News

Rural History 2025. Coimbra, 9-12 September

Invitation to join panels for Rural History 2025

The deadline for the submission of panel proposals for the Rural History Conference in Coimbra, Portugal, in September 2025 has been extended. Here we offer an invitation to agricultural and rural historians to join two proposed panels.

Recent publications

Family Farmers, Land Reforms and Political Action: An Alternative Economic History of Interwar Europe, by James Simpson, is now available from Palgrave Studies in Economic History.

Gary Willis’s new blog post for the On History blog at the Institute for Historical Research, ‘The National vs. The Local, Amenity vs. Employment and Housing: The Case of the ‘Sunderland’ Seaplane Assembly Factory, Calgarth, Windermere, the Lake District’, examines an intense contest over land use in 1940s Britain.

A new article by José Luis Martínez-González, ‘Assessing agricultural adaptation to changing climatic conditions during the English agricultural revolution (1645–1740)’, has been published in Cliometrica and is open access. It particularly examines the role of nitrogen-fixing plants, improved cultivation techniques, and seed enhancements in response to climatic fluctuations between approximately 1645 and 1715, followed by a warmer phase until 1740.

BAHS 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.

Cider pressing

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.

Peasant house built with crucks (large timbers extending from the ground to the apex of the roof) at Wick near Pershore, Worcestershire. A number of houses of this type in the midlands have been dated to the period 1380-1510. They were normally built by artisans (especially carpenters) employed by peasants. Image: Stephen Price

How peasants made the rural landscape

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.