Steve Hindle’s study takes its place as the pre-eminent microhistory of an early modern English community. The book’s strengths are both archival and methodological. Hindle benefits from the unusually rich papers of Sir Richard Newdigate (1644–1710) who kept estate and household accounts, memos to himself on estate management, and a census of householders undertaken over three days in December of 1684 by a jury of substantial residents. Additionally, Hindle makes expert use of a vast but more usual range of parochial, manorial, household, legal, juridical, and ecclesiastical records to reconstruct what seems to be every possible detail of the lives of Chilvers Coton’s 780 residents. His method departs from studies that paint a composite picture of a community to stress, instead, the different experiences of the community’s diverse residents. He therefore takes the reader on a walk with the census jurors around the parish, stopping at thirteen residences to reconstruct the familial, economic, political, and religious lives of the inhabitants. Each reconstruction constitutes a chapter, space that allows for a detailed consideration of specific people, all placed within their historical context but presented as fully distinguished individuals.

The people chosen for biographies cover a range of social niches. The middling sorts are represented by the vicar, a victualler, a carpenter, an upwardly mobile miller, and a downwardly mobile yeoman whose son nevertheless became a fellow of the Royal Society. Local industry in mining and metal work is represented by a blacksmith, a nailer, and a collier; the diversity of rural handicrafts by a silk-weaver and a carpenter; and the range of agrarian labor by a husbandman, a bricklayer, a laborer, and the servants of Newdigate’s palatial home of Arbury Hall. Each life story balances attention to the particularities of the individual with the social structures within which they moved. Henry Beighton III, for example, was typical of the declining smallholder, slowly squeezed out as debts mounted, and the Newdigate family gradually monopolized village land. But Beighton was hardly without agency. Although he held leases in local mines and came from a respectable family long-established in the village, he “entirely lacked the qualities of caution and prudence” and managed to die in bankruptcy (297). He brazenly pursued an extra-marital affair with a poor collier’s wife and thereby, Hindle suggests, “forfeited the trust of his neighbors” (296). Lacking local goodwill and credit, he resorted to increasingly desperate schemes and left his widow scrambling.

Hindle embeds an interest in personality and contingency with careful attention to the changing fortunes of particular trades, industries, and social types. Chapters are expert short histories of the early modern English economy seen from the perspective of one mode of work. Chapter 6 on Francis Rason, victualler, explains the role of alehouses in village life and their contributions to sociability amid recurrent suspicions that they fostered riot and waste. Chapter 9 on Christopher Smith, nailor, is a masterful little study of alienated labor in a trade with increasing dependence on local mining but also growing national networks of supply and distribution, all organized by increasingly powerful bourgeois merchants. Every archival scrap that documents Smith’s humble life is squeezed in the service of placing him within the Warwickshire landscape, where agrarian labor and the putting-out industry existed side by side.

The book’s conclusion skillfully synthesizes the agrarian and the proto-industrial strands of this village’s story, showing the connections between the decline of the smallholder and the increasingly “immiserated proletariat” working as ribbon weavers in a “punctured pastoral land with coalpits so extensive that its agricultural value was decimated” (422). There is a persistent interplay between the locality and the broader world, as Chilvers Coton was a unique place but not a “self-contained parochial community” because there were “innumerable external influences: too much population turnover, too many exogamous marriages, too many outsiders claiming seats at All Saints, too many parishioners worshipping elsewhere, too many inhabitants with supply chains and commercial linkages stretching across the parish boundary” (411). As with the best microhistories, a focus on the particular and the local allows for insight into the general and the global.

What do these particulars add up to? Hindle is less interested in historiographical novelty than exemplifying known trends through the lived experiences of individual people in specific places. These are “scenes” rather than arguments, with most assertions consistent with stories found in the Agrarian History of England and Wales or Keith Wrightson’s more recent surveys. The goal is to recover, evoke, and empathize: to “walk the streets of Chilvers Coton in the imagination, reconstructing the spatial construction of the lived experience in a seventeenth-century rural community in unprecedented detail” (407). This aims to show how actions and behaviors, the “bounded rationality of ordinary men, women, and children,” shaped the eighteenth century’s new “industrious revolution” and consumer society (422).

Such an agenda, along with the self-sufficient nature of the chapters, make this an ideal study for teaching advanced students. But there are few concessions made to the nonexpert reader, with technical terms and historical events left unexplained. Historians might find their own favorite themes underdeveloped; this reviewer wanted to know more about the local environment, how the hard times of the mid-1680s related to the harsh weather of those years, and how the “chaos and contingency” (270) of colliery expansion fit within the national process of England’s transition to fossil fuels. The thirty-page bibliography is impressive but omits manuscripts, leaving readers interested in Newdigate’s unique archive to comb through hundreds of notes. Beyond such quibbles, however, Hindle’s study of Chilvers Coton is a monument of social history, drawing on meticulous archival research, a wide and deep understanding of the period’s economic transformations, and perhaps most of all, a humane empathy for the humble people whose lives and labors made a new world.