In general, local historians have confined themselves, since the discipline became respectable, to the economic setting in which local communities, at the village level at least, lived their lives. In a famous inaugural lecture, the study of local history was defined as that of the ‘origin, growth, decline, and fall of a local community’. Professor Finberg in that definition did not intend only economic historians to fasten onto the magic words ‘growth’ and ‘decline’. Indeed, he intended local history to develop as a discipline which prevented the tendency of the national historian ‘to lose sight of the human person’, and even quoted Chesterton on Notting Hill, to defend the local historian from the obvious charge of only chronicling small beer: ‘Notting Hill … is a rise or high ground of the common earth, on which men have built houses to live, in which they are born, fall in love, pray, marry, and die. Why should I think it absurd?’ It has therefore been a source of surprise to me that local historians have almost always interpreted that initial brief in economic terms. We have many studies now of the gentry, landowners, tenants, village economies, open fields, of the way, in fact that most ordinary people, in ordinary villages before enclosure earned their bread-and-butter, or rather lard.