The Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize is awarded annually for the Best Book in British or Irish Rural or Agrarian History. The prize was awarded for the first time in Spring 2017.
2022
Paul Brassley, David Harvey, Matt Lobley, and Michael Winter, The real Agricultural Revolution: The transformation of English farming, 1939–1985 (The Boydell Press)
9781783276356
On presenting the prize, Professor Clare Griffiths said: 'This year’s judges enjoyed many hours of both enjoyable and instructive reading as we worked our way through the submissions. I was joined in these endeavours by my fellow judges Nicola Verdon and Paul Warde. The standard of the submissions was very high this year, but one book did shine through, and we were unanimous in our decision. This is the first occasion on which the prize has been awarded to a book with more than one author. This book will surely prove to be indispensable reading for anyone studying the history of British agriculture in the twentieth century. It is a book which impressed us with its scholarship, its use of original primary research across a great range of source materials, and the way in which it combines attention to the particular and the regional with an ability to contextualise historical experience and tell a wider and more far-reaching story, a story which it sets out with eloquence and engaging argument. Above all, it succeeds in making a significant contribution to the field, not only in adding to our sum of knowledge, but in providing new insights as to how we may interpret and better understand an important period in the history of British farming, and the complicated processes by which changes in agricultural practice take shape as a consequence of the decisions and actions taken by myriad individuals.’
2021
Claas Kirchhelle, Pyrrhic Progress: The History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production (Rutgers University Press)
9780813591476
Presenting the prize, the President of the Society, Paul Brassley, said, 'The year 2020 will be remembered for several bad things, but among the good things that happened was the emergence of a larger crop of Thirsk Prize candidates than ever before: ten books, with authors from six different countries, on topics ranging from early medieval pigs to the problems of the Common Agricultural Policy. It is never easy to decide upon the best in such a diverse field, but in a plague year it was always going to be difficult to ignore a book that deals with the history of a potentially major factor in the next pandemic, given the significance of antimicrobial resistance. Consequently this year’s Thirsk Prize has been awarded to Claas Kirchhelle of University College, Dublin, for Pyrrhic Progress: the History of Antibiotics in Anglo-American Food Production (Rutgers UP), a meticulously researched and compelling analysis of the differences between Britain and the USA in the use and control of antibiotics in agriculture.''
2020
Ros Faith, The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England (Cambridge University Press)
9781108720069
The President of the Society, Paul Brassley, writes: 'As in previous years, it is gratifying to see that 2019 produced an excellent crop of entries for the Thirsk Prize. They were all potential winners, and covered periods ranging from the eighth century to the twenty-first, but the judges were unanimous in awarding the prize to Rosamond Faith for her book, The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England. The book explores the structure of values and obligations in Anglo-Saxon landed society which determined whether behaviour was judged to be right or wrong, and explains how these ideas affected landholding. Concepts of rank, reciprocity, and worth were changed by the Norman Conquest, so by the twelfth century a formerly free peasantry owed regular labour and rent in cash or kind to a new class of landlords. The culmination of a lifetime's work, this book makes comprehensible a huge amount of knowledge, secondary literature and primary sources. Beautifully written, and sensibly priced, it's exactly the kind of book that Joan Thirsk would have enthused about.'
Dr Faith writes in response: 'I should like to thank the Society for this honour. Joan Thirsk and her work have been of great significance for historians of English rural life, and have had a particular resonance for me. She took me under her wing when I was a young mother-of-two struggling to combine academic work with family life and I am sure that it was largely due to her influence that in 1966 the Agricultural History Review published my article on peasant inheritance. When I began to return to academic life many years later it was a conference she organised at the Department for Continuing Education in Oxford, whose papers were published as The English Rural Landscape in 2000, that brought home the importance of being alert to the ways that the local landscapes influenced farming and farmers' lives. That approach became a template for my contribution to the book that Debby Banham and I wrote on Anglo-Saxon farming and dedicated to her. I don't know what Joan would have made of The Moral Economy of the Countryside but I do remember a conversation from some sixty years ago in which we both deplored the breach between the study of Anglo-Saxon and later medieval England. I hope she would think that I had done my best to take a longer view.'
2019
Paul Warde, The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, c.1500–1870 (Cambridge University Press)
9781316584767
Presenting the prize, the President of the Society, Dr John Broad, said, ‘There were more entries for this year’s Joan Thirsk prize than ever before, the standard was high, and the judges found a great deal of interest in them all. Nevertheless, they were unanimous in awarding the prize to Paul Warde for his lively and well-written book, The Invention of Sustainability, which uses the printed literature of Britain and many other European countries to show how ideas of a sustainable rural economy – forestry as well as agriculture – developed from the early modern period through to the mid-nineteenth century. Its concern is with agricultural writers and with European-wide linkages, and its success is both relevant to contemporary concerns and apt: these are themes that Joan Thirsk discussed and wrote about throughout her life.’
2018
Briony McDonagh, Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830 (Routledge)
978-1409456025
Presenting the prize, the President of the Society, Dr John Broad said: ‘The excellence of the field for the Thirsk Prize this year was such that all submissions would be worthy winners in a normal year. We found it extremely difficult to rank the books and indeed each of the four was ranked first or equal first by one of the judges. However we were ultimately unanimous in our decision to award the prize to Briony McDonagh for her book Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830. She used both national samples and local case studies to illuminate how female landowners could be independent managers of their estates and shapers of the landscape. I am sure that Joan Thirsk would have warmed to both the subject matter and the quality of the argument and writing.’
2017
Peter Jones, Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology and Nature, 1750-1840 (Oxford University Press)
978-0-19-871607-5
Announcing the winner, Dr John Broad, President of the BAHS, said, ‘Since January, the judges have been reading the entries ... All the entries were of a high standard and worthy of serious consideration. Interestingly, three of them had a significant ‘transnational’ comparative element which we enjoyed and felt was well done. Although we had marginally different views of the merits of each book, were were unanimous in awarding the prize to Peter Jones. This is a book Joan Thirsk would have empathised with and enjoyed, since one of her last essays, “The World Wide Farming Web”, covered some of the same issues of the transmission of agricultural ideas in a slightly earlier period. Peter’s book ranges right across Europe from the the British isles to Germany and beyond, and from Scandinavia to Spain, tracing the spread of ideas, the interactions between them, and using illuminating case studies to show the practical implications. It is a pleasure to congratulate him on his achievement.’
