcadia within a predominantly urban society. Fully illustrated with accompanying maps, paintings and photographs, The English Rural Community provides an important and innovative overview of a subject where history, myth and debate are inseparably entwined. A full bibliography will assist a broad range of general readers and students of social history, historical geography and development studies approaching the subject for the first time, and the whole should establish itself as the central analytical account in an area where image and reality are notoriously hard to unravel.

1. Images and realities in the English rural community: an introduction Brian Short; 2. The evolution of contrasting communities within rural England Brian Short; 3. English rural communities: structures, regularities, and change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Joan Thirsk; 4. Population movement and migration in pre-industrial rural England Malcom Kitch; 5. The English farm labourer in the nineteenth century: farm, family and community Alun Howkins; 6. Sportive labour: the farmworker in eighteenth-century poetry and painting John Barrell; 7. Images of the rural in popular culture 1750–1990 Stuart Laing; 8. The mystical geography of the English John Lowerson; 9. The rural/urban fringe as battleground Peter Ambrose; 10. Image and analysis: new directions in immunity studies Susan Wright.

This book examines the English rural community, past and present, in its variety and dynamism. The distinguished team of contributors brings a variety of disciplinary perspectives to bear upon the central issues of movement and migration. Fully illustrated with accompanying maps, paintings and photographs, The English Rural Community provides an important and innovative overview of a subject where history, myth and debate are inseparably entwined.