The estates, villages and farms of the English countryside were once the mainspring of economic life and support of the government, responsive to the needs of the nation. Yet rural England was itself constantly having to adjust; to demographic change, famines, epidemics and not least to the eventual predominance of the industrial state. Enclosure eventually swept away the traditional framework of farming, and a surplus of rural workers sought a better life in the cities or abroad. The village became a backwater, a disregarded symbol of things past, valued only by those who hankered after rustic nostalgia. This history traces this fundamental change, the rise and fall of rural England from medieval times up to WW2...