Bibliography - Professor Brian M. Short B.A., Ph.D, F.R.G.S.
Bibliography Home

Agriculture in the high weald of Sussex and Kent 1850-1953, by B. M. Short, 1973 at University of London (Ph.D. thesis)

The Turnover of Tenants on the Ashburnham Estate, 1830-1850, by Brian Short, published 1975 in Sussex Archæological Collections (vol. 113, article, pp.157-174) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 6177] & The Keep [LIB/500316] & S.A.S. library

The Sussex Landscape, by Brian Short, published October 1975 in Journal of Historical Geography (vol. 1, issue 4, article, pp.389-390)

The String Town: Hailsham 1870-1914, edited by Brian Short, published 1980 (86 pp., Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sussex, ISBN-10: 0904242137 & ISBN-13: 9780904242133) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/502780] & East Sussex Libraries

Scarpfoot parish: Plumpton 1830-1880, edited by Brian Short, published 1982 (Occasional paper no. 16, 57 pp., Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sussex, ISBN-10: 0904242188 & ISBN-13: 9780904242188) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/502981] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

"The Art and Craft of Chicken Cramming": Poultry in the Weald of Sussex, 1850-1950, by Brian Short, published 1982 in Agricultural History Review (vol. 30, no. 1, article, pp.17-30)   Download PDF

The geography of local migration and marriage in Sussex 1500-1900, by Brian Short, published 1983 (21 pp., Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sussex) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries

The Changing Rural Society and Economy of Sussex, 1750-1945, by Brian M. Short, published 1 September 1983 in Sussex Environment Landscape and Society (chapter 8, pp.148-166, Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd., ISBN-10: 0862990459 & ISBN-13: 9780862990459) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 8831] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Sussex Rural Communities: Contemporary Perspectives, by Brian M. Short, published 1 September 1983 in Sussex Environment Landscape and Society (pp.192-207, Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd., ISBN-10: 0862990459 & ISBN-13: 9780862990459) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 8831] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

The Decline of Living-In Servants in the Transition to Capitalist Farming, a Critique of the Sussex Evidence, by Brian Short, published 1984 in Sussex Archæological Collections (vol. 122, article, pp.147-162) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 9140] & The Keep [LIB/500309] & S.A.S. library

Very Improving Neighbourhood, Burgess Hill 1840-1914, by Brian Short, published December 1984 (Occasional paper no. 23, 85 pp., Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sussex, ISBN-10: 0904242269 & ISBN-13: 9780904242263) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries

Indoor Farm Service in 19th-Century Sussex. Some Criticisms of a Critique. A Rejoinder, by Brian Short, published 1985 in Sussex Archæological Collections (vol. 123, article, pp.225-242) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 9514] & The Keep [LIB/500310] & S.A.S. library

The County of Sussex in 1910. Sources for a New Analysis, by Brian Short, Mick Reed and William Caudwell, published 1987 in Sussex Archæological Collections (vol. 125, article, pp.199-224) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 9994] & The Keep [LIB/500304] & S.A.S. library

The South East from 1000 AD, by Peter Brandon and Professor Brian Short, published 16 July 1990 (444 pp., London: Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd., ISBN-10: 0582492459 & ISBN-13: 9780582492455) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Rural housing need in south east England : Wealden District, East Sussex, 1988-91 , by Brian M. Short, published 1991 (v + 87 pp., Hailsham: Wealden District Council, ISBN-10: 0951864505 & ISBN-13: 9780951864500) accessible at: British Library & East Sussex Libraries

The Ashdown Forest area: agricultural change in the western High Weald from 1970 to 1988, by Brian Short, Sue Swift and Giles Swift, published June 1991 (29 pp., Sussex Rural Community Council, ISBN-10: 187385000X & ISBN-13: 9781873850008) accessible at: British Library & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Village Housing Need in the 'Affluent' South East, by Brian Short, published 1 March 1992 (70 pp., University of Sussex Geography Laboratory, ISBN-10: 1874465029 & ISBN-13: 9781874465027) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries

The Ashdown Forest Dispute 1876-1882, edited by Brian Short, published April 1997 (vol. 80, vii + 303 pp., Sussex Record Society, ISBN-10: 0854450416 & ISBN-13: 9780854450411) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 14342][Lib 13720] & The Keep [LIB/500457][Lib/507863] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

This volume presents a revealing case study in the environmental politics of Victorian England. On 13 October 1877 John Miles was cutting litter (bracken, heather, gorse etc.) on Ashdown Forest on behalf of his landlord Bernard Hale, barrister, J.P, Deputy Lieutenant of Sussex, and Ashdown commoner. William Pilbeam, one of Earl de la Warr's keepers, approached him and told him to stop cutting. Miles later recounted 'I went on cutting', thus initiating the Ashdown Forest case, brought by Reginald Windsor, seventh Earl de la Warr as Lord of the Manor of Duddleswell against Hale and Miles, to test the extent of Hale's common rights. Expensive legal opinion was hired by both sides since many commoners were titled and wealthy landowners; and William Augustus Raper, a Battle solicitor, was engaged to assemble evidence on behalf of the defendants. Some of this evidence is transcribed as the main body of text in this volume - over 100 depositions collected by Raper in 1878 and 1879 from elderly Forest residents.
Raper's visits to his informants' cottages were recorded in five small notebooks whose contents are not easily deciphered. This volume presents their full transcription, together with a contextualising introduction to the Forest and its customs and to the complex legal actions of 1876-1882. A short biography of each of the elderly deponents has also been included.
These narratives are invaluable sources for the history of Sussex, for genealogy, and for environmental, legal, economic, social and cultural history. Herein are recounted the main environmental and local political themes of this surviving area of Victorian open Forest, seen quite unusually from the perspective of rural working people.

An Historical Atlas of Sussex , edited by Kim Leslie and Brian Short with maps by Susan Rowland, published 1999 (176 pp., Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, ISBN-10: 1860771122 & ISBN-13: 9781860771125) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 14026][Lib 18777] & The Keep [LIB/501686][Lib/508903] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Published as part of the local Millennium celebrations, the Atlas presents the history of Sussex in a way never before attempted. Some seventy maps plot a huge diversity of subject matter ranging from prehistoric times to the present; from Saxon settlements through 17th-century inns and ale-houses to employment patterns and commuting to work in the late 20th century.

Population in 1676 and 1724, by David Martin, Brian Short and Peter Wilkinson, published 1 January 1999 in An Historical Atlas of Sussex (pp.66-67, Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, ISBN-10: 1860771122 & ISBN-13: 9781860771125) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 14026][Lib 18777] & The Keep [LIB/501686][LIB/508903] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Riots and Unrest, by Andrew Charlesworth, Brian Short and Roger Wells, published 1 January 1999 in An Historical Atlas of Sussex (pp.74-75, Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, ISBN-10: 1860771122 & ISBN-13: 9781860771125) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 14026][Lib 18777] & The Keep [LIB/501686][LIB/508903] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Population Change 1801-1851, by Brian Short, published 1 January 1999 in An Historical Atlas of Sussex (pp.88-89, Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, ISBN-10: 1860771122 & ISBN-13: 9781860771125) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 14026][Lib 18777] & The Keep [LIB/501686][LIB/508903] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Agricultural Regions, Improvements and Land Use c.1840, by Brian Short, published 1 January 1999 in An Historical Atlas of Sussex (pp.96-97, Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, ISBN-10: 1860771122 & ISBN-13: 9781860771125) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 14026][Lib 18777] & The Keep [LIB/501686][LIB/508903] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Landownership in Victorian Sussex, by Brian Short, published 1 January 1999 in An Historical Atlas of Sussex (pp.98-99, Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, ISBN-10: 1860771122 & ISBN-13: 9781860771125) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 14026][Lib 18777] & The Keep [LIB/501686][LIB/508903] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Conservation, Class and Custom: Lifespace and Conflict in a Nineteenth-century Forest Environment, by Brian Short, published October 1999 in Rural History (vol. 10, issue 2, article, pp.127-154, ISSN: 0956-7933)   View Online

Cannon … is busy now bringing fern from the moor to use as bedding, he has cut it about a mile off up the lane behind Belle Green. It is a rough road to bring it down. I think I will go up next time with the cart and help the children to rake it, it is such a nice crackly fern.
At the East Grinstead Petty Sessions in March 1868 Charles, sixth Earl De La Warr brought ten poor men forward charged with oak and beech underwood cutting and trespass. George Edwards the Reeve had discovered six men cutting and tying, another three with handbills but who were not actually cutting at the time, and Abraham Card 'a woodbuyer, etc.' loading the wood onto his wagon. Edwards had cautioned the men against cutting: 'When I got to them I read a paragraph from Mr Hunt's letter [Hussey Hunt, De La Warr's steward, warning against litter cutting]. They laughed and went on cutting. I then gave them all into custody'. It appears that the men were handcuffed and led away. Daniel Heasman, one of the men once again, was convicted and originally imprisoned for 21 days, the other defendants were originally fined 1s. damages, 1s. penalty and costs.

The ownership, occupation and use of land on the South Downs, 1840-1940: a methodological analysis of record linkage over time, by John Godfrey and Brian Short, published 2001 in Agricultural History Review (vol. 49, no. 1, article, pp.56-78)   Download PDF

Three major complexes of documents are now available for the study of agriculture from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The tithe surveys, already well known, are now joined by the Lloyd George 1910 Valuation Office material, and the National Farm Survey of 1941-3. This paper expl ores the methodological issues arising from the use, and especially the comparison, of the three sources in the context of a case study from the South Downs in Sussex.

Environmental politics, custom and personal testimony: memory and lifespace on the late Victorian Ashdown Forest, Sussex, by Brian Short, published July 2004 in The Journal of Historical Geography (vol. 30 issue 3, article, pp.470-495)   View Online

The late Victorian period witnessed a growing concern for, on the one hand, environmental protection, and on the other, the 'human fauna', with their vanishing folk heritage, living on the margins of a capitalist rural economy. In connection with the Ashdown Forest legal dispute (1876-1882) over the common rights in this ancient Forest area in the Weald of Sussex, the young solicitor William Augustus Raper interviewed over 100 elderly residents to collect evidence of 60 years' gathering of litter (bracken, heather, etc.). Their depositions reveal much about the ways in which local environmental politics were a constituent part of custom and economy on the Forest, and how such contested rights underpinned the more elite conservation movement at this time. Although gathered for a specific legal case, the evidence reveals much about the interrelations between late-Victorian peasant communities and their environments, but also much about the individuals, and their social, economic and spatial relations. The material is assessed for its relationship to similar 19th- and 20th-century sources and for its use within historical geography, and there is also a discussion of the potential and problems associated with the use of transcribed oral evidence and auto/biographical material more generally.

England's Landscape: The South East, by Brian Short, published 7 August 2006 (256 pp., English Heritage, ISBN-10: 0007155700 & ISBN-13: 9780007155705) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

The most detailed description of why the countryside of England now looks the way it does, covering the geology, archaeology and history of each area and what effects each has had on the landscape we see today.

• Landscapes of Power and Control
• Environment and the Landscape
• Cultural Topography: Regional Patterns in an Ancient Landscape
• The peopling of the South East and the evolution of settlement patterns
• Changing Ways of Life and the Landscape
• Urban Living: Urban Landscapes
• London Lives: Landscapes and Reactions
• Landscape and the Creative Imagination
• The Theatre of the South East

"The Outhwaite controversy": a micro-history of the Edwardian land campaign, by Brian Short and John Godfrey, published January 2007 in The Journal of Historical Geography (vol. 33 issue 1, article, pp.45-71)   View Online

The concept of micro-history has not yet been well explored within historical geography. This paper employs the idea but with a more overtly spatial emphasis, by relating the national discourse surrounding the land question in Edwardian Britain to one of its local manifestations. In particular, we consider the attacks made by the radical 'single-taxer' Liberal MP R.L. Outhwaite upon the Duke of Norfolk and his estate at Arundel, Sussex. Outhwaite levelled charges of feudal land monopoly leading to poor housing and rural depopulation on the Duke's Sussex estate, and contrasted this with the wealth being transferred from the Duke's extensive properties in Sheffield to reconstruct the castle at Arundel. The Duke and his agent, Mostyn, responded fiercely to the allegations. This local struggle for political power and capital is set against the wider situation during the tense years leading up to the Great War. The intersection between the two scales of enquiry demonstrates how the national level of political debate became more complex and fractured at the local level, how actors at the local level were also moving on wider stages, and the interconnecting processes. Further questions about the utility of micro-history are raised as a result.

Land & Society in Edwardian Britain, by Brian Short, published 21 August 2008 (400 pp., Cambridge University Press, ISBN-10: 0521021774 & ISBN-13: 9780521021777) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/501952]

This revealing 1997 book in the Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography series presents some of the first researches into a trove of hitherto inaccessible primary source material. A controversial component of Lloyd George's People's Budget of 1909-10 was the 'New Domesday' of landownership and land values. This rich documentation, for long locked away in the Inland Revenue's offices, became available to the public in the late 1970s. For the growing number of scholars of early twentieth century urban and rural Britain, Dr Short offers both a coherent overview and a standard source of reference to this valuable archive. Part I is concerned with the processes of assembling the material and its style of representation; Part II with suggested themes and locality studies. A final chapter places this new material in the context of discourses of state intervention in landed society prior to the Great War.

The Duke and the radical: an Edwardian land conflict in Sussex, by John Godfrey and Brian Short, published 2010 in Sussex Archæological Collections (vol. 148, article, pp.225-246) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 18613] & The Keep [LIB/500366] & S.A.S. library   View Online

Between 1908 and 1913 the radical Australian politician R. L. Outhwaite carried out a sustained campaign of criticism of the 15th Duke of Norfolk, as part of a wider attack upon landed wealth by Lloyd George and some other Liberal MPs and their supporters. Papers preserved in the Arundel Castle Archives, together with a wide range of other contemporary sources, make it possible to trace the chronology and rationale of Outhwaite's attack, together with the defence, which was mounted primarily by Edward Mostyn, the duke's loyal and influential Arundel agent. The national context of this acrimonious debate between these three men is traced, and the local society and economy of the Arundel estate in the years before the Great War are also analysed.

A man in his landscape: Peter Brandon 1927-2011, by Brian Short, published 2012 in Sussex Archæological Collections (vol. 150, article, pp.193-207) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 18615] & The Keep [LIB/500368] & S.A.S. library   View Online

In 1963 Peter Brandon was awarded a PhD for a thesis on the medieval commons and common fields of Sussex. This work set him on an academic career which resulted in many books and articles relating to the history of the landscape and society of Sussex. His writing, talks and media appearances made him a well-known figure, and an inspiration for many whose own enthusiasms were initiated by his accessible style. This paper interweaves his private, academic and intellectual pathways, critically assesses his writings, and pays tribute to his legacy.

Obituary: Dr Peter Brandon,1927-2011, by Brian Short and Ann Winser, published April 2012 in Sussex Past & Present (no. 126, obituary, p.9, ISSN: 1357-7417) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/500475] & S.A.S. library   View Online

Apples and Orchards in Sussex, by Brian Short with Peter May, Gail Vine and Anne-Marie Bur, published 3 September 2012 (230 pp., Action in Rural Sussex, ISBN-10: 1873850239 & ISBN-13: 9781873850237) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/508858] & West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Apples and Orchards in Sussex came about in response to the current challenges facing people who eat fruit as well as fruit growers - the grubbing up of commercial orchards, the scarcity of heritage varieties of apples associated with Sussex, the domination of imports in shops, and the loss of domestic skills such as cooking with apples. After years of creating community orchards, we wanted to find out more about our fruit-growing past and to look at ways in which people today might contribute to future orchards - both as a treasured landscape feature and as a source of fruit. Prof. Brian Short has trawled the archives of the Kew Gardens, the Royal Horticultural Society and museums to build up a detailed picture of how orchards originally came to England and to Sussex. Oral historians have gathered the stories of people across Sussex with inside knowledge of fruit-growing in our past and present and together we point practical ways to a rich fruit-growing future. Contains the first definitive list and photos of Sussex apple varieties; Illustrations from historic archives; Watercolours by botanical artist Nicky Ashford; Maps of Sussex showing historical orchard distribution; Interviews with growers past and present; Information on where to learn orchard skills and where to buy local fruit and trees; How to contribute to a more durable and nature-friendly fruit-growing future.

The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest, by Brian Short, published October 2013 in The Journal of Historical Geography (vol. 42, article, p.22)   View Online

The Battle of the Fields: rural community and authority in Britain during the Second World War, by Brian Short, published 20 November 2014 (480 pp., Boydell & Brewer, ISBN-10: 1843839377 & ISBN-13: 9781843839378) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries

The Battle of the Fields tells the story of rural community and authority in Britain during the Second World War by looking at the County War Agricultural Executive Committees. From 1939 they were imbued with powers to transform British farming to combat the loss of food imports caused by German naval activity and initial European mainland successes. Their powers were sweeping and draconian. When fully exercised against recalcitrant farmers, dispossession in part or whole could and did result. This book includes the most detailed analysis of these dispossessions including the tragic case of Ray Walden, the Hampshire farmer who was killed by police after refusing to leave his farmhouse in 1940. The committees were deemed successful by Whitehall as harbingers of modernity: mechanization, draining, artificial fertilizers, reclamation of heaths, marshes and woodlands. We now deplore some of these changes but Britain did not starve, in large part thanks to their efforts. This book will appeal not only to historians and geographers, but to many who maintain a deep interest in the British countryside and its past, and tothose who continue to share a fascination for the Second World War, in particular the "home front". It will also demonstrate to all who are anxious about food security in the modern age how this question was dealt with 70 years ago.