ABSTRACT
The account of the parish in the last chapter has perhaps made it appear to have been a completely self-contained group. This of course was not the case; it was a unit of local government in a framework established by the State, and the authority of the Parish Council and the School Board derived from it. Economically the parish was a small area of production subject to the forces of a world-wide market. The stock bred there was sold to buyers in various places in Britain and much of the wool cropped was eventually exported to Italy. Returns from farming here as in the rest of the country depended on production and conditions in other parts of the world, particularly America and Australia. Emigration abroad or to towns in Britain had already been standard practice (though to what extent I do not know; seepage 139) for several generations. Yet though parishioners were involved in a network of relations extending beyond the parish boundaries, their everyday social environment was provided by family and farm and the relatively contained network of parochial relationships. Since 1900, however, events and policies originating outside have abolished the parish as an administrative unit and destroyed the relative containedness of the local network. Relationships between employer and employee have been considerably altered. Parishioners have been drawn into a wider dispersed network stretching beyond the parish, and their relations within the parish have altered accordingly.
