This book is an extended case study of a family and its estates in midland England. It demonstrates how great landowning families and their dynastic ambitions moulded the rural economy, shaped the landscape of England, and interacted with rural society and village communities to produce effects that are still strongly visible in the twenty-first century. Modern estimates suggest that by the late nineteenth century elite landowners (the aristocracy and gentry) had accumulated estates that covered over half of the cultivable land area of the country. They managed a panoply of ancient tenures involving copyholds and manorial courts that were the direct descendants of medieval villeinage. However, early modern landowners gradually altered tenures towards modern contractual arrangements especially in the south and east of England. Leases for short or medium terms (up to twenty-one years), or increasingly year-to-year tenancies, replaced lifehold arrangements, fines, heriots, and labour service requirements, and farm rents more closely reflected the real profitability of the land for those who worked it.

The long transition from medieval patterns of rural landholding and social relations to the great estates of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England involved a variety of changes in countryside. Modernising estate management practices significantly changed landlord–tenant relationships as well as tenures. Over thirty-five years ago, Lawrence Stone demonstrated how the great Tudor landowners exploited their estates more intensively to increase income in the face of high inflation. They attempted to assert new forms of property right over dormant or undefined aspects of rural land and custom.