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
Abstract: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.
"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
Abstract: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.
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