ABSTRACT
Rural England and Wales confronted two problems on the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914. The first was common to the whole nation – the raising of a volunteer army. The second was peculiar to agriculture – the need to feed the country at war. The relationship between these was to dominate rural life and rural policy until the early 1920s. The relationship was a difficult one because the demands of recruiting could actually work against the needs to increase agricultural output in an industry which was largely unmechanised and thus relied to a great extent on hand labour.
