Clifton-upon-Dunsmore, near Rugby, gave its name to a parish which included the villages and manors of Brownsover and Newton on the other side of the Avon. The following account is concerned mainly with Clifton itself, the village and manor, not the parish. A very full set of documents has enabled us not only to describe in considerable detail the seventeenth-century enclosure by agreement and reconstruct the enclosure map, but also to attempt a sketch of the village community.

The history of the village has two features of special interest for economic and social historians: a serious epidemic, probably plague, in 1604, and the enclosure of the common fields and former demesne land in 1650. It is commonly believed that both plague and enclosure could do great damage to the life of a community; in Clifton we have them both within half a century. Moreover, thirteen years after the enclosure, the Whitneys, who had been lords of the manor for three centuries, sold their estates to the rising Bridgeman family, and most of the villagers got a new landlord. The village, however, seems to have been resilient in these vicissitudes.