Peasants Making History: Living In an English Region 1200-1540

by Christopher Dyer

Overview

Peasants have been despised, underrated, or disregarded in the past. Historians and archaeologists are now giving them a more positive assessment, and in Peasants Making History, Christopher Dyer sets a new agenda for this kind of study. Using as his example the peasants of the west midlands of England, Dyer examines peasant society in relation to their social superiors (their lords), their neighbours, and their households, and finds them making decisions and taking options to improve their lives. In their management of farming, both cultivation of fields and keeping of livestock, they made a series of modifications and some dramatic changes, not just reacting to shifts in circumstances but also devising creative initiatives. Peasants played an active role in the development of towns, both by migrating into urban settings, but also by trading actively in urban markets. Industry in the countryside was not imposed on the rural population, but often the result of peasant enterprise and flexibility. If we examine peasant attitudes and mentalities, we find them engaging in political life, making a major contribution to religion, recognizing the need to conserve the environment, and balancing the interests of individuals with those of the communities in which they lived.

Many features of our world have medieval roots, and peasants played an important part in the development of the rural landscape, participation of ordinary people in government, parish church buildings, towns, and social welfare. The evidence to support this peasant-centred view has to be recovered by imaginative interpretation, and by using every type of source, including the testimony of archaeology and landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198847212
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/19/2022
Pages:	396
Product dimensions:	9.49(w) x 6.43(h) x 0.99(d)

About the Author

Christopher Dyer, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Leicester

Christopher Dyer is Emeritus Professor of History at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction2. Peasants and landscapes3. Peasant society: landholding and status4. Peasants changing society5. Family and household6. Peasants and their crops7. Peasant farming: livestock and pasture8. Peasants and towns9. Peasants and industry10. Peasant outlook, values, perceptions, and attitudesConclusion

Editorial Reviews

"Peasants Making History ably conveys the dignity and humanity of the many thousands of men and women who lived, worked, and died in the West Midlands countryside throughout the later middle ages." — Murray Andrews, Worcestershire Recorder

"Peasants Making History is a thoroughly humane study which sets a high bar for future work in medieval regional and social history." — Stephen Mileson, Oxfordshire Victoria County History, Medieval Archaeology vol 67.1

"This book is not just the fruit of a lifetime of wide-ranging research, but reflects an enduring curiosity about human experience, the insatiable desire to explore and keep learning, and that in turn makes it possible for Dyer to explain how peasants made history." — Peter L. Larson, Speculum 99/2

"Dyer's study is not perhaps a book for the nonspecialist to read cover-to-cover, but it provides a wealth of detail on peasant life in England in the later middle ages arranged by topic." — Kathleen Thompson, BGAS

"Often derided as inherently conservative, servile and unimaginative, the peasants of the English middle ages are given centre stage in this significant work by one of the foremost authorities on the social and economic history of the medieval period. [...] It is Dyer's deep familiarity with the documents of his study area that give the everyday people of the medieval period a voice. In this work we agree with Dyer that peasants helped create the modern world, and that their contributions deserve much wider reconition" — Andrew Margetts, Agricultural History Review

"Piers Plowman's constant negotiations between multiple discourses and communities present conflicting and probably self-conflicted perspectives, but scholars of Piers Plowman, like those concerned with any aspect of medievalEnglish culture, as well as those studying peasant culture of any period, can learn much of value from Dyer's wide and penetrating examination of west-midland medieval peasants' lives, which merged into and helped create wider culturalspheres with which the records and literature allow us to be so much more familiar." — Andrew Galloway, The Yearbook of LanglandStudies

From the Publisher