The first study to describe 100 years of pre-enclosure agricultural systems throughout England from one of the foremost authorities on medieval field systems.

The later Middle Ages was an overwhelmingly rural world, with probably three out of four households reliant upon farming for a living. Yet conventional accounts of the period rarely do justice to the variety of ways in which the land was managed and worked. The thirteen essays collected in this volume draw upon the abundant documentary evidence of the period to explore that diversity. In the process they engage with the issue of classification - without which effective generalisation is impossible - and offer a series of solutions to that particularly thorny methodological challenge. Only through systematic and objective classification is it possible to differentiate between and map different field systems, husbandry types, and land-use categories. That, in turn, makes it possible to consider and evaluate the relative roles of soils and topography, institutional structures, and commercialised market demand in shaping farm enterprise both during the period of mounting population before the Black Death and the long era of demographic decline that followed it. What emerges is an agrarian world more commercialised, differentiated, and complex than is usually appreciated, whose institutional and agronomic contours shaped the course of agricultural development for centuries to come.

Commons are an urban as well as rural phenomenon, designed to provide grazing for the draft animals of tradesmen ("a green precursor to the carpark") as well as to serve as a civic amenity. This beautifully illustrated book is the result of an English Heritage project to survey the archaeology of surviving town commons to get a picture of their historic importance and to promote their conservation. The book presents the findings, tracing the origins of the commons and how they relate to the urban landscape, as well as examining the many uses of commons, primarily agricultural, but also including industrial functions such as quarrying, serving as military training grounds, and as open spaces for entertainment and public meetings. A gazetteer lists the known historical town commons, together with their current state of survival as recorded by the project.

Obsolete old words from seventeenth-century English villages reflect the realities of working-class life, exhausting labor, dirt, bizarre foods, magic, horses, outrageous sexism, feudal duties. New words, first appearing in print 1650–1800, reflect a middle-class culture very different from an earlier courtly culture, interested in money, coffee-houses, and self-fulfillment. The book contains chapters on pre-industrial and middle-class culture, the scientific revolution, and semantic change. They give strong evidence that new words and the new senses of old words played a key role in the British Enlightenment, its links with quantification and natural science, its tendencies towards reorganization and democracy, its redefinitions and revitalizations of women’s roles, social stereotypes, the public sphere, and the very concepts of individualism, sociability, and civilization itself.