A century after its publication, R. H. Tawney's The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century remains as imaginative, spirited and passionate as ever. For a long time, the book was neglected by early modern historians. The dismissal of The Agrarian Problem, often by those unacquainted with it, grew from Eric Kerridge's denunciation of it in 1969. Adopting a schoolmasterly tone, Kerridge chided Tawney for spending too little time in the archives (‘Time which he might have given to studying history was devoted instead to the Fabian Society and the Labour Party’) and condemned The Agrarian Problem as mere socialist propaganda. More recently, the tables have turned. The last twenty years have seen a flowering of work on customary law, much of it conducted under the influence of E. P. Thompson's 1991 book Customs in Common. This work has recaptured some of the qualities of The Agrarian Problem, most notably its recognition of the political characteristics of custom. Tawney characterised the politics of custom as follows: