Many different motives, intellectual and personal, can inspire research and writing on local history. Much work from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries has been based on an affection for a native area and its people, or on the desire to trace the impact of dramatic ‘outside events’ such as the Civil War on a particular locality. Since the Second World War, local history has often served as a laboratory in which general historical theories could be tested. The county has been a logical unit for assessing the various theories about the fortunes of landed élites, summed up as the ‘gentry controversy’. Village studies have been used to assess demographic patterns or processes of social and cultural differentiation. This present work is influenced, distantly it may sometimes seem, by the approach of Alan Everitt, who developed the concept of the ‘county community’, and who, like others of the ‘Leicester school’ of local historians has emphasised the importance of seeing local communities of all types as entities with their own character and integrity, not simply as arenas for ‘national events’ or collections of manageable sources for the testing of general theories.

In the course of the over-long gestation of this study of Warwickshire, I have become more self-conscious or critical about the use of such phrases as the ‘local’ or the ‘county community’. The complacent use of these terms has too often meant the existence of a community is assumed rather than demonstrated or analysed.