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1845 to 1850 greatly reduced the yield. He estimates that in three years “the potato crop was short of its normal return by 33,75 and 37 per cent”. In 1847 the yield was good, but because of the shortage of seed potatoes, little was planted. This shortfall of food, he shows, had no parallel in Western Europe. The Great Famine fell upon an island economically backward when compared with much of the rest of the British Isles. But Ireland was not backward in many other ways compared with either Great Britain or the rest of Europe. In number of doctors and hospitals, it compared favourably with Britain, and the quality of the medical profession was extremely high. It was simply incapable of dealing with the vast numbers who were infected with disease or simply starved. Sir Peter Froggat points out that Irish doctors did their duty: over 500 doctors and pupils died out of about 2,600 between 1843 and 1848. Unlike England, Christine Kinealy writes, Ireland had no history of Poor Relief. However, the New English Poor Law of 1834 prompted a system in Ireland, based upon the workhouse and excluding outdoor relief. It was set up remarkably quickly, but like the medical profession was quite overwhelmed by the numbers impoverished in the Famine.

Ireland’s woes did not finish with the end of the famine. Migration became permanently established, and the potato became less central to the diet, but even so. as T. P. O’Neill demonstrates, the still densely populated parts of the west were on the verge of famine three times in the 1890s when the potato harvest failed. A penultimate chapter by Crawford, a nutritionist, provides a valuable account of modern views on famine, nutrition and the relationship between disease and malnutrition. Ninety per cent of the deaths in the Great Famine were due to disease, but over 100,000 died from marasmus. dropsy and starvation. L. A. Clarkson provides a short finale to the book.

Most historical geographers will find much of interest in these two books. It is perhaps surprising that two volumes upon the subject of famine should devote relatively little space to the supply of food, although this perhaps reflects the lack of reliable statistical information upon food output in the period before the 1860s.

University of Shejield DAVID GRIGG

ADRIAAN VERHULST, Prkcis d’Histoire Rurale de la Belgique (Brussels: Editions de 1’UniversitC de Bruxelles, 1990. Pp. 224. FB 750)

Verhulst is well known for his Histoire dupaysage rural en Flandre de l’ipoque romaine au XVIII’ sikle (Brussels 1966) and for his role in founding the Belgian Centre for Rural History in the following year. During the first quarter of 1983 he commuted from his department of economic and social history in Ghent to occupy the Franqui Chair at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles where he delivered a series of lectures analysing the rural history of Belgium and its adjacent pays in the southern Netherlands, French Flanders and northern Lorraine. In reworked form his presentations make up the substance of this Prkcis which concentrates on conditions between the sixth century A.D. and the late eighteenth century. Subsequent changes are reviewed with extreme brevity. Over this broad time span much more is known about Flanders than about Wallonia and this spatial disparity is reflected throughout the book.

Verhulst’s affection for the long medieval period is demonstrated in the first three chapters which summarize the question of settlement continuity from Roman times and then depict the great adventure of land clearance and agricultural advance (alongside urban growth and trading activity) during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The chronicle of land winning orchestrated by churchmen, nobles and associations of peasants evokes a parallel story in France which Marc Bloch told almost sixty years ago. Detailed analysis of the reclamation of the Zwin floodplain downstream of Bruges between 1150 and 1400 offered one kind of model, another being exemplified by the clearance of heaths and scrubby woodlands in the Kempenland. More land meant more food and cereal output was further boosted by innovative rotations in various parts of the Belgian north, Indeed, agricultural improvement is shown to have been essentially a

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Flemish matter, with Wallonia lagging as an area of belated dtfrichement into which crop innovations were gradually diffused as surplus Flemish farm labour moved south.

After the medieval triumphs of Flemish farming, Verhulst charts not only the famines, rising prices and settlement desertion of the fourteenth century but also the continuing refinement of crop rotations and animal husbandry which inspired many generations of English visitors. Warfare, disease and rising taxation during the “long seventeenth century” sapped the Belgian countryside of its vitality until about 1730 when vigorous demographic growth began, accompanied by accelerating land fragmentation, con- tinued clearance of commonlands, cultivation of potatoes and the rise of numerous rural crafts. This new phase of dynamism was poised on a fragile base. As human numbers grew, poverty became widespread in the intensively cultivated Flemish countryside, with the situation deteriorating sharply around 1820 as rural craft activities were overtaken by the industrializing ports and the rapidly-expanding coal-based communities of Wallonia. Twenty years later conditions worsened once again as the potato famine of the 1840s locked the Flemish countryside into protracted economic depression from which it was not to escape for a further hundred years, by which time the well-being of Wallonia had floundered. The social, economic and cultural implications of this regional disparity remain insinuated into every aspect of Belgian life.

The changing fortunes of rural Flanders, the courage of its innovative small farmers and the hardships they weathered over more than a thousand years form the essential content of this carefully crafted book. A very extensive bibliography of items in Dutch and French (and occasionally in other languages) invites further exploration, and a collection of photographs displays the legacy of centuries of landscape transformation. This most useful synthesis is complemented by two dozen line drawings which range from professionally drafted maps and graphs to bizarre depictions of afforestation (Figure 22) and potato production (Figure 23), with them latter being shown as a heap of potatoes rising steeply between 1720 and 1750 before entering a phase of more modest growth in the second half of the century!

University College London HUGHCLOUT

P. M. JONES, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xvii + 306. E27.50 and E9.95 paperback)

This book draws its inspiration from two sources. Its conceptual concern is to examine critically the work of Georges Lefebvre who, some sixty years ago, placed the peasantry at the heart of the Revolution in his Paysans du Nord pendant la RPvolution Frangaise (Paris 1924). To what extent, Jones asks, should his ideas be revised and reformulated in the light of recent research? Alongside this conceptual structure the book is richly illustrative of the author’s second source of inspiration, namely his own careful, sensitive and evocative accounts of peasant communities in central and southern France published over the last twelve years or so. In combining these two elements Jones has produced a trenchant and thought-provoking book about the place of the peasantry in the revolutionary struggles between 1787 and 1800.

The first two chapters of the book outline the tremendous diversity of rural France at the end of the ancien rkgime. It is indeed almost impossible to speak of a peasantry, rather only of peasantries, each with their own structures and character. The extent to which ancien rkgime France was “smitten with a socio-economic malaise” is clear from Jones’ analysis of the origins of the Revolution. Particular emphasis is placed on regional differences for, as his examination of the extent of harvest dues shows, there was extreme unevenness in the rate of seigneurial surplus extraction across the country. The third chapter looks in detail at the events of 1789 from the perspective of the peasantry and serves to underline the importance of the widespread agrarian distress of the preceding year in fostering discontent and keeping the peasantry precariously balanced “between hope and fear”.