ABSTRACT
This study of the rural past is essentially a group of essays dealing with some of the major aspects of rural society as it developed through the centuries, and with the economic and agricultural setting in which that society moved. In some degree the choice of the topics is a personal one, reflecting the interests and knowledge of the writer; but in some degree also the material has been chosen with the purpose of providing the reader with a rounded picture, and, so far as is possible, a realistic and informed one. That picture can be only an interim view, and the conclusions drawn from it must be provisional in nature, for there can never be a final word in history. Research continually produces new material which in time modifies established views, and the interests of historians themselves change over time, influenced in part by fashion and by the issues which affect their own immediate society. This book would have been written very differently when the author was himself a student, and no doubt it will be very different again if attempted after the lapse of another thirty or forty years.
