News
- LIBRAL adds 15 volumes, spanning c.1800-1944Election work has impeded LIBRAL uploads recently, but happily the scanner’s assistant was re-elected. This LIBRAL circulation contains the usual mixture of the known and unknown. Some particular themes emerge out of our madness. We have John Galt’s Annals of the Parish (1821), the memoirs of the parish’s minister, Rev. Micah Balwhidder. This is the fictionalised account …
- Spike Gibbs and Steve Hindle win Thirsk Prize 2024Like 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.
- Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize 2023This year, for the first time, the Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize was split between two authors: Professor Christopher Dyer and Dr Jane Rowling.
Publications
- Rural History Today, Issue 46 (January 2024)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.
- Rural History Today, Issue 45 (July 2023)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.
- How peasants made the rural landscapePeasants 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.