Ronald Blythe is often seen as Britain’s finest living rural writer. He has published over thirty books, some of them, like Akenfield and The View in Winter, widely acknowledged as classics, inspiring a film and follow-up books by others. His literary output has been extraordinary: novels, short stories, poetry, rural documentary writing, oral history, ‘parish’ writing, religious books, his own autobiographical work (among a remarkable milieu of creative people), and historical studies ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. He has also edited a great range of authors and types of writing. Ronald Blythe is especially an East Anglian author, writing about that English region, in whose work the local and the religious are often to the fore. As this famous author approaches one hundred years of age, this article is a forthright academic appreciation of his work, a discussion of its themes and impressive variety, and an analysis of the meanings and importance of his writing to modern readerships.

This article considers rusticated memorials in many churchyards and cemeteries in England and Wales, between c. 1850 and the present day, analysing their forms, chronology, and their wider social and artistic significances. These memorials have hitherto been a neglected form among British memorial styles. The discussion here focuses on the English Midlands, Kensal Green Cemetery (London), and Montgomeryshire in Wales. It appraises how such memorial rustication may relate to changing attitudes to rurality, ‘natural’ landscapes, and secularisation over time. As an analysis of shifting memorial tastes, the article assesses the chronology of rustication against the periodisation of two more dominant memorial types: namely Gothic memorials, which prevailed in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Art Deco memorials, which gained popularity from the 1920s. It appraises regional differences in memorial style change, showing little English and Welsh variation in this after the mid-nineteenth century. There is attention to the hitherto little studied decline of the Gothic, and to the wider significance of the more secularised memorial forms that followed it. The role of these Gothic, rusticated, and Art Deco memorials for an understanding of social, attitudinal, religious and secularising change is emphasised.

This article comprises a close analysis of churchyard extensions, closures and new cemetery provision in the English midland counties of Leicestershire and Rutland. It provides a graphic outline of these changes, and so extends cemetery history to rural as well as urban areas. The main periods of change examined are the 1850s, 1880–1900 and from the 1960s to 2010. Such a chronology, and its detailed processes and problems, has not hitherto been available for any region. This highlights the effects of these changes on senses of ‘community’, and their links to processes of secularisation, church viability and belonging.

This issue of Rural History has greater thematic coherence than previous numbers, with all the papers having some relation to the study of ‘popular culture’, while coming from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Each of the articles develops a key area of analysis, but their juxtaposition helps to raise further questions – about the kinds of sources that can be used to redress the bias towards the elite that has tended to dominate the study of culture, and about the problems involved in the handling of such sources. How do concepts of class, sectional, or gender interest relate to the sense of place and local identity? How can we detect such ideas within the historical record? How should we proceed in attempting to reconstruct popular and regional consciousness?

Two questions will no doubt greet the arrival of this journal: why rural history? and why now? The current economic climate is hardly favourable for ventures of this kind. But recent developments in the numerous fields which touch on matters rural indicate a real academic need for a new forum for interdisciplinary exchange. Much exciting and innovative work has been carried out over the past decade – on the nature and structure of rural communities; on regional differences and identity; on how rural workers are defined and represented by others and by themselves; on the relationship between the urban and the rural. Yet this research has been scattered across a range of disciplines and subdisciplines, many of which tend to be regarded as marginal to the central thrust of historical investigation. In areas like folklore studies or art history, ideas of the rural have developed apace, and the terms of the analysis of the rural community have acquired considerable methodological complexity. Yet the study of ‘rural history’ continues to be rather narrowly defined, confined by an essentially economistic agenda that has excluded much of the most fascinating recent work. Rural history is often seen as synonymous with agricultural history, and although the latter has generated a great deal of valuable and interesting research, its privileging of the economic perspective has tended to preclude the methodological inclusiveness that now seems necessary to foster cross-fertilisation between the disparate areas in which the study of rural society is being pursued.