James Bowen, ‘The carriers of Lancaster 1824-1912’, pp.178-190

Carriers were an integral and crucial element in the life of every community from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth. They provided a vital service, transporting a wide range of goods, packages, livestock and people, and forming a web of routes and linkages which connected every town with its hinterland, towns to each other, and many towns and cities to the metropolis. At the same time, they disseminated news and information and were an essential part of the social and economic structure which tied town to country and place to place. Carriers are also familiar figures in literature, precisely because of these attributes. Yet they have rarely been analysed in depth and their role, perhaps because it was unglamorous, has been often overlooked. In this article James Bowen provides a case-study of Lancaster, highlighting the importance of the trade directories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a key source. His analysis of the role of the carriers, the way in which they adapted to the arrival of the railways and reorientated their routes to serve stations and railheads, and the role of inns and family networks, draws attention to the rich potential for further local research on this topic.

This article was the winner of the 2010 British Association for Local History Publications Awards, and is an edited version of one which originally appeared in the Transactions of the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society. Patricia Newton presents the results of her extensive survey of the farming landscapes of the Laxey Valley in the parish of Lonan on the east side of the Isle of Man. Her work involved documentary sources, secondary descriptions (particularly valuable for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), maps and plans, and detailed fieldwork among the fields and active and ruined farmsteads of the valley. She outlines its agricultural and economic history, including the impact of lead-mining in the Victorian period, and discusses the social and political influences (such as moves towards disafforestation of the uplands) which helped to shape the present day landscape. The chronological span is very great—from the thirteenth century to the present day—and the result is an exemplary synthesis drawn from many different sources but always focused on the beautiful and historically-rich landscape itself. The local history of the Island is not well-known beyond its shores, and this article, a worthy winner, opens our eyes to its remarkable fascination.

Joanna Loxton, ‘How Walter Henry Owen avoided the bailiffs: a Lincolnshire farmer between the wars’, pp.224-234

This paper is a detailed case-study of the experience of one Lincolnshire farmer between the end of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second. Walter Henry Owen lived and farmed first at Bridge End and then at North End, tenanted properties about eight miles south-east of Sleaford. Using the exceptionally detailed records which he kept, and which are now deposited at the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading, Joanna Loxton traces the precarious financial viability of the exercise, showing how profit and loss fluctuated (often alarmingly so) but that Owen was able to adapt at surprisingly short notice to changing circumstances. By doing so, he avoided the bankruptcy which was the fate of many small farmers in the period. Her paper is exemplary in its linking of decision-making with the financial evidence of account books, and provides a very full local example set firmly within the context of the broad trends of English agriculture in a troubled and often turbulent time. There is a valuable assessment of the quality of the records themselves, and the unfulfilled potential of the resources of the Museum of English Rural Life’s archives is highlighted.