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“... on the Fens of East Anglia,’ runs a recent press report. Perhaps the reporter had already read Joan Thirsk’s new book, since he refers to the closure of the last woad factory in the region, at Parson Drove near Wisbech, ‘80 years ago’, which is a fair rendering of the 1914 demolition date given by Thirsk (who ...”

“... as relics – Malthus did, if he saw them at all. But as the pioneering agrarian historians Joan Thirsk and Jeanette Neeson showed, well into the late 18th century they remained vital parts of efficient, even flourishing communal agricultural systems that were being destroyed by enclosure. On other continents they survived European colonialism and ...”