Alternative Agriculture: A History

People like to believe in a past golden age of `traditional' English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. Yet crops from the past such as flax, hemp, rapeseed, and woad, are gradually reappearing in our `modern' countryside, which may in the past have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine.

Joan Thirsk reveals how the forces which drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture - a glut of mainstream meat and cereal crops; changing patterns of diet; the needs of medicine - have striking parallels with earlier periods of our history. Besides providing us with fascinating images of past lives (Catherine of Aragon introducing the concept of fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; the gentry of the 1600s cultivating artichoke gardens in the hope of producing more male heirs), the book warns us that decisions should not be made in a historical vacuum. We can still find solutions to today's problems in the hard-won experience of people from the past.