In the study of popular culture, the significance of gifts and tokens in the making of marriage has not been given the attention it deserves. The surviving artefacts alone merit closer examination and the role of such objects in dramatic and pictorial representations has yet to be adequately explored. If their full social and symbolic importance is to be understood, however, a close examination is necessary of acts of giving in precisely defined historical contexts. The richly detailed evidence of ecclesiastical depositions surviving for the diocese of Canterbury permits just such an examination. This evidence provides examples from rural communities in woodland, downland, marshland and lowland pays in Kent to the south and east of the River Medway, and shows their connections with local towns. And among these, the case of Divers v. Williams provides unusually extensive information.

Brewing was an important part of the medieval peasant economy. There are different views, however, about the nature and position of those who brewed. It has been suggested that brewing was an integral part of the household economy, that is, at the fully developed stage of the household and family, whilst others have connected brewing with the early stages of the life-cycle of individuals, before household formation. Either as part of the household economy or before household formation, brewing may have supplemented income from agrarian activity, whether from the direct holding of land, or from wages for work on the land. Brewing may also have been a feature of the sexual division of labour within the household. Moreover, it has been proposed that brewing was more important for the household economy of cottagers and lesser landholders than for the tenants of standard holdings, who, perhaps, needed to supplement their income less than the smaller landholders. When related to the life-cycle of individuals, however, brewing may have been undertaken more consistently by those who would later acquire land and would then divest themselves of brewing as a major part of their income, although Chayanov believed brewing to relate more widely to the developmental cycle of all peasant households. His perception was that brewing would have been necessary at that stage of household development where there were many mouths to feed and many hands to perform the labour, whereas, when the siblings left the household, the supplementary income from brewing would no longer be required. There are thus a number of issues involved in the question of who, in the main, brewed, and at what stage of their life-cycle they did so.

In 1776, baron Salomon von Otter, governor of the neighbouring county of Halland and jus patronatus of the local parish, stood opposite the men of Öja parish at a meeting outside the church. The powerful nobleman was for the third time arguing for the praiseworthy and legally required task of building a combined school and poor-house in cooperation with the neighbouring parish (where he happened to own most of the land). The peasants of Ö for a third time refused, both in writing and orally, on the grounds of their alleged right to self-government. The baron continued with his persuasions, and presented the support he had from the local nobility, among them the bishop. He was still met with a firm refusal. Eventually the baron ordered that they should build the house, referring (probably without much legal foundation) to his position as jus patronatus. Now everybody surrendered, except one farmer who refused to join in the final decision. This fact was carefully noted by the local clergyman, together with assurances that this unwise stubbornness would not suffice to impede the project.

English and Welsh agrarian society, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was intimately tied to the poor law. That law was extensive in scope, encompassing settlement and removal, apprenticeship, illegitimacy, parochial rating and taxation, as well as welfare and unemployment provision. It continually swayed the rural labour market. It underlay the development of so-called ‘open’ and ‘close’ parishes, or as I would prefer to express it, the maintenance of a number of parishes (or hamlets or townships) as fundamentally estate units. It was an essential element in tenant farmers' judgements on profitability, and was routinely discussed in the General Views of Agriculture. Like the overhang of a George Morland tree, sometimes clutching, sometimes benign, it extended far over the lives of that majority of village inhabitants termed the ‘labouring poor’. Commentators like Arthur Young, John Howlett or Sir Frederick Eden discussed the poor law in the same paragraphs as they wrote about enclosure, agricultural improvement, depression and rural social relations. They paid close attention to poor-relief, making extensive connections between the poor law, rural poverty, rents, and agricultural innovation. To them such matters were closely entwined.

The development of any particular society has to be understood in terms of the economic processes at work at the time, together with the cultural influences which permeate society, and the specific nature of the place in which these cultural and economic influences operate. The visible results of these influences and processes must be seen historically. That is to say, the entity being studied is a constantly changing sequence of processes both present and past. These processes need to be viewed dialectically.

Farming in the western Highlands and Islands of Scotland was transformed over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the clearance of some townships to make way for commercial sheep production and the reorganisation of others into crofts. Commentaries on the region prior to these changes portray it as a cultural backwater, with communities employing a range of seemingly archaic and primitive practices. Early agricultural surveyors and ‘Improvers’ who visited or worked in the region were especially important in laying the foundation for this view. Admittedly, their near moral conviction about change and the virtues of new husbandry made them disdainful of traditional practice everywhere, even in the Lowlands. When it came to the western Highlands and Islands, though, their tone underwent a perceptible change, with words like primitive and barbaric creeping into their descriptions. Early travellers added to this picture of a region rooted in the past, with customs and practices that seemingly set it apart, chronologically as well as geographically, from the rest of Britain.

For better than a decade American historians have debated whether or not U.S. farmers were ‘capitalist’ or ‘non-capitalist’ during the nineteenth century. This debate has tended to use market integration as the key index for determining where they should be conceptually located,-although Henretta and Merrill, who fired the opening salvos in the debate, focused more on how farmers understood what they were doing, and Genovese has long insisted that the direct relations of production are the basis for defining specific modes of production. This argument is important not only insofar as it sharpens our knowledge of early American social formations, but also as it aids in interpreting political disputes that occurred on local and national levels.

As a tenurial solution, sharecropping has been a source of constant fascination and controversy for centuries. It is as old as written history. Furthermore, it has existed and to a certain extent still exists, in very different institutional frameworks, and it constitutes one of the most common tenurial solutions in the history of agriculture.

Sharecropping dominated the agricultural scene in central Italy from the late Middle Ages until the early 1960s. An especially exploitative form was the backbone of Rumanian agriculture before the First World War. In Asian agriculture, sharecropping has been and still is highly dispersed, not only in wet rice production but also in non-irrigated crops such as wheat, or industrial crops like jute. The postbellum American South consituted the sharecropping region par excellence in the USA, although it was not unknown in other parts of the country. In the 1970s share tenancy reappeared in Californian strawberry production. Even if service tenancy dominated the Andean and Mexican hacienda, it was frequently supplemented with sharecropping on specific crops. In late nineteenth-century Mexico share tenancy expanded significantly in maize production. The cases mentioned above represent only a brief and highly incomplete list of economic, social and institutional frameworks where various forms of share tenancy are found.

In just over two hundred years, the United States has been transformed from a very largely rural and wilderness nation into an urban one. Rural Americans have gone from being the first majority to the last minority, to paraphrase historian John Shover (Shover,1976). All through this time policies directly and indirectly oriented to rural areas and rural people have been enunciated by the federal government. Rarely was the coordination of policy sought or achieved, however. Also, for generations the easy assumption was made that agricultural policy constituted rural policy. Further, a form of rural fundamentalism, closely related to a neo-Jeffersonian social outlook, reinforced a false sense of ‘rugged individualism’ as the essence of personal and collective success. Such gross oversimplifications have tended to mask some of the truly substantive problems of poor housing, race and gender inequities, unemployment, illiteracy, poor health, and malnutrition faced by rural and small town populations.