Challenging the view that England had no peasantry or that it had disappeared before industrialization, this text shows that common right and petty landholding shaped social relations in English villages. Their loss at enclosure sharpened social antagonisms and imprinted a pervasive sense of loss.

Using a combination of archaeology, anthropology and ethnohistory, this book traces the rise of one Indian group, the Chicacoans. By presenting a case study of the Chicacoans from AD 200 to the early 17th century, the author offers readers a window onto the development of Algonquian culture.

Much of what we currently know about the ancient Maya concerns the activities of the elites who ruled the societies and left records of their deeds carved on the monumental buildings and sculptures that remain as silent testimony to their power and status. But what do we know of the common folk who labored to build the temple complexes and palaces and grew the food that fed all of Maya society? This pathfinding book marshals a wide array of archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence to offer the fullest understanding to date of the lifeways of ancient Maya commoners. Senior and emerging scholars contribute case studies that examine such aspects of commoner life as settlement patterns, household organization, and subsistence practices. Their reports cover most of the Maya area and the entire time span from Preclassic to Postclassic. This broad range of data helps resolve Maya commoners from a faceless mass into individual actors who successfully adapted to their social environment and who also held primary responsibility for producing the food and many other goods on which the whole Maya society depended.

The Adequate Commoner for the Pathfinder RPG is meant for distribution channels and presents a new perspective on what is probably the most overlooked character in any game: the Commoner NPC class. Now commoners can be more than just faces in a crowd and cannon fodder. They can be the player characters! Includes the Gear Commoner or Mythic Commoner, as well as commoner jobs, New Commoner Feats and Traits, equipment, weapons, improvised traps, and more! Rounding out such goodies are tactics and suggestions for running a commoner character game, as well as Cooks' Day Out, a beginning adventure for commoner characters just hoping to survive the day. ... and there's more yet! So, if you're bored with the exceptional and fed-up with the extraordinary, how about giving the mundane a try? We promise, your commoners will never seem common again.

This book puts the debate on commons, commoners, and the disappearance of both throughout early modern and modern western Europe in a new light, through new approaches and innovative methodologies. Tine De Moor links the historical debate about the long-term evolution of commons to the present-day debates on common-pool resources.

Philip Larkin's favourite novel? That might be an exaggeration but it is one that not only exercised a lasting fascination for him but was also an influence on his own novel writing. Larkin famously wrote about it in a 1982 Spectator article (republished in Required Writing) under the wonderfully apt title ' The Traffic in the Distance'. Despite Larkin's enthusiasm The Senior Commoner, until now, has never been reissued, and although reprinted once, second-hand copies have been fabulously rare. The Senior Commoner was first published in 1934. It is set in Eton College (dubbed Ayrton in the novel) but is not remotely in the tradition of the English School story. To quote Larkin, 'There is no story, or hardly any: the book is a huge structure of tiny episodes, designed to portray a complex institution at all levels.' Whilst, interestingly, there might stylistic similarities with Henry Green and the early novels of Anthony Powell (all three authors were at Eton at the same time, though Julian Hall was two years junior to the other two) this novel very much has its own voice, indeed, Larkin found it unique. He was attracted to its 'brittle plangency of style' and its 'studied circumstantial irrelevancy' and concluded, 'Nor have I ever read another book in the least like it.'

This study explores how Tibetans manoeuvre within two contradictory value systems - those of old Tibet and the new People's Republic of China - balancing between ideals and pragmatism. More specifically, it asks how it is that the social categories of pre-communist Lhasa persist and are relevant in daily life despite decades of Chinese rule and the comprehensive restructuring of Tibetan society.