The Midland Peasant, one of Hoskins’ most admired works, portrays, with the aid of local records, a monumentally stable peasant society, which greatly strengthened its roots during the 16th and 17th centuries. English agrarian life in this period is seen through Wigston Magna in Leicestershire, one of the largest villages in the Midlands, and the free peasantry were the largest single class within it. An open-field village of the ‘classic’ type, its three fields remained unchanged until their disappearance in 1766.