ABSTRACT
The basis of the economy was, of course, open-field husbandry, the subject with which anyone studying Midland peasant economy must inevitably begin, as Hoskins did in his pioneering essay 'The Leicestershire Farmer in the Sixteenth Century'. The poorer common-field farmer, on the other hand, was not only confined to the common fields of his own village, but was also being held back in the economy of the old husbandry. Having identified the interests of the different classes dependent on the common fields, an examination of the uses made of the different resources there will help establish what effect the changes in the farming economy had on the common-field farming system. Enclosure, population changes and the emergence of a poverty problem are three aspects of the fundamental changes in the economy. The development constituted progress away from peasant subsistence husbandry, with no more than its traditional market involvement, towards truly commercial farming.
