Elections have badly impeded LIBRAL over the past couple of months, but good to say the scanner’s assistant was happily re-elected. Here, before the second election of the year, is the LIBRAL circulation you should have had before the last election containing the usual mixture of the known and unknown. We now have over 1,250 …

LIBRAL adds 15 volumes, spanning c.1800-1944 Read More »

Like last year, two books stood out. The first, Spike Gibbs’ ‘Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in late Medieval and Early Modern England’ (Cambridge University Press), is a book that the panel agreed will shape the historiography for many years to come. The second, Steve Hindle’s ‘The Social Topography of a Rural Community: Scenes from a Labouring Life’ (Oxford University Press), is a wonderful, illuminating microhistory of one early modern Warwickshire community.

This year, for the first time, the Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize was split between two authors: Professor Christopher Dyer and Dr Jane Rowling.

Issue 46 carries articles on the diaries of Violet Dickinson; oral history and environmental land management; rural resistance to land dispossession in the Western Isles; and county magazines.

This issue features an article by Christopher Dyer on medieval peasants’ contributions to the countryside; Elizabeth Pimblett on women’s roles in the story of cider; Tony Pratt on the British cattle census of 1866; and Paul Warde on land valuation and surveying in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.

Peasants were not rich or powerful, but they had a capacity, often when operating together in a community, to make decisions and change the world around them. The peasant contribution to the medieval countryside has emerged gradually in the thinking of historians and archaeologists.