Until recently farm workers have attracted little historical interest compared with other working class groups. Much of what is ostensibly labour history could be better described as trade union history, for historical work on the working class has been concerned primarily with the evolution of working class organisations, and farm workers made less impact on the development of the organised labour movement in Britain than groups such as miners or dock workers. Rural workers are traditionally far more difficult to organise than urban workers, but even so their efforts to form a union in the 1870’s were more widespread and determined than is generally realised.

Farm workers, however, are suitable as a subject for labour history if seen in the context of their communities. In the early years of the last century their way of life was inextricably bound up with the poor law, whose reform was one of the earliest and most important of the major reforms of which nineteenth century England was so proud. Throughout the century domestic industry in the form of lace-making in the north of Bedfordshire and strawplait in the south, had a more profound effect on rural society here than in any other comparable county.

The volume is based on a PhD thesis submitted to the School of Social Studies of the University of East Anglia in 1979, of which a copy is available at the County Record Office. In this connection I should like to acknowledge the advice and support of my supervisor, Dr. Richard Wilson, and his colleague, Dr. B. A. Holderness, both of the UEA, and also of Miss Pamela Horn of the Oxford Polytechnic, who examined the thesis. I owe a debt too to Dr. W. A. Armstrong of the University of Kent at Canterbury, who first drew my attention to the farm workers as a possible subject for study.

The documents printed here include two main categories of material: first, extracts from British Parliamentary Papers taken from the Blue Books of the period, and secondly, documentary material at the Bedfordshire County Record Office. Neither the original thesis nor this present collection would have been remotely possible without the assistance of Miss Patricia Bell, the County Archivist, and her colleagues, in particular Mr. James Collett-White.