English Countryside Research Articles

Labourers

The autor, adopting the comparative labour law perspective, gives an insight into the classic reading by Emily Bronte, telling about the suffered living in the English country side of late 1800.

Feature: Remembering Alun Howkins, 1947–2018

The death of Alun Howkins in July 2018 has deprived modern British history of one of its most influential and charismatic academics and History Workshop Journal of one of its original, long-serving collective members. Whilst Alun’s interests and publications were broad, cutting across disciplinary boundaries and historical approaches, his central commitment was always to the history of the modern British countryside and the men and women who lived and worked there. This was partly a reflection of his own background and also of the training he had received at Ruskin College in the late 1960s with Raphael Samuel. Alun was born in 1947 in Bicester, Oxfordshire, the older of two children. His father Harold had served a seven-year apprenticeship as a motor mechanic in the 1920s, but after being badly injured in the Middle East during the Second World War he found work only intermittently in that trade and was forced to move to a series of semi and unskilled jobs. As his father’s income fell in the mid 1950s, his mother Lillian went out to work, as an orderly and then cook in the local hospital before moving to the Ministry of Defence Central Ordnance Depot in Bicester, a large local employer. The Howkins family lived in a rented terrace house on the edge of Bicester, which like many small rural market towns was undergoing postwar transformation. Alun’s recollections of the place were ambivalent. He remembered ‘horses in the fields … when cows weren’t all black and white and when corn fields were full of poppies’. But he also recalled ‘low wages and houses without toilets or tap water’ and standing with a union banner ‘while a family was turned out of a cottage, which had been their home for the best part of 20 years’.1 Growing up there didn’t produce any great attachment; for the teenage Alun it was a trap, somewhere to escape.

In the Governess’s Room

This article considers the all too common experience of precarious employment in higher education, but under a unique set of circumstances: a three-year postdoctoral fellowship and residency in a stately home in the English countryside. The author explains how she harnesses the pedagogical possibilities of her precarity by operating a policy of radical honesty with her students, both inside and outside of the classroom. As a Victorianist, she petitioned to teach texts, including Jane Eyre, that allowed her to explore contingent academic labor with her students and compare the plight of the nineteenth-century governess—poorly paid, forced to lead an itinerant existence, and subject to dismissal when she outlived her utility—to the conditions that many academics currently face. She invites her students to share their struggles, and for her part, she frankly shares the difficulties of being a precarious academic, in the hopes of creating a place of mutual understanding, support, and solidarity.

Journeying to Heaven with The Children’s Encyclopaedia: Arthur Mee’s Territorial Spirituality for Young Pilgrims

ABSTRACTArthur Mee, Baptist editor of The Children’s Encyclopaedia (CE), offers CE readers a ‘territorial spirituality’ for ‘scenery pilgrims’ between the wars. Devotee of English countryside, acculturated to believe that ‘life’s a journey’, Mee encourages young travellers to tread this ‘enchanted land’ as pilgrims, who slowly journey to old, quiet places (by rail) and visit ‘sources of vision’, becoming habituated to mystical, Romantic experience of the natural world in sacred spaces of hidden England. Basically Baptist (Bunyanesque?), Mee’s ‘pilgrimage’ ethos is of its time, reflecting the open-air values of inter-war English evangelicals in the A.E.G.M. and Oxford Group.

DieterHelm, 2019. Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside, Harper Collins, ISBN: 9780008304492, Hbk, p. 336, £20.00

Journal of Agricultural EconomicsVolume 70, Issue 3 p. 880-882 Book Review Dieter Helm, 2019. Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside, Harper Collins, ISBN: 9780008304492, Hbk, p. 336, £20.00 Rob Fraser, Rob Fraser r.w.fraser@kent.ac.uk Search for more papers by this author Rob Fraser, Rob Fraser r.w.fraser@kent.ac.uk Search for more papers by this author First published: 09 August 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/1477-9552.12358Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume70, Issue3September 2019Pages 880-882 RelatedInformation

The emergence of ungoverned space in the British countryside

Police and farmers in Britain have differing views on the effectiveness and measures of effectiveness of the policing of rural and farm crime. Farmers are increasingly feeling abandoned by the police while the police are trying to resource rural policing against a backdrop of budget cuts, inadequate strategic guidance and a lack of understanding of the impact of rural and farm crime.
 To obtain information on issues about farm crime, interviews were conducted with Police and Crime Commissioners and Crime Prevention Advisors across four rural police forces in England. Interviews and focus groups were also conducted with farmers.
 The research found that farmers have low levels of confidence in the police, which resulted from the police providing poor response and feedback on incidents. This in turn results in low levels of reporting of crimes by farmers. The police are dealing with increased demands with much lower budgets and few opportunities for specialist training. Combined with ineffective strategic responses and a lack of understanding of farmers’ situations regarding the impact of farm crime, the police are perceived as ineffective in deterring rural criminals.
 This paper explores these policing issues and suggests the need to improve confidence among farming communities to encourage the reporting of farm crime, enabling a better understanding of the extent of farm crime in Britain.

Hydrogen trains roll into service: A new hybrid locomotive signals a growing push for zero-emission rail technologies - [News

In June, the United Kingdom's first hydrogen fuel cell train rolled down the tracks, marking a milestone in the global push for greener transportation. Passengers climbed aboard the HydroFlex prototype as it ambled through the English countryside—without emitting any of the pollution that follows diesel locomotives.

Russian Cosmism by Groys Boris (review)

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 540 Helfant surmises that it was a practical solution to an intractable issue, provoked by the peasants’ frustration against landowners, who only organized wolf-hunts in certain months — leaving them vulnerable to wolf attacks for the rest of the year. Helfant’s monograph draws on recent work on animals in Russian literature by Amy Nelson, Jane Costlow and Henrietta Mondry, as well as key ecocritical researchers like Erica Fudge. Garry Marvin’s work on English foxhunting helps Helfant to demonstrate the vast semiotic difference between pursuing wolves across wild, untamed Russian land and chasing foxes in the tidy English (and European) countryside. S. K. Robisch, in his recent and expansive study, Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature (which, oddly, Helfant ignores), concludes that the ways in which we read the wolf, whether through fiction or folklore, are important because they shape our real-life interactions with the animal and its environment. Minutely researched and grippingly presented, with vivid illustrations, That Savage Gaze is a fine example of ecocriticism: as representations of wolves lend us insight into the context of nineteenth-century Russian society, we follow Russian writers’ struggles to see the world through lupine eyes. It’s time to reintroduce the wolf, and other threatened species, to Russian Studies. Department of Modern Languages Muireann Maguire University of Exeter Groys, Boris (ed.). Russian Cosmism. e-flux, Inc. and MIT Press, New York and Cambridge, MA, 2018. ix + 249 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Author biographies. Index. $27.95: £22.00. The new anthology, Russian Cosmism, contributes to a growing engagement with the holistic and anthropocentric views of this movement, whose adherents endeavoured to redefine the role of mankind in the universe by blending occult traditions and the sciences of the future. In the founding text of this tradition, Philosophy of the Common Task (Filosofiia obshchego dela, 1906), the Orthodox Christian philosopher and librarian Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903) called for the unification of the whole of humankind with the goal of overcoming disease and death, the resurrection of the deceased and the coming immortal human race, which would colonize space. After Russian Cosmism remerged as a broad intellectual movement in Russia at the end of the 1980s, artists and scholars in the West have turned to Fedorov’s view of the universe and the work of scholars he inspired, drawing on his belief in progress and unity in the face of contemporary ecologic, economic and social chaos and disintegration. REVIEWS 541 This volume presents a single text from Fedorov alongside twelve others from revolutionary anarchists and Marxist thinkers who expanded on his philosophy following the October Revolution. Most of these writings are here translated into English for the first time, having only recently been published in Russia after being suppressed since the 1930s. Bibliographic information about the writings and short biographies about each of the authors are included at the end of the volume. Boris Groys’s introductory essay contextualizes the collected texts by focusing on how Russian Cosmism conceived of technology as a messianic force, which would preserve the living and restore the dead, leading to a profound transformation of human society and culture. In pursuit of immortality, the restorative and preservation work of museums was held up as a model for overcoming the limits of death. Working toward the highest goal also entailed that human beings would continue to evolve, utilizing reason to reconstruct a society in which human relations as individuals would no longer be separated by death and private time. Without temporal and spatial limits, humanity would come to know true social solidarity. This pursuit required individuals to be united by a central, powerful state, which could guarantee the new basic right to exist and the freedom to move through space. Presenting various strands of Russian Cosmism, the writings included in this volume coalesce around the notion of human development and progress as it relates to man’s struggle with nature and mortality, and humanity’s relationship to space. The two texts by Aleksandr Chizhevskii connect human beings directly to cosmic activity, as he asserts a causal relationship between an increasing number of sunspots and the sociological characteristics of mass behaviour...

The availability of local services and its impact on community cohesion in rural areas: Evidence from the English countryside

This paper investigates how the availability of services and amenities influences levels of community cohesion in rural England. Specifically, we measure levels of community cohesion in selected rural parishes between two points of time (2000 and 2010) using an index of indicators based on the presence or absence of retailers and amenities. Results of this analysis provide empirical evidence that the presence of facilities and services has a considerable impact on residents in rural areas, suggesting a significant relationship between the presence of small retailers and social engagement in the English countryside. We discuss these findings with regard to policies and initiatives that could enhance the positive impact that services and amenities operating within villages and rural hamlets have on local communities.

State regulation of the socio-economic relations during Elizabeth I Tudor's rule

The author of the article reconstructs the hierarchical structure of the 16th century English society, the development of capitalist relations in the English countryside at the British Queen Elizabeth I Tudor led to a noticeable socio-economic changes, which affected all major categories, such as land users and owners. A new legal framework was created to protect the interests of the ruling class. The essence of these normative legal acts was the attempt of the country's leadership to cope with the problems that arose due to the growth of the proletariat, and most importantly, the inability of the British industry to use the hands released from agriculture. The government was well aware of this imbalance – the supply and demand for labour. But the government of Elizabeth was not able to propose a specific programme for the use of labour, and went on a proven path – forced coercion of workers' fulfillment of unprofitable obligations. The conclusion is made about the usefulness of the information contained here in the analysis of the transition states of societas.

Sian Edwards, Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside: Creating Good Citizens, 1930–1960

Sian Edwards, <i>Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside: Creating Good Citizens, 1930–1960</i>

Media Ecologies of Plant Invasion

Abstract In popular conservation discourse, Rhododendron ponticum is portrayed as an alien invader let loose on the British countryside by misguided gardeners. In Scotland, eradication campaigns tend to be favored over more pragmatic approaches to management, even though the methods employed can be destructive and long-term success is often limited. Building on recent work critiquing categorical approaches to invasive species management, we argue that such campaigns obscure not only the underlying conditions but also the ongoing production of plant invasiveness. We focus in particular on the way perceptual processes shape and are shaped by plant “invasions” over time. Noting that the majority of plant invasions worldwide are initiated by the horticultural trade, and that visual appearance is a major factor in the selection of plants for trade, we present a framework for critically analyzing the visual conditions of horticulturally led invasion ecologies. Working from the perspective of a more-than-human, materialist media ecology, we cast rhododendrons as entities that modulate light, or “photomedia.” Our analysis explores how their invasiveness is materially produced via the cultural and socioeconomic as well as vegetal relations in which they are entangled. The site of our analysis is an abandoned country estate in western Scotland that has recently undergone R. ponticum removal. By examining the production of visual effects by rhododendrons, cameras, and other media employed there, we identify relations to land that, far from being limited to the period of R. ponticum’s “escape” into the Scottish countryside, continue in present-day projects of eradication. This yields critical visual strategies for a gentler, more experimental re-mediation of R. ponticum and invaded landscapes in general.

Landscape and Embodiment in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and The True Heart

The essay contextualisesLolly WillowesandThe True Heartin relation to interwar ideas about landscape and ruralism. It argues that the protagonists Laura Willowes and Sukey Bond depart from normative relationships to the English countryside in order to orient themselves more independently in their worlds. It suggests that Warner invests in potentialities of what Sara Ahmed analyses as ‘disorientation’, and that in her nuanced evocations of sexual deviance, landscapes become a prompt for the discursive construction of queer subjectivities.

Walking as Practice and Prose as Path Making: How Life Writing and Journey Can Intersect

Walking as Practice and Prose as Path Making: How Life Writing and Journey Can Intersect

Mapmaking and Mapthinking: Cancer as a Problem of Place in Nineteenth-century England.

In the nineteenth century, Dr Alfred Haviland plotted the distribution of cancer on maps of England. Matured within the intellectual milieu of nascent professional public health, his work can be married to that of his fellow sanitary reformers; however, his approach to medical cartography differed from what historians expect of Victorian mapmakers. While most of his mapmaking colleagues attended to urban places, Haviland turned his attention to the English countryside. This article will thus make three interventions into the limited literature on cancer in nineteenth-century England. First, it will demonstrate how cancer came to be constituted as a problem of place. Second, it will show that Haviland understood the disease to be produced by rural environs, and thus paradoxically correlated to healthful locales rather than areas of urban squalor. Third, this article suggests an alternative to the well-travelled interpretation of nineteenth-century mapping as an exercise in power and social control.

Finding Sperm in the English Countryside-The 14th Biology of Spermatozoa Meeting.

Finding Sperm in the English Countryside-The 14th Biology of Spermatozoa Meeting.

Monitoring landscape-scale environmental changes with citizen scientists: Twenty years of land use change in Great Britain

Citizen science is increasingly recognised as one of the most cost-effective means of achieving large-scale and long-term biodiversity monitoring. Here we assess the potential for citizen scientists to contribute to the long-term monitoring of land cover, land use and habitat change through ongoing field data collection.Land cover monitoring is most commonly carried out via remote sensing or professional surveys but these can be costly, low detail or spatiotemporally limited. We used ongoing habitat data collection by citizen scientists participating in a structured survey of breeding birds to assess whether there is the potential for citizen scientists more broadly to play a role in the long-term monitoring of habitat extent and condition. Categorical habitat data has been collected annually by over 2500 volunteers as part of the UK Breeding Bird Survey since 1994 and we used this to quantify temporal variation in the reporting of different habitats in the British countryside. Where possible we validated our estimates of habitat cover and change using independent estimates from professional surveys and other datasets.We detected increases in woodland cover, in particular mixed woodland, and declines in farmland cover, particularly livestock farming. Our habitat cover estimates closely matched alternative land cover estimates but there was little correspondence in estimates of change between survey types and we discuss why discrepancies may occur.Although the data we used were not initially designed for this purpose, our results suggest that there is considerable potential to use citizen science for cost-effective identification of temporal patterns in land use, habitat-type and management in ways that could complement other methods.

Emptiness and its futures

In the past 25 years, rural Latvia has become notably emptier. This emptying is the result of post-Soviet deindustrialization and large-scale outmigration, enabled by EU accession and exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis. It is accompanied by lack of political protest, leading many to conclude that migration hinders political mobilization. Such conclusions derive from viewing leaving and staying as actions in relation to the state. Instead, leaving and staying should be viewed in relation to transnational forms of power. The people leaving the deindustrialized Latvian countryside to work in the English countryside are seeking futures past, namely, futures of stable employment and incremental prosperity. Those who stay in the emptying Latvian countryside create the future as a little bit more of the present.

New representations of rural space: Eastern European migrants and the denial of poverty and deprivation in the English countryside

To date, there has been relatively little focus on Eastern European ‘accession’ (EU8) migrants' representations of the rural in Western Europe. Through drawing on research conducted in England, this paper highlights how the materiality of the English countryside strongly shapes EU8 migrants' views of rural space. In turn, their representations of the rural as ‘idyll’, as social and cultural capital and as relational, coupled with their own moral values promoting self-sufficiency serve to perpetuate the rural as being ‘problem free’. Furthermore, the conflation of the rural idyll with ‘Englishness’ and ‘whiteness’ provides EU8 migrants living in the countryside with the opportunity to become involved in various aspects of rural community life. Consequently, the paper argues that their actions, as well as their representations of the rural, further contribute to the cultural ‘screening out’ of rural problems.

True North: Essential Identity and Cultural Camouflage in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England

True North: Essential Identity and Cultural Camouflage in H.V. Morton’s <em>In Search of England</em>