Commoners : Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Past and Present Publications)

This is one of the most important and original contributions to English rural history to be published in the past generation. Winner of the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society in 1994, Commoners challenges the view that England had no peasantry or that it had disappeared before industrialization: rather it shows that common rights and petty landholding shaped social relations in English villages, and that their loss at enclosure sharpened social antagonisms and imprinted on popular culture a pervasive sense of loss.