English Peasant Research Articles

Medieval Crime: English Peasants and Trends in Crime

The author attempts to discover if modern day statistics of crime are similar to the crimes committed by medieval peasants by reviewing medieval crime records. The paper seeks to answer the question: Was there a correlation between poverty and crime for medieval peasants? The author discovers this correlation upon many other topics, such as who was more likely to commit a crime, and the role women played in the medieval crime system.

James Crossley, Spectres of John Ball: The Peasants’ Revolt in English Political History, 1381–2020. Sheffield and Bristol, UK: Equinox Publishing, 2020, 537 pp.

Very little is known about the historical figure of John Ball, the twice-excommunicated priest whose words formed the rallying cry for England’s most famous revolt against the feudal system, otherwise associated with the peasant Wat Tyler. This new book adds nothing about John Bull himself; however, it sets the few existing facts and texts in their proper historical context, which has been obscured over the centuries. The revolt occurred during the unhappy reign of the boy-king Richard II, whose father Edward III had rather successfully balanced the claims of English peasants and their feudal overlords. Richard was 13 years old when the revolt led by Wat Tyler broke out in January 1381 and had been king for less than four years. He sympathized with the peasants and met with them at least twice. He even agreed to end serfdom and to free nonviolent protestors. However, he was opposed by political and religious leaders who had their own agendas. His reign was always uneasy and he was deposed, imprisoned, and killed at the age of 33, bringing the Plantagenet dynasty to an end.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants before the Plague, by Judith M. Bennett

At a paper in Oxford in 2019, Judith Bennett spoke about writing the history of the marginalised. She reasoned that if we want to know about the life of peasants, we must be willing to do a lot with a little. There, the topic was sub-peasants—those below Cecilia Penifader and even her less well-off neighbours. But the point stands: tiny gasps of information enliven reconstructions of medieval peasants’ lives. To use Bennett’s own metaphor, a few found coins can tell the story of a world of exchange; so, too, must the barest details of a life tell the story of a whole mode of existence. In the first edition of this book, published over twenty years ago as A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c.1295–1344 (1999), Bennett went one better. This peasant was not an amalgam; she was specific, located. In a crowd still so often nameless and faceless,...

Etude on Comparative Source Studies: Example of Medieval English Manor

The paper offers a number of problems connected with specificity and comparative characteristics of manorial records — surveys and court rolls of medieval England. Manorial surveys as a basic type of records include various data concerning lands, tenements, and rents of English peasants, entry fines, heriots, enclosures, different social types of peasantry, etc. A number of them have been thoroughly researched by Russian historians, while manorial court rolls haven’t been yet researched enough. Manorial court rolls if compared with manorial surveys, are sources of another type. They represent everyday life of English medieval peasantry, including its legal aspects as well as crucial role of manorial custom in the relations between peasants and manorial lords; order of manorial courts’ work and their types; crimes and punishments in the manors; borrowings from the system of Common law (e.g. the Jury), etc. Manorial court rolls have been substantially researched in England and in the USA by both historians and legal scholars. This article also deals with the problem of interpretation of numeric and legal “languages” of manorial records.

Joan Thirsk

Joan Thirsk, who died on 3 October 2013 at the age of 91, had been associated with Past and Present for most of its history. She joined the Editorial Board in 1957, and was for twenty years (until the arrival of Olwen Hufton and Judith Herrin) the only woman among its members. She would have been known to some of the journal’s founders through R. H. Tawney, who had supervised her thesis on the sale of royalist lands during the Interregnum, and whose London seminar she regularly attended, and also through W. G. Hoskins, an early contributor to this journal,1 who had appointed her as Senior Research Fellow in Agrarian History at Leicester in 1951. When she was elected to the Board her study of English Peasant Farming in Lincolnshire since the sixteenth century was about to appear, and she was extending her research to earlier periods and other topics. Her first articles in our pages were a review of French work on the history of the family, and a paper on the origins of ‘The Common Fields’ which sparked off a debate with J. Z. Titow.2

How Pagan Were Medieval English Peasants?

During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, it was commonplace among historians that the common people of medieval England had remained substantially pagan in their religious beliefs. Christianity, according to this view, was essentially the faith of the elite, with the populace embracing what was at best a dual allegiance to the new and old religions. This view has now disappeared, and the time seems right to take stock of medieval popular religion in England with a view to solving three problems: why did the concept of a pagan medieval populace develop, flourish for so long and then decline; what is the actual evidence for medieval popular belief; and what new perspectives can be taken on medieval English Christianity by employing comparisons with paganism?

The Last English Peasants? Lake District Statesmen and Yeoman Farmers in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Example of Tom Rumney of Mellfell

Visitors who dcribed the Lake District in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw its society as distinctively different from the rest of England and were struck by the survival of a numerous group of small, independent owner-occupiers. These farmers were often called ‘statesmen’, a term applied by outsiders rather than locals and not of great antiquity. Lakeland owner-occupiers preferred to use ‘yeomcn’. A good deal has been written about this social group. However, much of this relates to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries or has focused on problems of nomenclature. Research on parliamentary enclosure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has established some general trends regarding changing numbers of small proprietors, while census enumerators' books have provided the basis for work on Cumbrian owner-occupiers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Less attention has been paid to, how this society changed in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Lake District was drawn into the mainstream of English society and economic life. The use of the term ‘peasant’ in the title of this article is deliberately contentious as there has been considerable debate on whether the term can be justified for English society after medieval times. Marshall has suggested that one has to go back to the early eighteenth century to find a real peasant society in the Lake District. but Searle has claimed that a peasantry with a near subsistence economy, little penetration of market forces, much mutual assistance and collective regulation of assets survived until the end of the eighteenth century.

The Last English Peasants? Lake District Statesmen and Yeoman Farmers in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Example of Tom Rumney of Mellfell

The Last English Peasants? Lake District Statesmen and Yeoman Farmers in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Example of Tom Rumney of Mellfell

Little England Beyond Wales: Re-defining the Myth

The southern part of Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales is today popularly known as Little England Beyond Wales. This is a headline for a cultural history which gives us cricket in West Wales (Figure 1) and which explains how English as a language came to dominate this area on the north side of the Bristol Channel, following its conquest by Anglo-Normans in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. This history, however, has drawn the interpretation of placenames and landscape towards an assumption that this is a product of massive settlement by Norman lords and English peasants. This article provides a critique of that myth by discussing its nature, origin and development. While accepting the argument of linguistic change, it does question the assumptions of process, especially those related to physical change in the landscape. The work of the Carew Castle Archaeological Project provides a case study for analysing some of the details of landscape morphology and development in the critical period. It concludes that the landscape of South Pembrokeshire, as in North Pembrokeshire, is likely to be founded on a pre-Norman base of dispersed settlement and co-axial field systems, with some nucleation also beginning as a process towards the end of this period. However, nucleation was on a relatively small scale and continued throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Tudor era, when the myth of Little England was itself being created. Indeed it could be suggested that the manipulation of the landscape was a deliberate act of Anglicising by an aspirant gentry in the political circumstances of the Tudor policy of amalgamation which culminated in the Acts of Union and which is only now being undone in contemporary Wales.

The Prudent Village: Risk Pooling Institutions in Medieval English Agriculture

The prudent peasant mitigated the risk of crop failures by scattering his arable land throughout his village, Deirdre McCloskey argued, because alternative risksharing institutions did not exist. But, alternatives did exist, this essay concludes. Medieval English peasants formed two types of farmers' cooperatives. Fraternities protected members from the perils of everyday life. Customary poor laws redistributed resources towards villagers beset by bad luck. In both institutions, the expectation of reciprocation motivated farmers with surpluses to aid neighbors with shortages. Deirdre McCloskey's theory of the prudent peasant has three tenets.1 Scattering farm fields reduced the variance of crop yields and thus the risk of starvation. Scattering farm fields reduced average crop yields and thus peasants' incomes. Scattering farm fields was the only way in which medieval English peasants mitigated risk. Translating the tenets into terms of portfolio theory forms the foundation of McCloskey's model. The risk to each farmer as measured by the variance of total output was reduced by diversifying holdings among many small plots facing different weather, weed, water, rodent, insect, and soil conditions. If one plot did poorly and another did well, a farmer could still harvest enough grain to survive from all of his plots put together. However, diversification was expensive. Scattered holdings yielded 10 percent less grain than their consolidated counterparts. So, scattering entailed an exchange of return for risk. The prudent peasant chose to scatter his farm fields to protect himself and his family from idiosyncratic agricultural shocks because better alternatives did not exist. Peasants had no better

Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150–1350. By James Masschaele (New York, St.Martin's Press, 1997) 275 pp. $45.00

JAMES GIVEN Historians’ understanding of the role of towns and trade in medieval society has changed dramatically in the last few years. The medieval town was once regarded as, in Bloch’s phrase, “a foreign body in feudal society.”1 Inhabited by merchants catering to the consumption needs of the ruling groups in church and state and prospering from long-distance trade in luxury goods, towns were surrounded by a countryside inhabited by a commercially inert peasantry. Subsistence farmers, peasants participated in market-mediated exchange in only a minor way. Recent scholarship has revised this picture. Masschaele’s excellent work exempliaes a new way of looking at towns and trade in medieval society from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century. Masschaele makes three major contributions. The arst is a careful description of the way in which English towns and their markets were tightly integrated with their agrarian hinterlands. Through the analysis of lists of urban occupations and tax returns, Masschaele demonstrates that the economy of the typical English town was dominated by the processing of raw materials obtained from the countryside. The primary sectors of the urban economy involved the provision and processing of food stuffs for the urban population, the production of textiles, and the processing of leather and hides. In Masschaele’s opinion, these activities accounted for one-half to two-thirds of urban economic activity. As he puts it, “the growth and prosperity of most towns went hand in hand with the development of commercial links with the countryside” (17). Masschaele’s second contribution is to underline the deep involvement of English peasants in commodity production. For Masschaele, the true agrarian entrepreneurs of medieval England were the upper levels of the peasantry. Although the gentry sold agricultural goods into urban markets, Masschaele estimates that the total amount of market-bound goods produced by peasants vastly outnumbered that produced by the gentry. In Masschaele’s account, the English countryside was not populated with a largely subsistence peasantry, living in a “moral economy,” and only marginally engaged in the market, but with large numbers of bustling peasant entrepreneurs carefully judging market conditions, loading up their packhorses and wagons, and setting off down the roads and over the bridges of an elaborate inland communications network to town in search of proat. The book’s third major contribution is an interesting case study of the market network of Huntingdonshire. Drawing on central-place theory, Masschaele discusses how rural markets and peasant villages were linked together into a regional marketing network focused on the larger towns. The efaciency with which such a market network could function

A Slice of Life: Selected Documents of Medieval English Peasant Experience by Edwin Brezette Dewindt (review)

A Slice of Life: Selected Documents of Medieval English Peasant Experience by Edwin Brezette Dewindt (review)

Decolonizing the English Past: Readings in Medieval Archaeology and History

Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists are accustomed to categorizing the inhabitants of the rural farming households of medieval England as peasants without questioning the disciplinary implications of imposing such a category on historical subjects. Foundational categories, such astheworker,thepeasant,thewoman, become so familiar that they appear natural and divert us from studying the historical and power-charged processes involved in their constructions, past and present. The century-old debate over views of medieval English peasants as bound statically by custom, on the one hand, or as dynamically diverse or mobile, on the other, perhaps expresses embedded disciplinary tensions in the historic division of labor between anthropology (including archaeology) and history. From their disciplinary formation in the early modern period, anthropology and history together have constructed and guarded an imaginary but nevertheless potent boundary between the historical and the primitive, a boundary that divided the European colonizer from the non-European colonized and that within Europe divided the historical past from the traditional past. Who gets an anthropology and who gets a history therefore becomes a question of historic and power-charged disciplinary practices. As a foundational category, “peasant” straddles both disciplines and both divisions of the past, historical and traditional.In this essay, I wish to examine the powerful yet unacknowledged ways in which these disciplinary practices inform medieval peasant studies. I shall focus especially on the study of the material culture of the medieval English peasantry. Both history and archaeology claim the medieval English peasant to justify disciplinary narratives.

Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH PEASANTS paid taxes to their king, fought in his armies, and probably devoted more time each year to his provincial administration than did any other group in society. Yet they scarcely figure in the political histories of their country, except as bearers of the interests of others. Eric Hobsbawm summed up the orthodox view approvingly when he wrote at the launch of The Journal of Peasant Studies that, prior to the eighteenth century, peasants appear to belong in economic or social history, but rarely in political history [he proffers China as a possible exception], since rulers rarely have to bother for more than a moment about what happens in the villages.' In their revolts alone do peasants escape this judgment, and even here the reprieve is partial, the emphasis being on what peasants resist rather than on what they create, on their defeat and the disappearance of their moment of coherent, collective consciousness.2 The routine political activities through which medieval English peasants regularly participated in the crown's provincial politics slip by unnoticed.3 My quarrel with this approach,has two parts. First, medieval English peasants participated in the crown's provincial politics partly at least on their own terms and for their own ends, and in the process they influenced both the form and content of these politics. The grounds on which to make the case have already been

English Peasants and Medieval Miracle Lists

English Peasants and Medieval Miracle Lists

From “Rabble” to “Chopsticks”: The Radicalism of William Cobbett

William Cobbett is a problem figure in English history. Among his several stage credits are his performances as the soldier's friend, the champion of the rural laborers and the parliamentary leader of the common people. During the 1810s and 1820s he took his celebrated rural rides for the purpose of discovering first-hand the wants and needs of the country laborers. He voiced their “cottage charter” in thePolitical Register, he composed hundreds of tracts disseminating their reform program, and in 1830 he led them in the Captain Swing disturbances—the laborers' militant campaign for improved wages, full employment, and the return to the cottage of bacon, beer, and wheaten bread.Cobbett's sympathies for the farm workers have long been a subject of observation among historians and literary critics. Matthew Arnold suggested that Cobbett's politics were regulated by the condition of country workers, while Hugh Egerton described Cobbett as “the one eminent author whom the farm labourers of England can claim as their own.” For Leslie Stephen, Cobbett was “the voice of the English peasant,” for J. B. Morton he was “the peasant articulate,” and for G. K. Chesterton he “spoke for those innumerable who are also inarticulate.” The great biographer of Cobbett, G. D. H. Cole, agreed: Cobbett was a politicized peasant “at one in nature and sentiment with the mass which he aspired to lead.” Unlike the previous commentators, Cole developed his argument at some length, but his primary understanding of Cobbett was as a rustic-minded critic of industrialism and high finance—a valid assessment certainly, but one neglectful of Cobbett's self-professed ignorance of industrial labor and of market economy.

The diffusion of vetches in medieval England

productive arable farming systems could and did evolve during the course of the thirteenth century.3 On a larger geographical scale Langdon has shown that from the mid-twelfth century an increased usage of the horse began to have a significant impact upon traction and haulage.4 Substitution of the horse for the ox in ploughing made particular progress on peasant holdings and allowed an intensification of arable production, the development of more specialized types of livestock husbandry, and an improvement in labour productivity. Its effect upon road transport was still greater. Not only was the horse more widely adopted in carting than in ploughing, but the economic dividends of this substitution were more immediate and direct: it accelerated the circulation of goods and extended the range of market transfers. In short, it was integral to the growing commercialization of the economy and for that reason made most progress in those parts of the country-notably East Anglia and the south-east-which were most deeply involved in the burgeoning market nexus.5 These developments in agriculture are symptomatic of an emergent ruralurban complex and this ties in with what is now known about the scale of late thirteenth-century English urbanism. Thus, Keene has shown convincingly that London c. I300 was possibly the second largest European city north of the Alps, with a population of perhaps go-Ioo,ooo.6 Winchester and Norwich have also been shown to have been much more populous than was formerly thought.7 These substantial urban populations cannot but have I I am grateful for research assistance received from Gill Alexander, Jenitha Orr, and John Power. Part of the research upon which this paper is based was undertaken whilst in the tenure of a Personal Research Fellowship of the Economic and Social Research Council. 2 The case for technological progress in medieval agriculture is most strongly stated by White in his Medieval technology; see also Hallam, Rural England. Nevertheless, it is the contrary view which is implicit in much writing on the subject, most notably Fussell, 'Social change but static technology'; Titow, English rural society, and Postan, The medieval economy. 3Campbell, 'Agricultural progress'. 4 Langdon, Horses, oxen and technological innovation; idem, 'Horse hauling'. 5 Britnell, 'The proliferation of markets'; Biddick, 'Medieval English peasants'.

Missing Links: Taxable Wealth, Markets, and Stratification among Medieval English Peasants

Missing Links: Taxable Wealth, Markets, and Stratification among Medieval English Peasants Evidence for economic and social stratification among English medieval peasants confronts historians at every turn. By the end of the thirteenth century between one third and one half of English villagers worked less than three acres of land. Some thirteenthcentury households lived in larger houses equipped with barns; others lived in one room cottages. Social stratification, moreover, accompanied economic stratification in English villages. Wealthy peasants developed informal patron-client relations with poorer villagers and dominated formal positions in village administration. Stratification among English peasants sprang from roots as old as the eleventh century and flourished after the Black Death, which ameliorated population pressure in the countryside in the later fourteenth century.1

English Peasant Buildings in the Later Middle Ages (1200–1500)

FROM A SYNTHESIS OF evidence for late medieval peasant buildings this article argues that their size, quality and complexity have frequently been underestimated. Documentary evidence from the West Midlands is used to define the main features of peasant buildings—agricultural buildings as well as houses—in the period 1350–1500. Similar characteristics are found in the same period in other regions, in the context of their own building traditions. The origins of durable vernacular houses must be sought in the 13th century with the move away from earth fast construction. A series of changes began long before the ‘Great Rebuilding’ of the 16th and 17th centuries, and connected with that process in an evolutionary pattern.