Joan Thirsk

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Agrarian history of Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times

English Peasant Farming

E. P. Thompson

Jack Goody

This pioneering book examines different aspects of the inheritance customs in rural Western Europe in the pre-industrial age: for families and whole societies, the roles of lawyers in reducing them to a common system, and the recurring debate on the merits of various inheritance customs in shaping particular kinds of society. At first sight the study of inheritance customs may appear to be a dull affair, concerned with outdated practices of hair-splitting lawyers; certainly, little academic interest has been shown in the subject. Yet inheritance customs are vital means for the reproduction of the social system, by the transmission of property and other rights through the family. Various family structures and social arrangements are linked by different means of inheritance. This book will interest a wide range of historians, students, postgraduates and teachers alike, whether they are concerned with social, economic, demographic or legal history, in the medieval, early modern or modern periods, and whether their interests are directed to England or other countries of Western Europe; it will also be valuable to social anthropologists, sociologists and historians of ideas. A comprehensive glossary of technical terms has been added for the non-specialist.

Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800

Family and Inheritance

Edward Miller

The third volume of The Agrarian History of England and Wales, which was first published in 1991, deals with the last century and a half of the Middle Ages. It concerns itself with the new demographic and economic circumstances created in large measure by endemic plague.

The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume 3, 1348-1500

H. E. Hallam

The agrarian history of England and Wales from pre-Norman times to the outbreak of the Black Death.

The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume 2, 1042-1350

H. P. R. Finberg

Edith H. Whetham

Volume VIII of the Agrarian History (1978) provides a technical, social and economic history of rural England and Wales between 1914 and 1939.

The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume 8, 1914-1939

Former Reader in Economic History Joan Thirsk

From pre-history to the present day our landscape has been transformed by dramatic human disturbance, triggered by the rise and fall of populations and their need to be fed, housed, and employed. These changes have built-up layers of evidence which today present historians with exciting new insights about land use and rural communities of the past. In this groundbreaking new study Joan Thirsk and her team of distinguished contributors, many of whom live in the very landscape they so intimately describe, invite us to explore the historical richness of the English landscape. Each chapter synthesizes the very latest thinking and provides fresh perspectives on its specific subject. The first ten chapters in turn describe the characteristic features of the main regional landscape types, including fenlands, downlands, woodlands, marshlands, and moorlands, showing that, however physically scattered they may be, they have been moulded by successive generations to produce many uniting similarities.

The English Rural Landscape

No one has done more to emphasise the significance of the land in early modern England that Joan Thirsk, whose writings are both an important contribution to its history and point the way for future research. The subjects of this collection include the origin and nature of the common fields, Tudor enclosures, the Commonwealth confiscation of Royalist land and its subsequent return after the Restoration, inheritance customs, and the role of industries in the rural economy, among them stocking knitting.

Rural Economy of England

Fenland Farming in the Sixteenth Century

Volume IV of the Agrarian History (1967) examines farming in Tudor and early Stuart England and Wales.

The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume 4, 1500-1640

Edward John T. Collins

The unifying theme of this volume is the changing role of the countryside in national life, and the impact upon it of the social and economic forces unleashed by industrialisation and the growth of towns.

The Agrarian History of England and Wales

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. However, that countryside may have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine. Take todays startling yellow fields of rapeseed, seemingly more suited to the landscape of Van Gogh than Constable. They were, in fact, thoroughly familiar to fieldworkers in seventeenth-century England. At the same time, some features that would have gone unremarked in the past now seem like oddities. In the fifteenth century, rabbit warrens were specially guarded to rear rabbits as a luxury food for rich mens tables; whilst houses had moats not only to defend them but to provide a source of fresh fish. In the 1500s we find Catherine of Aragon introducing the concept of a fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; and in the 1600s, artichoke gardens became a fashion of the gentry in their hope of producing more male heirs. The common tomato, suspected of being poisonous in 1837, was transformed into a household vegetable by the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to cheaper glass-making methods and the resulting increase in glasshouses. In addition to these images of past lives, Joan Thirsk reveals how the forces which drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture a glut of meat and cereal crops, changing dietary habits, the needs of medicine have striking parallels with earlier periods in our history. She warns us that todays decisions should not be made in a historical vacuum: we can find solutions to our current problems in the experience of people in the past.

Joan Thirsk

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