I don't know anything about agricultural returns but in 2002 I did some
research into the history of a Union. At least one file in the PRO
(now National Archives at Kew) had papers relating to the Henley Union,
which was the one in which I was mainly interested. The file is
MH12/9691.
Correspondence between Councils (England & Wales) and the Local
Government Board before 1900 is in the series MH12 at the National
Archives but according to an index which I saw in 2002 there are no
papers in the series after 1900 as they were lost through enemy action
at Elstree and by fire at Brighton.
Brian Read
On 7 Aug 2008, at 12:20, Gregory, Ian wrote:
>> Dear All,
>>
>> I am involved in a project on the impact of the railways on rural
>> society in the period before the First World War. As part of these we
>> want to use the Agricultural Returns which annually published
>> parish-level details of the amounts of crops and livestock in every
>> parish in England & Wales. The parish returns are available in the
>> National Archives as MAF68 but if we were to digitise them we would
>> have to be very selective because of the volume of data. The stats are
>> also available at county-level in various published sources but these
>> are too aggregate to be useful.
>> In a review of L. Napolitan's "A century of agricultural statistics"
>> published by TW Fletcher in the Economic History Review in 1969 there
>> is a reference to the Agricultural Returns also being available at
>> Poor Law Union level. He states "The historian's continuing need for
>> the specific and the concrete is to a degree catered for in the
>> pre-1914 volumes. But in the last resort he will have to explore the
>> original Parish Returns, which, incidentally, were usefully aggregated
>> into Poor Law Unions down to 1929, but of the existence of these the
>> centenary volume gives no indication." Working with data at Union
>> level would be manageable but we have not been able to track these
>> down or to get in to get in touch with TW Fletcher.
>>
>> I am wondering if anybody knows whether these data are really
>> available and, if so, where we can access them.
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>> Ian Gregory
>>
>>
>>
>> Digital Humanities
>> c/o Department of History
>> Lancaster University
>> Lancaster
>> LA1 4YG
>>
>> T: +44 (0)1524 594967
>> F: +44 (0)1524 846102
>> E: [log in to unmask]
>>
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