ABSTRACT
Early Victorian England was the home of earnest and practical men. In one far-flung community - the township of Grey's Forest, on the edge of the Cheviots - the population of forty-four was divided among six hamlets. The growing demand for meat and dairy produce from a larger, more affluent urban population helped to ensure the prosperity of the livestock producer. The new railway network speeded up the dispatch of livestock to market, thereby avoiding the serious weight losses and difficult travel incurred in sending them 'on the hoof' or by canal. Given the economic pressures faced by rural families in the middle of the nineteenth century - even after the small improvements in living standards. The close-knit, narrow, rural world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had vanished for ever under the impact of the acquisitive drives and class divisions which characterized industrial society.
