Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 261

Between 2001 and 2004 the Countryside Agency, sup-ported by several rural charities, commissioned Ted Collins and his team of specialists to carry out a survey of traditional rural crafts in England, and this is the result of their efforts. They cover a wide range of activities: the horse industry, meaning not only breeders, riding and racing stables and so on, but also the supporting trades, principally saddlery and farriery; wheelwrights; the various kinds of blacksmiths, such as artists and engineers as well as farrier-blacksmiths; the greenwood crafts, producing fencing materials, garden ware, furniture, charcoal, and thatching spars; pole-lathe turners; basketry; historic gardens; wind- and water-milling; and a variety of historic building crafts, from thatching and tiling to timber framing, earth walling, flintworking, glazing, and plastering. They examine thecurrent state and function of these trades, paying particular attention to the state of the labour force and its skills, and the training and education needed to maintain them. There is also an associated website, www.craftsintheenglishcountryside.org.uk, that contains further statistical data and other appendices.

This is not a work of history, but it contains much history, and history is integral to its purpose. There have been other examples of historians contributing to policy debates (Hoskins, for example, wrote part of a Royal Commission report on Common Land), but this goes further. History is, in a sense, part of the product or service that many of the rural crafts produce. It is no longer necessary to possess a willow basket to carry one’s shopping or washing; a plastic product will do the job, although it may not do it so well or be as pleasing to look at. Thus the traditional crafts now produce luxuries rather than necessities. Their products are now free to appeal to niche market consumers who buy them for what they are as much as for what they do. In 1927 The Times carried a perceptive review of The rural industries of England and Wales volume 1, by Helen FitzRandolph and Doriel Hay, predicting this outcome: ‘The old trades may yet be renewed by a demand, defying the lure of cheapness, for soundness and simplicity, for the traditional forms whose adaptation to use makes their inherent beauty – qualities which were once to be had inthe village shop, and now seem likely to be the perquisites of the great’. Hence the need for the 262 the agricultural historical sections in most of the chapters of this report, and consequently its value for rural historians.

In comparison with farming, rural crafts and trades have been relatively neglected by both policymakers and historians over the last fifty years. After FitzRandolph and Hay’s very detailed 1926–7 survey, there were a few more works in the 1950s and ’60s, mostly describing the decline of individual crafts, but since then there has been very little. A comparison with the earlier surveys is interesting. There is nothing here on weaving, dyeing, spinning or lacemaking, on tanning, or making clogs or coracles, but there is hard evidence of buoyant demand for coppice products, a revival in traditional milling, and a demand for skilled labour in many crafts, to pick just a few of the report’s conclusions. Although it may not have been its primary purpose, this book is therefore the nearest thing we have to a history of these activities in the late twentieth century, which we can now see was a crucial period in which, for some crafts at least, decline was replaced by survival or revival.