The range of women's work and its contribution to the family economy studied here for the first time. Despite the growth of women's history and rural social history in the past thirty years, the work performed by women who lived in the nineteenth-century English countryside is still an under-researched issue. Verdon directly addresses this gap in the historiography, placing the rural female labourer centre stage for the first time. The involvement of women in the rural labour market as farm servants, as day labourers in agriculture, and as domestic workers, are all examined using a wide range of printed and unpublished sources from across England. The roles village women performed in the informal rural economy (household labour, gathering resources and exploiting systems of barterand exchange) are also assessed. Changes in women's economic opportunities are explored, alongside the implications of region, age, marital status, number of children in the family and local custom; women's economic contribution to the rural labouring household is established as a critical part of family subsistence, despite criticism of such work and the rise in male wages after 1850. NICOLA VERDON is a Research Fellow in the Rural History Centre, University of Reading.

The English Pig is an account of pigs and pig-keeping from the sixteenth century to modern times, concentrating on the domestic, cottage pig, rather than commercial farming. In Victorian England the pig was an integral part of village life: both visible and essential. Living in close proximity to its owners, fed on scraps and the subject of perennial interest, the pig when dead provided the means to repay social and monetary debts as well as excellent meat. While the words associated with the pig, such as 'hoggish', 'swine' and 'pigsty', and phrases like 'greedy as a pig', associate the pig with greed and dirt, this book shows the pig's virtues, intelligence and distinctive character. It is a portrait of one of the most recognisable but least known of farm animals, seen here also in many photographs and other representations. The pig has a modest place in literature from Fielding's pig-keeping Parson Trulliber to Hardy's Jude the Obscure and to Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford. In modern times, while vanishing from the sight of most people, it has been sentimentalised in children's stories and commercialised in advertisements.

First published in 1989, The Vanishing Countryman investigates how farmers, farm workers, and other country crafts- and tradespeople have fared in response to significant changes across the British countryside in the past one hundred years. The book explores the move towards large-scale and capital-intensive farming, and the conflict between increased production and damage to the environment. It looks at the decline in the number of farm workers, crafts- and tradespeople. It also considers the changes in social composition across country villages and the impact that this has had on living standards, housing, and transport. The Vanishing Countryman will appeal to those with an interest in rural and social history, and in the history of the British countryside specifically.

In Behind the Plough, agricultural historian Nigel Agar surveys a century of agricultre in Hertfordshire, the first time such a history has been written. The 19th century saw changes in agriculture just as dramatic as the developments taking place in industry. Throughout the period under consideration, Herrtfordshire was almost entirely rural but its proximity to London meant that it was in no sense isolateed. Indeed, the needs of the capital influenced the way agriculture was carried out in the county.

Whilst in certain quarters it may be fashionable to suppose that there is no such thing as society historians have had no difficulty in finding their subject. The difficulty, rather, is that the advance has occurred through such an outpouring of research and writing that it is hard for anyone but the specialist to keep up with the literature or grasp the overall picture. In these three volumes, as is the tradition in Cambridge Histories, a team of specialists has assembled the jigsaw of recent monographic research and presented an interpretation of the development of modern British society since 1750, from three complementary perspectives: those of regional communities, of the working and living environment, and of social institutions. Each volume is self-contained, and each contribution, thematically defined, contains its own chronology of the period under review. Taken as a whole they offer an authoritative and comprehensive view of the manner and method of the shaping of society in the two centuries of unprecedented demographic and economic change.

First Published in 1990. This is Volume IX in the Library of Peasant Studies series, edited by Mick Reed and Roger Wells. The contributors to this volume discuss the disparity between agricultural history and rural history despite the two becoming synonymous in academic discussion. The editors state that exciting developments continue, but it is clear that the simple accumulation of empirical detail will not on its own, provide explanation and that exploration of the contents within these articles will inform positive change.

Idle Hands is the first major social history of unemployment in Britain covering the last 200 years. It focuses on the experiences of working people in becoming unemployed, coping with unemployment and searching for work, and their reactions and responses to their problems. Direct evidence of the impact of unemployment drawn from extensive personal biographies complements economic and statistical analysis.