Agricultural History Review, Volume 45 Part 1 (1997), pp. 61–72

Past authors have identified the early twentieth century as the point at which gleaning finally vanished from the lives and labour of the rural working-class. This paper seeks to re-position this decline, placing its disappearance forward some forty or fifty years to the decades following the Second World War. However, gleaning did not simply continue unchanged into the twentieth century, as the customary practices that had once accompanied it now became obsolete. The paper examines the reasons for the continued use of gleanfing, its changed form, and places the decline of its customary practice within a wider context of changes occurring in rural popular culture at this time. 

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