The farms, villages, estates and people that characterized the English countryside were once the mainspring of both the government and the economy. They supported and responded to the needs of the nation. Yet rural England has always been threatened: from epidemics and the famine to the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. From the end of the 18th century, weakened by enclosure and depopulation, the countryside battled with an increasing industrialization and inevitably succumbed. The village had become a relic, the symbol of a past age visited by those in search of Olde Englande. A...

Following the success of The Victorian City, we are delighted to announce the forthcoming reprint of The Victorian Countryside. Originally published in two volumes, this set represents a major landmark in the social history of the United Kingdom. It provides a detailed and authoritative survey of a period when the economy and landscape of the British countryside was transformed forever by the industrial revolution. The set is particularly notable for its inclusion of studies on folk life and oral history, sources which have greatly enriched our knowledge of past rural...

This first volume of a two volume set represents a landmark in the social history of the United Kingdom. The study provides a detailed and authoritative view of the British countryside transformed by the industrial revolution.

This first volume of a two volume set represents a landmark in the social history of the United Kingdom. The study provides a detailed and authoritative view of the British countryside transformed by the industrial revolution.

The challenges and opportunities offered to British farming by the profound changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries make these years of outstanding interest to the agricultural historian. These original essays are presented to Gordon Mingay, the most distinguished historian of the Agricultural Revolution, and reflect his own interests in three central themes; landownership and landed society; rural labour; and agriculture both as a business and as a way of life.

This 1989 volume continues the detailed account of the agrarian history of England and Wales, and with volumes IV and V provides a continuous comprehensive study for the whole of the period 1500 to 1850. The century covered in the present volume has always been considered one of vital importance in agrarian history as being that of the classical 'agricultural revolution'. The work provides a fresh analysis and assessment of this period, particularly in the estimation, in terms more precise than ever before, of the extent of the growth of agricultural output, as well as of the prices that...