The history of rural landownership at the village level has been dominated by a series of particular problems. At one end of the spectrum the process of estate-building by gentry and aristocracy, the transition from feudal manorial tenures to compact tenanted estates, and the creation of ‘closed’ or estate villages, has been relatively well documented. At the other the ‘problem’ of the disappearance of the small landowner, prompted a century ago as the rural tradition began to become a minority interest, has shifted away from its original focus on the owner-occupied family farm. It has increasingly concentrated on the fate of the smallholder and cottager and more recently on the interplay of landownership and common rights. This particular emphasis has tended to narrow research to the post-1780 parliamentary enclosure period where sources such as land tax, enclosure awards, and tithe returns make nominal linkages more feasible at a lower wealth level in society, and on a year-to-year basis.

This article concentrates not on the smallholder and cottager, but on the farming community – men (and occasionally women) making a living from holdings of 30 acres, or one to one and a half yardlands and upwards – and the choices and decisions they faced owning or tenanting lands. It examines the literature concerning communities in a broad band of central England south of the Pennines and north of the Thames. Detailed examples will be taken from mid- and northern-Buckinghamshire villages, an area of open fields but early and piecemeal enclosure, in the years between 1620 and 1800.