The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England, by Rosamond Faith

Abstract

Historians are accustomed to treat popular appeals to ‘good old laws’ with scepticism. The concept of a moral economy was first developed by E.P. Thompson in opposition to such instincts, maintaining not only that society was shaped by historically embedded norms and obligations, but that ordinary people were capable of articulating them with precision. Rosamond Faith sets out to uncover the ideas which structured social relations in the centuries between 600 and 1200. Her point of departure is a society in which land was plentiful and could be owned by peasants as well as aristocrats. How did an elite manage to appropriate peasant labour under these circumstances? Lordship, of the kind originating in bonds of military leadership and protection, supplies part of the answer, and it helped that both noble and non-noble freemen looked back to a past conceived in terms of invasion and conquest. Among non-nobles, people distinguished one...