Commoners were not labourers. Their defenders and critics agreed on this. Some laboured, some earned wages, but even they were independent of the wage. Their lands and common rights gave them a way of life quite unlike that of the agricultural labourers, outworkers or smallholders they might become at enclosure. Defining exactly what commoners were is difficult but it is important. They were peasants. I call them that reluctantly, but necessarily. The value of the name is that it emphasizes a continuity with the past, a continuity based on the occupancy of land and rights in the common-field system.

There are other words. As an alternative to peasant I could call commoners ‘cottagers’ as some contemporaries did. But in common-right terms ‘cottager’ has a very specific meaning; to use it here would be to exclude many commoners who were not cottagers. Moreover, for all that Gregory King used it in 1688 to describe the very poor, cottager has a late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury ring to it.