County boundaries are no guides to social and economic characteristics. Although Warwickshire was a comparatively small county, it was split into several regions which often had more in common with the economies of neighbouring counties than they had with other parts of Warwickshire. This diversity is not simply a matter to be noted as ‘background’ but was an important influence on the social and political character of the county. All sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers agreed that the county was divided into two distinct parts: the forest region of ‘Arden’, north of the river Avon, and the fielden region to the south. Leland, for example, wrote:

The fielden was an area of mixed farming: barley, wheat and peas were grown, sheep kept and some dairying carried on though not on the same scale as in the north of the county. To the south-east of this region lay the great sheep pastures on the heavy clay soils of the limestone belt, where the Spencers of Wormleighton and Althorpe in Northamptonshire had their estates.