Inheritantly the mass of the ordinary population are not described in the written documents which were published starting with the Domesday Book in 1086. Various "Visitations to County Name" were published throughout the Middle Ages and several of these survive in various locations, and these include family trees or the prinicipal families of the county involved. Conventions for drawing the trees and abbreviations to use on them grew up over the centuries.
Following the Dissolution of the Monastries and also the Civil War significant redistribution of land took place, and these periods are particularly rich in terms of the records which survive.
If it transpires that your family was sufficiently far up the social scale that you can trace yurself back to these genealogies then you are one of the lucky few! And you should find that you can trace your tree back further than those further down the social scale.
The Institute for Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, the IHGS, located in Canterbury, Kent, is an essential source for you to be aware of. Their web site is at http://www.ihgs.ac.uk and they also have an extensive library at Canterbury. They offer courses leading to exams and written qualifications in Heraldry and Genealogy.
My interests encompass all of the above, but not for every name on my tree!
So in the same way that my web site is available before I've completed doing my research, or even finished writing up all the research I have done, here is the outline of how beginners should approach researching their family history in England if they want to avoid the common mistakes and learn from the experiences of others.
Then I tried to find out more from the library, found nothing (failed at step 2!) and dropped it until meeting unknown relatives at my grandfather's funeral.
After that my interest waned again until I had moved back to the Plymouth area and shortly after that my father received a letter from a Bob Trevan in Lismore, New South Wales, Australia. His family had similar christian names to my family, so I pulled out the old research and started writing. We still write, and we still cannot prove any relationship between our 2 branches! But we still both live in hope of finding the evidence necessary to make the connection! At this time I took an evening class in Family History and learnt how to approach the subject, how it differs from genealogy, what written records exist which are of greatest use to family historians and very importantly, where to find them. Also, in those pre-Internet days, what "standard forms" existed for interviewing elderly relatives, for keeping track of which records you had searched and different techniques for showing the relationships between yopurselves and other relatives. The course really concentrated on steps 1, 2, 3 and 4. Using the skills I had acquired I traced my direct ancestors back to the same point I'm stuck on today in c1698.
My interests have really spread from family history into the area of a One-Name Study in the names Trevan (and if there were more hours in the day I would do the same for the name Henwood) and Treliving (but my relative Lynne Browning beat me to it and has published the definitive Treliving Family History book in 1994/5 with a little help from her relatives, including me - step 5).
And recently my interests have spread into the area of Local History research for the parishes of Port Isaac and Sheviock where the early branches of my Trevan family lived, and in particular St Teath where so many of my families lived that almost all of the Yeoman classes in the parish were my ancestors or distant cousins!
Add to that the fact that my degree is in Maths with Computer Science and I have always worked with computers, it seemed natural that I should choose to write up my family history in the form of a web site - step 5 - rather than go through all the steps necessary to produce a book. I'm sure I'm still making mistakes, but I might as well pass on what I learnt from the evening classes (updated to take changes since then into account) and the mistakes I have made before them and since! Maybe this is step 6!