The coppice and underwood trades in north Hampshire lasted almost unchanged for over one thousand years, yet the conspicuously wooded landscape of today is no more than three hundred years old. The landscape is an outcome of the enclosure of the common fields and replacement of their temporary dead-hedges by permanent living hedges, together with a radical reorganisation of the methods by which both wood and timber were grown, managed and marketed. These processes abolished the old extensive, open landscape, comprised of coppices, underwood, timber and rough grazing: the land-use system now termed wood pasture. It created the closed landscape of intensively managed woodland that prospered between 1750 and 1870. Evidence is drawn from the records of Crown, church, college and lay estates, besides contemporary comment, interpreted in the light of experience in restoring and managing an area of wood pasture.

This case study focuses on East Riding hiring fairs both as labour markets and popular festivals and considers the vitality of their internal interactions in the mid Victorian years, a time that has been associated with the erosion of traditional practices by urban influences and their reshaping into more orderly and passive forms. The article suggests that mid Victorian rural popular culture proved to be not only adaptive to the forces of urban modernity but robustly dynamic and informed by rural social forces.

The history of game shooting since the Second World War might be seen as an enigma. In spite of unprecedented changes to the countryside resulting from the intensification of farming which contributed to a rapid decline in the partridge population, the size of the national game bag increased due to the enhanced popularity of the pheasant as a sporting quarry. This article evaluates the reasons for the expansion of the sport in this period, focusing on the management of the countryside, the evolution of game keeping, the growth of artificial game rearing, and the increasing popularity of game shooting.

Recently, there has been growing interest in the emergence of rural movements in response to rapid changes in the post war countryside. However, little attention has been paid to the reaction of the old social movements to this transformation in rural society. In this paper, I concentrate on the reaction of the Boerenbond (Farmers’ Union) to the altering Flemish countryside in the 1960s and 1970s. The transformation of the Boerenbond in 1971 into a specialised agricultural organisation and a broader rural movement countered the rapid shrinking of the farm population and the strong specialising of modern farmers. Furthermore, by attracting non-farmers, the Boerenbond maintained its support in the countryside. A farmers’ union opening up to non-farming members in a society with emerging new social movements seems progressive at first glance. But the overall prevalence of agriculture in all stages of discussions and implementation is striking. Nevertheless, the emergence of a rural movement with new socio-cultural goals within an old, corporatist and Catholic farmers’ union suggests that this is a unique case in north-western Europe.

This paper explains how technological developments and changes in production encouraged and drove the processes of agricultural modernisation that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, taking the region of Aragon in north eastern Spain as a case study. The main agricultural macro-variables reveal a surge in output, coincident with a far-reaching restructuring of production, in which livestock and animal feeds played a key role. The relative success of this high speed agricultural transformation was largely due to technological progress and the development of Aragon's trade links before 1936. Meanwhile, the earlier development of irrigation schemes, the capitalisation of farms and experimentation with different seed varieties allowed the region to adapt quickly to the new Green Revolution technologies that came to the fore after 1950. At the same time, established trade links allowed a swift transition to livestock and related produce destined for fast developing agro-industrial regions, like Catalonia and Valencia. As in other countries, technological and trade path dependency also explain the polarisation of agricultural development within Aragon itself, and in particular the success of the provinces of Zaragoza and Huesca in contrast to failure and depopulation in Teruel. The experience of Aragon may thus be useful to understand the dynamics of other less developed regions currently in the throes of transformation.