‘T he Justice and the Mare′s Ale is two books rather than one, and two rather good books at that. One of them is a work of detailed local history...giving a blow by blow account of the criminal careers and eventual comeuppance of a dozen Westmorland burglars and coin–clippers in the early 1680s. The other is a sequel to The Origins of English Individualism , a second instalment of Macfarlane′s argument that the peculiarities of the English are very peculiar indeed, and that pace the sociological orthodoxy England never was a "pre–modern" or pre–capitalist or peasant...