ALTHOUGH recent decades have seen the emergence of ‘memory studies’ in the humanities and social sciences, ‘studies of senses of the past in early modern England have been almost monolithically elitist in their focus. … Much of early modern popular memory remains an undiscovered country’ (29–30). From its bourne, however, a traveller returns, armed with fascinating riches of information. Andy Wood, astoundingly, has studied for The Memory of the People some 20,000 depositions by ordinary people in national and regional archives (38, n 135), and is thus singularly well-placed to argue the particulars of the case that, whilst the upper classes cultivated a sense of national history, ‘the local was the most important site within which popular memory was constructed’ (12). Documented here from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, popular memory of the local conceived its landscape substantially as a ‘taskscape’ (198), the ground of arduous material subsistence. ‘Millennia of relatively dense settlement ensured that early modern people occupied a humanized landscape of fields, hedges, ditches, roads, lanes, churches, dwellings, ruins and crosses’ (235). As generations ploughed, fished, and gathered in this accumulated landscape, locality thus signified a complex and highly particular nexus of inherited jurisdictions and property boundaries (individual and collective), of labour rights and obligations, of resources and communal use-rights. Together these created ‘a sense of place that was grounded in common practice’ (105), produced custom and customary law, and came to be codified in common law. Historically, custom proved ‘an especially sensitive discursive field within which subaltern groups felt able to make effective claims to land [and] power’ (289), for the story here is one of a shifting and hard-fought balance of power between lords and commoners. When the Black Death precipitated feudalism’s collapse and the emergence of a fluid market for labour and tenancies, peasants shifted the language of custom from Latin into English, and forced popular rights into custumals. From around 1500, changed circumstances enabled the counter-movement of fiscal seigneurialism, as lords and gentry enclosed common land, challenged tenant claims to low rents, and denied use-rights. Customary boundaries and entitlements were therefore assiduously memorized by every fresh generation of commoners, for defensive deposition in disputes. The process of state formation compelled gradual creation of written parish archives, textual records so important that they had often to be kept in elaborately locked chests within the parish church—whence they could no longer be stolen by land-hungry gentry and lords (260–271). Erosion of oral culture by the domination of the written word was thus not, as often claimed, the triumph of an intrinsically oppressive state medium, for the written document was produced through collaboration with the customary law of the commoners. ‘There was nothing fundamental about the written word that made it the bearer of elite state interests’ (250). The work of surveyors, however, was clearly redefining land in terms favourable to the interests of the upper-class employer, imposing a cadastral episteme, selling off assets such as woodland and restricting access to resources hitherto held in common. Locals responded with evasiveness, memory haze, or even threats. ‘[I]s not the field it selfe a goodly Map for the Lord to looke upon, better than a painted paper?’ remonstrated tenants, whose rents stood to be raised. ‘The worlde was merier, before measurings were used then it hath beene since’ (242).