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The article presents researches in the field of rural history carried out by science and educational institutions in Great Britain, i. e. universities as well as by formal and informal history science groups and societies. The article touches upon some problematic aspects, such as the organizational structure of researches in the history of the British villages, respective institution, research questionnaire concerning rural history as well as the main historiographical stages and achievements in the 20th century English rural history. First of all, the author presents universities' research programmes and their too specialized research directions of rural history which were mainly followed by Cambridge and Reading Universities. Cambridge University published a series of works under the title England's Rural History. A special mention should be made of The British Agricultural History Society, established in 1952 and still existing, which rallies different research centres and university researchers to investigate agricultural history, rural history including. The analyzed studies on rural history as well as researchers' preferences allow to claim that in modern historiography the social context becomes very prominent, i. e. agricultural history, development of ecological awareness, folklore researches, conventional culture and religion, rural literature and community, landscape researches, archeology and materialistic culture, ethnography, anthropology and rural sociology, women's role in a rural community, rural and urban relations, the role of community authorities etc. Special attention in the article is given to the prominent rural history researchers James Edwin Thorold-Rogers, Fridrich Seebohm, Sir Rowland Edmund Prothero, George Fussel, H. P. R. Finberg, Irena Joana Thirsk as well as to their contribution to the investigations of the British rural historiography. Retrospective evaluation of the achievements of the British agricultural history in the second half of the 20th century allows to claim that researchers were more concerned with the issues of villages than country estates; the importance of the fundamental processes of the 9th-10th centuries in rural genesis has been ascertained, a new approach to rural-urban relationship presented as well as market challenges and rural response to them displayed. Finally, the article introduces the existing polemics in the British historiography on the research object of agricultural history and rural history as well as the directions of the sociocultural or economic history, i. e. "stories about people" or stories about "cows and ploughs". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]