ABSTRACT
In fact, as far as Britain is concerned the notion of the stable, self-contained, healthy and harmonious rural community was something of a myth during the past three centuries (Short 1992). In the eighteenth century London was attracting young, landless migrants from a vast hinterland that covered lowland England, while, across the Channel, Paris attracted young people from the northern third of the country. Different farm goods commanded distinctive supply areas (as von Thünen was to demonstrate in 1826), and villagers were not spared their share of exploitation, poverty, disease and ill-will from their neighbours. The coming of the railways encouraged greater numbers of rural folk to leave their long-settled farms and villages in Europe in search of a better life in towns and cities. Rural crafts and services collapsed because of competition from urban factories, and the countryside housed increasingly fewer people but employed a higher proportion of them in farm-related work. The onset of depopulation came later in the newly
settled farmlands of North America and Australasia, but by the early years of the twentieth century it was widespread in areas that had been occupied by Europeans only a few decades earlier (Robinson 1990).
