With their climatic variability and low crop yields, the Highlands and Islands formed a risk-laden environment for traditional farming communities. Yet whilst the major or exceptional famines between 1600 and 1800 are well-recorded, there has been less comment about the more frequent low-order crises that afflicted communities on a regular, even routine basis, leaving them without sufficient meal for a month or so before the new harvest was ready. Evidence for the nature and frequency of these low-order crises is discussed. Continually threatened with the problems posed by them, it is argued that the typical farming community would have been skilled in their response. Two forms of response are explored. First, the paper reviews some of the different ways in which Highland and Hebridean husbandry would have been organised so as to minimise risks. Second, it is argued that when these risk aversion strategies failed, communities buffered themselves against shortage by resorting to a range of alternative famine foods, from seaweeds and shell foods to the edible weeds of arable and grassland. We need to see major famines as occurring not just when exceptional or bad conditions prevailed, but also, when both these risk aversion and risk buffering strategies failed.

This article suggests that there has been a tendency to understate the degree to which officeholding during the early modern period was embedded within the community, moulded by local influences and fulfilling a range of different functions in the parish. An over-emphasis upon national processes of social and cultural change has resulted in a failure to appreciate the complexity of the politics of officeholding. There has been only limited recognition of both the presence of constraints upon the actions of parochial elites and the mechanisms through which particular groups established and maintained control over parochial institutions. A detailed analysis of officeholding within seven parishes lying on the north Norfolk coast stresses the extent to which ‘parochial traditions’ determined the way in which things were done. It is argued that the effective linkage of officeholding to these shared understandings and to ideals of participation and inclusion created a powerful rhetoric through which the exclusion of a large minority of the populace and uneven distributions of officeholding were justified.

The woodlands, meadows and orchards of the Pays de Bray play an important part in the local survival strategy for this section of northern France where ‘green tourism’ occupies a major role. For centuries, the area contained extensive stretches of common heath and moorland, whose reclamation and replacement by enclosed pastures proved a long and contested process. The present essay exemplifies the ambiguity of the notion of usages (use-rights), with commoners claiming that they had legal rights and landowners arguing that these were simply privileges. Attention is directed to long-running conflicts between peasants and seigneurs, to the initiatives of entrepreneurs in the eighteenth century, and to the final resolution of disputes after the Revolution of 1789. Long recognised as an area ready for ‘improvement’, the Pays de Bray is now perceived as a cherished environment to be commodified and conserved.

This article first examines the recent historiography of the Poor Law, notes the dearth of historical writing on this topic with respect to Wales and then uses an incident which took place in the rural Welsh town of Llantrisant in the early 1840s which clearly exemplifies both particularly Welsh characteristics and those of the medical services of the New Poor Law. It is contended that further study of the welfare regime in nineteenth-century Wales is important for both Welsh history and for the broader historical understanding of the Poor Laws in rural areas.

Traditionally, historians have tended to accept the view that agricultural labourers in nineteenth-century England were subject to seasonal unemployment. In this article, however, it is argued that this is an over-simplification, and that there were in fact two coexisting labour markets. Using two sets of micro data, a wage book and the Census Enumerators' Books, it will be revealed (1) that there were two groups of agricultural labourers: those who were employed throughout the year (core workers) and those employed only in the busiest season (casual workers); (2) that the core workers and casual workers performed different tasks; (3) that they had different places of residence; and (4) that the casual workers' wages were more market-dependent. The movement of wages at the time of the arrival of Irish migrant labourers sheds further light on the different natures of the two markets. While core workers' wages appear to have been unaffected by this change in labour demand, English casual workers' and women's wages increased sensitively.