The English village
The village is a visual depiction of social order, literally. There is a status quo, and before all the recent political changes, the town has functioned pretty easily. The village isn't happy when changes come into town, because that means the landscape of their village will change. Suddenly, a dark side emerges from this sweet, pastoral community, and pretty soon, the townspeople are vengeful and punishing. They tie people to pillories and torture them.
People and population
The novel is predicated on the recent population boom that has left England in need of change. There are simply too many people for the entire island to be owned by land owners with entire swathes of property. The law is that people can move anywhere they want, and as long as they build a fence, they can claim whatever property fits in the fence. Needless to say, established land owners are extremely upset by this, so that the town sees the population growth as an apocalypse of their way of life. They see people as agents of evil.
Change versus order
The people in town land in different places on this spectrum: some are more comfortable with change than others. Although no one is excited about the changes that new English law are bringing in their town, some are more resistant than others. The dilemma demonstrates through abstract imagery the characters' various relationships to chaos and order. The people who are most resistant to change are those who crave order, but this doesn't stop them from being agents of chaos. They use chaotic methods to enforce order, but they fail.
Fire and destruction
Fire begins this novel's plot, and it also concludes the plot. The first fire was a symbolic foreshadowing of the fire that later consumes the whole town, and the first fire occurs alongside paranoia about a foreign conspiracy to steal land from the townspeople, so the idea of fire is closely linked to possessions and defense against loss. The fire is an imagery that suggests absolute loss, a force that these characters stake their entire lives against. The final fire shows that they fail to protect themselves against such change.
