CONTRIBUTORS
1. Frederic Aparisi (PhD Valencia 2016) has been postdoctoral fellow ‘Juan de la Cierva’ at the University of Lleida and visiting scholar ‘José Castillejo’ at the University of Cambridge. Currently he is research assistant at the Department of Medieval History of the University of Valencia. His research focuses on the rural history of late medieval Valencia, particularly rural elites, city-countryside relations and fishing history. He is co-editor of Beyond Lords and Peasants: Rural Elites and Economic Differentiation in Pre-modern Europe (Valencia UP, 2014).
1. Steven Bednarski is an environmental and social historian of the late medieval England and France. He is Professor of History, co-Director of Medieval Studies and Director of Environments of Change at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
1. Jean Birrell has long-standing research interest in the medieval English peasantry and has published widely on a number of topics relating to medieval rural life. She has a particular interest in forest, hunting and forest law as well as medieval manorial customs. Recent publications include ‘Manorial Custumals Reconsidered’, in Past and Present, (Number 224, August 2014), pp. 3–37, ‘Peasants Eating and Drinking’, in: The Agricultural History Review, Vol. 63, No. 1 (2015), pp. 1–18.
1. Chris Briggs is Senior Lecturer in Medieval British Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the rural history of late medieval England, and in particular the living standards of peasants and their interactions with markets and the law. He is the author of Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England (2009) and co-editor (with Jaco Zuijderduijn) of Land and Credit: Mortgages in the Medieval and Early Modern European Countryside (2018).
1. Tommaso Casini was born in Pelago, near Florence (Italy). He studied at the University of Florence, where he graduated under the supervision of Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur and obtained a doctorate in Medieval History in 2009. At present he is pursuing his research work as an independent scholar, while teaching Philosophy and History in the Italian high school. His research work has focused on social, political and institutional relations in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Tuscan countryside and he is now working on the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century registers of the bishops of Fiesole.
1. Maïka De Keyzer is a tenure track docent at the KU Leuven (Belgium). She obtained her PhD in 2014 with a dissertation on late medieval commons, sustainability and inclusiveness. Via an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, Maïka De Keyzer analyses the causes and consequences of welfare, inequality, social resilience and collective action in the premodern period.
1. Aysu Dincer is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Warwick. Her research and publications have focused on the social and economic history of the Eastern Mediterranean in the later medieval period. She is particularly interested in the study of slavery and serfdom, material culture, patronage and gender relationships.
1. Justine Firnhaber-Baker (PhD Harvard, 2007) is senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her work focuses on violence, power and law in late medieval France from a social historical perspective. Her most recent book is The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt (Oxford University Press, 2021).
1. Adam Franklin-Lyons is an associate professor of history at Emerson College in Boston. His work focuses on agriculture, the grain trade and famines in the Crown of Aragon, notably in his forthcoming monograph, From Shortage to Famine: Vulnerability and Resilience in the Late-Medieval Crown of Aragon. Recently, he has begun investigating mobility, the development of rapid communication systems and the history of news. The research is part of the group, The Travelers Lab, housed at Wesleyan University, a consortium of faculty that use digital methods to investigate similar themes.
1. Antoni Furió is Professor at the University of Valencia in the Department of Medieval History and has worked on numerous projects on the economy and society of the premodern Iberian Peninsula. His wide ranging research interests span rural Valencia, peasant commerce and markets as well as irrigation in the Mediterranean. Recent publications include (with Pau Viciano, Luis Almenar Fernández, Lledó Ruiz Domingo and Guillem Chismol), ‘Measuring Economic Inequality in Southern Europe: The Iberian Peninsula in the 14th-17th Centuries’. in: Giampiero Nigro, ed., Disuguaglianza economica nelle società preindustriali: cause ed effetti / Economic inequality in pre-industrial societies: causes and effect (University of Florence, Italy, 2020).
1. Christopher M. Gerrard is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at Durham University. His ten books include Medieval Archaeology: Understanding Traditions and Approaches (2003), Interpreting the English Village: Landscape and Community at Shapwick, Somerset (2013) and Waiting for the End of the World? (2020). He has excavated in England, Portugal and Spain with major projects on natural disasters in the Middle Ages, water resources, medieval material culture and, most recently, on the archaeology of common land.
1. Piotr Guzowski PhD, habilitation in history, works in Poland at the University of Bialystok. He has published two books in Polish: Chłopi i pieniądze na przełomie średniowiecza i czasów nowożytnych [Peasants and money at the turn of the Middle Ages] and Rodzina szlachecka w Polsce przedrozbiorowPiotr ej. Studium demograficzne [Noble Family in Pre-Partition Poland. A Demographic Study]. His academic interests are connected with the peasant economy, commercialization of the preindustrial economy, credit markets, financial capacity, peasant and gentry families and households in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period, historical demography and environmental history.
1. Richard Jones is Associate Professor in Landscape History and former Director of the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester. Working within the interstices of history, archaeology, and historical geography he has written book-length studies on the origins and development of English villages and the medieval natural world. His interests cover such diverse subjects as medieval river flood histories, place-naming and medieval maturing practices.
1. Catarina Karlsson holds a PhD in Agrarian History at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, specializing in medieval agricultural work and technique. She holds a master’s degree in Archaeology and worked as supervisor at the Swedish National Heritage Board with excavations and research for several years. She also worked as a curator and site manager at a county museum. Her research has specialized in production and consumption of iron, agrarian work, implements and use of the landscape. A large part of this research has been conducted in cooperation with the research group at Jernkontoret, The Swedish Steel Producers Association, where she is a member of The Historical Metallurgy Groups Committee of experts. She is currently employed at The Swedish Steel Producers’ Association, Department of History of mining and metallurgy as research coordinator, researcher and project manager.
1. Peter L. Larson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Central Florida. Larson is the author of Conflict and Compromise in the Late Medieval Countryside: Lords and Peasants in Durham, 1349–1400 (Routledge, 2006), a sociopolitical study of how English peasants reforged their lives after the Black Death. His next monograph employs a case study of a Durham parish to investigate the complexity of the development of agrarian capitalism and individualism in rural England.
1. Bernadette McCooey is an independent researcher, who was awarded her PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK, in 2017 for her thesis ‘Farming Practices in Pre-Modern Iceland’. She is interested in the interplay between society, economics and human agency in agricultural systems in the North Atlantic, and utilises multidisciplinary approaches in her research. Her chapter ‘The forgotten pigs and goats of Iceland in a North Atlantic context’ can be found in Medieval Animals on the Move: Between Body and Mind (2021) L. Bartosiewicz and A. Choyke (Eds.).
1. Andrew Moore researches the environmental history of fourteenth-century Herstmonceux through manorial records. He is currently a PhD candidate in the History Department of the University of Waterloo, Canada.
1. Mathias Moosbrugger is Assistant Professor in Patristics and Church History at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His award-winning dissertation on late medieval rural community building in Western Austria (2009) has made him particularly interested in the astonishingly creative power of writing in political, social and cultural processes. This interest has shaped his approach to questions of early modern Church History, which is currently his main field of work.
1. Miriam Müller has worked as a lecturer in medieval History at Birmingham University. She has published on a wide range of topics about medieval rural life, from peasant revolts and gender in the English village to her latest book, Growing Up in the Medieval Village; Childhood, Orphans and Underaged Heirs in Later Medieval Rural England (Palgrave Macmillan, January 2019). Her current research interests are medieval coastal communities and peasant revolts in northern Germany and the representation of medieval peasants in modern and contemporary far-right movements.
1. Janken Myrdal is retired professor of Agrarian History at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, and is now affiliated with Economic History at Stockholm University. His research has mainly concerned the history of agriculture from the Middle Ages until today, and everyday life generally in the Middle Ages. He was the editor of a five-volume history of agriculture in Sweden, abbreviated into one volume: The Agrarian History of Sweden from 4000 BC to AD 2000 (2011). Recently he has also taken an interest in the world history of material culture. Recent publications include ‘Transmitting everyday technology’, Conference Report: Asia and Scandinavia: New Perspectives on the Early Medieval Silk Roads 2015. Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities and‘Transmitting of Technology along the Silk Road – Theoretical Reflections and Three Examples’, The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities Bulletin 81 (2020).
1. Timothy Newfield is an environmental historian and historical epidemiologist. He is Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and Biology at Georgetown University.
1. Ronan O’Donnell is a Research Associate at the University of Durham, where he also earned his PhD in archaeology. His research interests centre around landscape archaeology of the medieval to modern periods with a particular focus on medieval to postmedieval landscapes, as well as North-East England. Recent relevant publications include O’Donnell, R.P., Assembling Enclosure: Transformations in the Rural Landscape of Post-medieval North-East England (University of Hertfordshire, 2015); O’Donnell, Ronan, ‘Field Systems and the Arable Fields’, in: The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain. Gerrard, Christopher & Gutiérrez, Alejandra (Oxford University Press, 2018) pages 86–101.
1. Ingvild Øye is Professor Emerita of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Bergen, Norway, Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion. Her scholarly fields cover medieval urban and rural archaeology, including textile production. She is author of Textile Equipment and Its Working Environment, Bryggen in Bergen, c. 1150–500 and also published findings from the Viking Age town of Kaupang, among others. Her current research project relates to textiles and textile production in West Norse societies from AD 800 to 1300.
1. Phillipp Schofield is Professor of Medieval History and Head of Department at Aberystwyth University. His research and writing are primarily directed at the medieval English peasantry, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and with particular emphasis on the nature of exchange in rural society and the response to crises. His major publications include Peasants and Historians. Debating medieval English peasantry (Manchester University Press, 2016) and articles in leading journals, including Past and Present and Economic History Review. He is presently preparing a monograph on responses to medieval famine in the later-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries.
1. Philip Slavin received his PhD from the University of Toronto. After holding positions at Yale, McGill and Kent, he is now an associate professor of medieval and environmental history at the University of Stirling. An author of thirty-five articles and two books on various topics of medieval environmental and economic history of England and Central Asia (most recent of which is Experiencing Famine [2019], a study of the Great Famine of the fourteenth century), he is currently engaged in two large-scale project – one on global history of plague from the Late Neolithic until today and the other on the deep historical roots of economic inequality.
1. Robert/R.N. Swanson is currently a Research Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Science and Professor in the Research Center for Social History of Medicine at the School of History and Civilization of Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China; and Emeritus Professor of Medieval Ecclesiastical History at the University of Birmingham, UK. He publishes widely on the late medieval church, particularly in England. His extensive publications include Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge, 2007), Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215 – c.1515 (Cambridge, 1995) and Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989).
1. Lies Vervaet obtained her PhD in History at Ghent University, Belgium, in 2015, with a study on the estate management of St. John’s Hospital of Bruges, one of the major landowners of medieval Flanders. Her research focused on the leasehold system, on rural labour, on the food provisioning of landlords and on gender aspects of late medieval rural society. Her interests also include landscape history. Currently, she is working for a heritage organization, engaged in landscape heritage in Flanders. Recent publications include Vervaet, Lies. 2019. “Women and Leasehold in Rural Flanders, c. 1290 to c. 1570.” Rural History-Economy Society Culture 30 (1): 1–15; Vervaet, Lies. 2019 and “Women and Wage Labour in Rural Flanders in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” Agricultural History Review 67 (2): 203–26.
Miriam Müller
The concept of rural life
Rural communities made up the vast majority of the population in medieval Europe. The people who shaped, worked and lived in these communities represented the foundation of medieval culture, politics and economics. While we might be prone to entertaining the image of the archetypal peasant as an agricultural worker, bent in hard labour over their hoe, driving a plough or gathering grain after the harvest, often at loggerhead with their seigniorial lord, decades of research has shown that rural communities did not quite conform to this rather two-dimensional image. Rather, village life, and rural life more generally, was a much more complex, multifaceted and nuanced affair.
Herein lies the first reason for the title of this volume. Its purpose was to bring together studies of rural life, and not merely village life, in Europe. Rural life extended beyond the village structure and it extended beyond. Many families whose main income came from agriculture did not live in village communities, but hamlets, or even single dwellings, small clusters of farm houses of perhaps one or two families. Rural life was also not wholly separate from urban life, and one reason why generations of scholars have found it increasingly challenging to draw clear distinctions between town and countryside is that the progress of research has shown not merely how the rural and urban were interrelated but also that they flowed into each other, while urban developments in some settlements could ebb and flow like tides with changing economic, social and demographic developments. Especially in the later Middle Ages this symbiosis becomes regionally clearly apparent, not least in the interaction with the devastating impact of the Black Death. Similarly, for example, many young people in England moved into towns, whose lifeblood depended on these rural immigrants, who in turn might move back and forth between village and town, while others travelled regularly to urban markets to sell produce.2
The concept of rural life therefore seeks to capture this wider network of social, cultural and economic complexities, which included, but also extended often significantly beyond, village structures. Conceptually it also allowed for regional and geographic variation, complexity and a broader perspective of interculturation and market connections, which the rather restrictive notion of the village would not have done justice.
Since this is a book of chapters about people who primarily lived and operated in rural contexts, this is a book mostly about peasants, and the term ‘peasant’ has been used by all contributors to this volume. We might consider the term ‘peasant’ itself as an ever-lasting can of worms that tempted scores of historians and social scientists to attempt an all-encompassing definition.3 We do not need to revise those discussions here, but it is clear that the core problem in attempting to define the peasantry is precisely the fact that these resourceful, skilled and multifaceted individuals who populated the premodern countryside have a tendency to defy clear defining parameters.4 Definitions matter of course. In a book such as this discussions about whether a person should be called farmer or peasant is in some cases more than simple semantics and at times caused some discussion between authors and the editor. It is important for the reader as well as the author to make sure that each other have a mutual understanding about the meanings of the terminology being communicated. To name an example: a peculiarity of the English historiography is precisely the differentiation between a peasant and a farmer in a way that does not exist in other European languages. A key difference here is usually perceived in historical period in addition to economic circumstance and hence also class structure. A farmer being associated with capitalism or at least an emerging capitalistic mindset and a peasant with, generally speaking, a precapitalist small-scale agricultural producer whose principal concern is survival and hence subsistence agriculture.5
In German, however, to stay with our example, a Bauer is a Bauer, whether the object of the discussion is a large-scale industrialised farmer with mass animal husbandry in the twenty-first century or one of the thirteenth-century tilling five acres of land. We might certainly agree that their social and economic concerns would be quite different and even at odds, but the principal word to describe them is the same, indicating a person essentially living off the land, which is theirs by law, rented from the owner, or through the de facto ownership, which often came hand in hand with various types of serfdom.
In the context of this volume, it is important to appreciate that some of the discussions so familiar to the English historiography have little or completely different relevance in other European contexts, since the differentiated conceptual understanding of the word peasant as distinct from farmer, to stay with our example, is simply not an issue in other countries and their respective historiographical traditions. Rather than attempting to shoehorn definitions on groups of people, recognising that at the core of such rural and essentially precapitalist societies are groups of highly skilled, knowledgeable and multifaceted people who lived and worked in a multitude of environments that were principally connected to small-scale agricultural production might therefore be more satisfying and productive, especially when working in broader geographical and chronological comparative frameworks such as this volume.
To note that land was of utmost importance to peasantries seems almost anachronistic. A peasant family relied on land for survival just as it relied on the family, kinship or the houseful to work the land and thereby constitute the principal unit of peasant production: the household. As such, the transmission of land from one person to the next, or one family to the next by means of inheritance, marriage or otherwise – as via the land market – therefore mattered a great deal, and consequently the relationship of rural families to land was a principal concern in peasant societies.6
Accordingly, historians have spoken in this context of a peasant – land bond or a family – land bond, reflecting thereby the central role land played in peasant families.7 Nevertheless, in English historiography some historians have expressed a scepticism of the existence of a true peasantry with strong familial ties to the land in England, where even long before the advance of agricultural capitalism the existence of an often vigorous market in land within rural communities could be identified. This, to some, indicated a weaker family–land bond; in other words, a less pronounced attachment to land, which is often so central to peasant agriculture.8 However, as Professor Dyer noted ‘peasantries differ’, and rural societies were diverse.9
Different cultural traditions and economic diversity locally and regionally will naturally result in varying relationships to land. Inheritance systems varied; some communities practiced partible inheritance, some primogeniture, some a mixture of the two depending on the type of landholding even within individual families. Similarly, a family whose economic base is not primarily or solely grounded in agricultural activities of a landed tenement is likely to have a different relationship to any – perhaps smaller acreages – of land than a neighbour whose living depends entirely on their thirty acres worked in a classic mixed farming method with livestock pasture and arable.
Too often peasants were seen more traditionally within a context designed for them by historians, packed into boxes. Like other social scientists, historians are fond of categorising, labelling and sorting. We are accustomed to talking about ‘small, middling and larger’ landholding tenants, and we discuss the ‘free’ or ‘unfree’ and ‘lords’ and tenant peasants.10 Sorting the subjects of our enquiries into such drawers helps – superficially at least – in the establishment of hypotheses, categories and allow plotting economic developments. Yet they are also simplistic at best, misleading at worst, and certainly cause problems when attempting to create parameters for comparison.
Over the years we have seen that many tenants in the English medieval landscape neither fit into the category of small or large tenant or even within boundaries of free or unfree, nor semifree. A peasant might hold both free and unfree land. In England, at least, tenants could simultaneously hold free and unfree land in different or in one and the same manor, thus rendering a distinction between free and unfree tenant unhelpful in many cases. In England status in the later Middle Ages was mainly attached to land, rather than the person. As a result, a peasant could be a free tenant and a villein tenant to the same or different lords. This fact can be seen to merely underline the fact that there was no particular social, cultural or economic gulf between the free and the unfree, but rather between the peasantry and their lords.11
A smallholder might hold less land than their neighbours yet be economically better off as they are involved in by-industries that gain regular incomes, brewing and baking spring immediately to mind, but should also consider artisanal activities, such as pottery, weaving, spinning, blacksmithery, carpentry and a host of other skills offering incomes. One frequently neglected example is incomes from fishing. Communities residing along coastlines or along rivers had significantly wider opportunities for incomes than inland communities. Additionally, even if we focus on landholding communities away from rivers and coasts, an important consideration is the often significantly varying quality of land. A smallholder whose fields are located on rich soil will probably gain more produce than a middling peasant whose land is stony or of poorer quality, or east facing, thereby gaining less sunlight. Gender has been shown to be rather problematic in delineating rights and responsibilities in medieval rural England. English manorial custom, at least in places overpowered common law, ironically often accorded women more say and rights over land and village affairs than common law would have us believe.12
Meanwhile peasant families were so complex and ever changing in their composition through second and third marriages and the existence of half brothers and sisters in addition to occasional orphaned children that were taken in that one might also see the traditional concept of a land family bond being somewhat challenged.13 Meanwhile noninheriting children of tenants of significant holdings might well have sunk into landlessness or smallholdership indicating that drawing clear distinctions between well-off and poor tenants is problematic.14
The act of taking a section of characteristics and labelling them not only removes the agents within that category out of their wider context, cutting them off from complex networks that might weaken or disguise the particular traits the definition rests on, but it also skews the wider and deeper meaning of the connections and relationships that were brought to bear on the isolated category. Thereby one is in danger of creating false impressions of facets of exceptionalism, the idea of the singular, the different. From this perspective is the distinction between peasant and farmer in the English historiography similarly an expression of the widespread trend in English historiography toward exceptionalism? The peasant ceased to exist to allow the emergence of the capitalist – or protocapitalist famer – on whose shoulders rested the development of agrarian capitalism, which heralded the dawn of industrialisation.
The collection of chapters presented here speak in their own right of a variety of rural experiences and societies. There is room for some comparisons and noting of differences, but the main promise of this book is to offer important insights into premodern forms of life, work and change from a wide range of perspectives across time and analysed using the tools of a variety of disciplinary approaches.
Aims and objectives
The principle aims for this edited volume are three-fold.
Fundamentally the contributors to this book all believe strongly that the lives and tribulations of ordinary people mattered. As such it was felt to be important to present a volume that represented a multitude of different facets of daily life in the medieval European countryside, from as many different perspectives and geographical areas as possible. The aim cannot be to offer an ultimate narrative of rural life in medieval Europe, but rather to present snippets of insights and perspectives, thereby hopefully encouraging further research and attempts at comparisons, while broadening the perspectives of students and researchers who would otherwise be principally reliant, due to limited sources or linguistic restrictions on a rather Anglocentric perspective of rural life. Historiography suffers if we do not compare and look beyond given horizons. As such, in this sense the book attempts to encourage a glance over the garden fence, it hopes for comparisons to be attempted and to make material and up-to-date research in the field available to readers, who do not have the linguistic skills and historiographical traditions to access this research in languages other than their own. It hopes for the stimulation of new research questions to be asked of even perhaps well-trodden source materials. It was moreover felt that the interest in the themes surrounding rural life is certainly in evidence. With its foundations firmly planted in the research traditions that centre on perspectives of history from below. The focus is on ordinary people, their agency, their ambitions and frustrations.
Secondly, there had been no substantial collection of essays focused on examining a broad range of aspects of rural medieval society, let alone one that looked beyond the shores of England, an omission the editor and contributors felt needed to be remedied urgently. In 1998 Tom Scott published a collection of essays that explored in mainly broad overviews peasantries across Europe from the later Middle Ages to the 1800s.15 While this represents an important volume it was limited not only in geographical but in its thematic scope. At the same time the main focus of the book rested in the Early Modern rather than the medieval period. Therefore, this present volume aims to readdress that imbalance by focussing on the Middle Ages. Key chronological marker points engaged with here include demographic growth, changes due to developing feudal relationships, followed by famine, the arrival of the Black Death and subsequent demographic contraction.
Thirdly, the aim in this case was an edited contribution to the very broad subject area of rural life in medieval Europe in a cross-chronological way, which specifically attempted to reach beyond previously set parameters of the, by now, fairly well-trodden topics usually defined by ‘land’, ‘family’ and ‘lordship’, while breaking down barriers between archaeology and history. Accordingly, the focus was both on inter- and multidisciplinarity. It was specifically not intended to produce a book that attempted to compare the same themes and topics across time in different geographical regions. Such an approach would have once again imposed rather artificially set definitions and parameters on the individual contributions.
The key point is that not everything was the same across all rural societies. Different contexts due to a multitude of factors including weather, geography, topography, nature of rulership and historical, customary specificities created varying dynamics in the countryside. Similarly, sources vary significantly across Europe. Manorial court rolls, for example, which have been at the heart of scores of researchers of rural life in England, and which allow in some cases exquisitely detailed insights into even the poorest peasant households, simply do not exist across much of Europe.16 Different sources offer different insights, and moreover such different insights even on one topic might not be directly comparable. Accordingly, while this volume invites comparative observations, it is not a stated aim to compare rural societies across time and place. The book could never fulfil such an objective.
The concept of the comparable presupposes a basis from which it can be assumed that the core of the research subjects to be compared are essentially the same, but the detailed elements are different.17 A comparative approach is, as Bloch has pointed out, several decades ago, not the same as simply comparing things.18 Comparing historical phenomena is the bread and butter of the historian’s craft, in the sense that research findings are looked at in reference to similar or differing phenomena, as have been identified by other historians.19 Comparing findings establishes parameters for testing hypotheses and building a corpus of knowledge about particular events.20 Every undergraduate essay does this, or at least should do it, as it is an integral process in the historian’s training. This approach is useful in establishing rough indicators of similarities and differences. However, it is very limiting.
On the one hand one, it is always hampered by historiography. Every historian’s field of enquiry is unique, and every historian has a singular view of their sources, with their own perspective and their own interests, which they bring to their primary sources and, looking at different countries, historiographical traditions.21 Not only does the individualism inherent in research colour the way primary sources are analysed and interpreted, it also, fundamentally, influences which sources are used and how they are explored.
The only way around this problem is to the approach the primary sources directly, or as Chris Wickham has put it, ‘go straight to the sources’.22 Bloch outlined two main ways in which comparative history could be done: either by comparing societies ‘widely separated in time and space’, or by analysing contemporary societies in ‘parallel’, which were ‘exposed throughout their development to the action of the same broad causes just because they are close and contemporaneous, and owing their existence in part at least to a common origin’.23 If the available primary sources are fundamentally different a fruitful comparative analysis is immediately hampered. This present volume specifically strove to avoid this pitfall. Instead, the aim was to allow contributors to explore their own sources and let these speak with their own voices in their own specific historiographical traditions and contexts. However, at the same time, by looking over the garden fence into neighbouring plots we can see that while our categories may show certain comparable aspects to next door, others fall down completely.
Sources in this context are not limited to texts. Instead, contributors were invited to consult as wide a variety of sources as possible. As a result, contributors drew on a multitude of materials, from textual sources over images, archaeological information, experimentation, as well as landscape and prevailing topography, a growing field that has received much deserved attention in recent years.24 This approach allows the reflection of the colourful diversity, complexity and simple humanity of medieval rural life itself, as well as the showcasing of the variety and breadth of historical research engaging with rural life.
Organisation and structure
The organisation of an edited volume is always fraught with problems and potential conflicts, especially with a large volume such as this. The book is divided into four thematically organised parts, which run cross-chronologically. The authors have been listed in their sections alphabetically, which seemed to be the most egalitarian path to take. In the thematic topics a decision was made to reflect the multidisciplinary focus of the volume, by avoiding separate sections for fields of discipline, such as history and archaeology as well as topics such as gender. Instead, archaeological chapters are integrated among other approaches into the wider thematic strands, and contributions that focused on gender and the experiences of women were also not separated from other approaches. Women were part of rural society just as children and men were and should therefore no longer be treated separately.
In Part 1 the six collected chapters explore aspects of communal life in rural contexts. It should not be surprising that notions of rural community loom large in this volume. On the one hand it is a very traditional stalwart of peasant studies, and it is indeed difficult to engage with the topic of rural life without contemplating communal structures.25 Examining rural communities shows how multifaceted and dynamic village life was. Several of the contributors highlight structures of hierarchies and status, as for example Aysu Dincer has done by allowing a rare and exciting glimpse into social structures in medieval Cyprus, or Frederic Aparasi, by stressing the importance of village elites in Valencia, or indeed through the exploration of the dynamics between lordship and rural societies in Tuscany by Tommaso Casini. Their contributions also once again highlight the intrinsic complexity of peasantries. Far from all poor, lacking any formal education and servile, a lot of these individuals were not only well off but had links to governmental and legal structures, and a few were downright entrepreneurial. Yet still, they were peasants; they were not like lesser nobles or townspeople. Even if in some cases they ended up living in towns, their rural ties seemed to stay with them, steering their lives into particular paths. The role the peasantry played in government, and more specifically village governance is also the theme of Piotr Guzowski’s important contribution exploring village organisation in medieval Poland, while Mathias Moosbrugger gets to the heart of the problem of what a village community was and how it could come into being by looking at the example of South-West Germany, engaging with debates that reverberate strongly through the German historiography of village life and especially at the wake of the Bundschuh movements and the German Peasant War of the early sixteenth century, but that has also stimulated interest in the extensive English historiographical discussions about ‘the peasantry’ and the village ‘community’.26
It is all too common to think of rural communal life in secular terms. Many sources moreover appear to encourage us to do so. They might be census records, manorial court records, court cases, indigtments or inventories that are prone to giving us a religion-free flavour of the past, focused as they are on trade, conflict. feudal dues, taxes and ownership. Robert Swanson’s essay exploring the English rural parish attempts to steer us away from such misconceptions. We are shown the importance of church structures, religious rituals and the institution of the parish as an intrinsic factor in the experiences of those who lived in the rural countryside. Experiences of the parish community were not merely another layer in intra- and intercommunal dynamics, but were intermeshed within the otherwise primarily secular constellations; they were integral to them, giving them wider dimensions.
Part 2 of the book is focused on adversity. Rural folk were incredibly resilient, and were survivors. Their struggle for survival is at the root of the somewhat Janus-faced nature of rural societies. On the one hand survival meant to a large degree cohesion. Solidarity and cooperation were necessities of life. On the other hand, however, communal cohesion can also mean exclusion, conflict and othering. The conceptualisation of communal structures necessitates elements outside such structures. Such factors related to other labourers and newcomers to village communities, as well as to local elements of the village elite, who were often tied into seigniorial governance as petty officials who were often placed in the difficult position of intermediaries between lords and peasants. The greatest division in the countryside though can still be found between lords and peasants. Here the lord was the most significant ‘other’ against whom solidarities often solidified.27
It is difficult to deny the dynamics of social class in rural societies, with the dominant class constellation being the lord on the one side and the peasantry with all their stratifications, economic, social and political complexities on the other.28 For despite their many differences in status, learning and economic means, which we have already encountered to some extent in Part 1, they were still under the rule of lordship and in one way or another tied to the soil as a means of income. Maika de Keyzer’s contribution offers us important insights into rural conflict over access to resources, while Justine Firnhaber-Baker explores the political dynamics between peasants and their Ecclesiastical lord in France before the explosion of popular revolt we have come to know as the Jacquerie. Conflictual politics were, however, not the only problems rural societies had to cope with. In his contribution, Phillipp Schofield explores famine in England while Philip Slavin discusses the development of disease and plagues in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His contribution offers us a broader perspective than a mere focus on the Black Death, not least because the existing scholarship on this topic, especially on the medium- to long-term effects of the Black Death, is vast.29
The third part of this volume explores aspects of the working lives of peasants and labourers. Jean Birrell’s contribution once again underlines the lack of homogeneity in medieval rural communities in her exploration of those who worked as wage labourers in medieval England. Her chapter represents an important contribution to our growing understanding of the nature and status of wage labourers in peasant communities. These were often, but not always, landless villagers, travelling immigrants to village communities or even smallholding peasants whose holdings could not be relied on to feed the household throughout the year, and who were consequently forced to supplement their incomes through wage labour. Chris Briggs illuminates in his contributions the important relationships between peasant household and consumption, highlighting another important complexity in rural society – its interconnection with urban centres, the difficulty of distinguishing town from village and the consumerism and production in rural contexts across the later Middle Ages. Adam Franklyn-Lyon’s contribution explores the developments in agricultural production in the Mediterranean, while Peter Larson reminds us of the importance of land markets in rural communities in England.
Three contributions in this section also engage with gender in rural communities, in particular in relation to work and developing rural technologies. Bernadette McCooey’s wide-ranging and illuminating discussion highlights not only the importance of women as farm labourers but also draws attention to the somewhat neglected topic of the role children played as farm workers in medieval Iceland. Janken Myrdal and Ingveld Øye offer us important and fascinating insights into developing technologies especially in the female stronghold areas of production of dairying and textiles in the High Middle Ages in a discussion drawing on sources and evidence from all over Europe and beyond. In the final chapter of this part Lies Vervaet focusses on the so far neglected, yet important contribution of women to the economy of coastal Flanders in the Later Middle Ages.
The final and fourth part of this volume brings together some important studies focussing on rural environments in the widest sense. On the one hand, contributions explore landscape history and the changing and dynamic interaction between rural communities and the geography and topography in which they operated and on the other aspects of material culture, which also includes experimental archaeology. Bednarski, Moore and Newfield introduce in their contribution the multidisciplinary and ambitious project exploring settlement sites around Herstmonceau on the south coast of England, while Furio offers important insights into the organisation and establishment of the famous irrigation systems in the Mediterranean, which brought Muslim and Christian communities together. Gerrard and O’Donnell offer wide-ranging insights into rural material culture. Richard Jones’ study offers detailed insights into the changing landscape of England in the thirteenth century. Finally, Catarina Karlsson’s study shows the potentially important contributions experimental archaeology can make to our understanding of rural material culture as well as value systems and economic costs of agricultural tools.
It is hoped that the reader will not only find the chapters offered here informative, but illuminating as well as enjoyable. Above all it is hoped that these studies will not merely go some way toward increasing understanding of rural societies in the Middle Ages, but also inspire new research and spark new questions to be asked of our sources.
Notes
1. There are always many people to thank when it comes to presenting a book to the public. Many, many friends and colleagues have encouraged and supported the idea of this book from the start. The authors of the individual contributions have been very patient and understanding with my at times rather slow editorial progress. My family stand out as always for being immensely supportive. I am also grateful for the thoughts and ideas from Chris Dyer, Chris Wickham, Jane Whittle and Naomi Standen when I discussed my ideas for this volume with them, and special thanks need to go to my friend Mike Evans for agreeing to read my draft introduction. Without his comments I am sure my offering would be poorer. All mistakes are of course – as always – my own. On a personal note: I wrote this introduction and read many of the chapters presented here between the announcement of the UK referendum on leaving the EU and my family’s own subsequent move from the UK, a country I love very deeply, to Germany as we desired a future in and not outside Europe for us and our children. In many ways this edited book is a resultant labour of love for the history and diversity of Europe. It seems that it is now more important than ever to look over the garden fence, reject the common assumptions of English exceptionalism and pull down borders of misunderstanding. It is hoped this humble book may play a tiny part in this process.
2. Fortowns see for example: R. H. Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society a Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); R. Holt and G. Rosser, The Medieval Town in England 1200-1540 (London: Routledge, 1990); C. Dyer, ‘Towns and Cottages in Eleventh – Century England’, in: C. Dyer, ed., Everyday Life in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), pp. 241–55.
3. Discussions around the term are wide-ranging. We might include the following: E. R. Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, 1966); W. Rösener, The Peasantry of Europe (Oxford/Cambridge: Wiley – Blackwell, 1994), C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages Social Change in England C. 1200-1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 22–3; M. Müller, ‘A Divided Class? Peasants and Peasant Communities in Later Medieval England’, in: C. Dyer, P. Coss and C. Wickham, eds., Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages; An Exploration of Historical Themes (Past and Present Supplement 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 115–31.
4. Thisis also a point discussed by Scott: T. Scott, ‘Introduction’, in: T. Scott, ed., The Peasantries of Europe, from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London and New York: Longman, 1998), p. 2.
5. See for example on this Scott, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–2 and 9–17.
6. Theliterature on this topic is substantial. See for example: J. Mullan and R. Britnell, Land and the Family; The Trends and Local Variations in the Peasant Land Market on the Winchester Bishopric Estate 1263-1415 (Studies in Regional and Local History vol. 8, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010); the essays in B. J. P. van Bavel and P. R. Schofield, eds., also engage with this topic: The Development of Leasehold in Northwestern Europe, c. 1200–1600 (Turnhout:Brepols, CORN publication series vol. 10, 2008); P. R. Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval Engfland 1200-1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), esp. pp. 9–76.
7. Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England.
8. Ofrelevance here is the debate started by Macfarlane: A. Macfarlane, ‘The Myth of the Peasantry: Family and Economy in a northern Parish’, in: R. M. Smith., ed., Land, Kinship and Life Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 333–49; A. Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Blackwell: Oxford, 1978); See also his critics, especially Z. Razi, ‘The Erosion of the Family Land-Bond in the Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: A Methodological Note’, in: R. M. Smith ed., Land, Kinship and Life Cycle, pp. 295–303; J. Whittle, ‘Individualism and the Family-Land Bond’, in: Past and Present, vol. 160, (1998), pp. 25–63.
9. C. Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages; The People of Britain 850-1520 (New Haven, CT and New York: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 8.
10. C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, Social Change in England c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 23.
11. R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975); Müller, ‘A Divided Class?’, pp. 115–31.
12. M. Müller, ‘Peasant Women, Agency and Status in Mid Thirteenth to Late Fourteenth Century England: Some Reconsiderations’, in: C. Beattie and M. Frank Stevens, eds., Married Women and the Law in Pre-modern Northwest Europe (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 91–114.
13. M. Müller, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs in Medieval Rural England; Growing up in the Village (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) esp. pp. 119–40.
14. Z. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish. Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270-1400 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Müller, ‘A Divided Class?’, pp. 115–31.
15. Scott, The Peasantries of Europe.
16. Z. Razi and R. M. Smith, eds., Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) see here especially the chapter by Z. Razi and R. M. Smith, ‘The Historiography of Manorial Court Rolls’, pp. 1–35; M. Bailey, The English Manor c. 1200-c. 1500 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 167 ff.
17. M. Bloch, ‘A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies’, in: M. Bloch, ed., Land and Work in Medieval Europe Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, translated by J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 45–6.
18. Bloch, ‘A Contribution towards a Comparative History’, pp. 45–6.
19. See on this also C. Wickham, Problems in Doing Comparative History, the Reuter Lecture 2004 (University of Southampton, 2005) who felt that ‘comparison is essential’, p. 2.
20. A very similar point was made by Wickham, Problems in doing Comparative History, p. 3.
21. Wickham, Problems in doing Comparative History, p. 7.
22. Wickham, Problems in doing Comparative History, p. 7.
23. Bloch, ‘A Contribution towards a Comparative History’, p. 46 and p. 47.
24. For some excellent studies see for example:
25. The bibliography on this topic is vast. For examples in the English and German and historiography see: E. Britton, The Community of the Vill (1977); Z. Razi, ‘The Toronto School’s Reconstruction of Medieval Peasant Society: A Critical View’, in: Past & Presen, vol. 85 (1979), pp. 141–56; Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England, pp. 1–9; Muller, ‘A Divided Class?’, pp. 115–31; C. Dyer, ‘The English Medieval Village Community and Its Decline’, in: Journal of British Studies, vol. 33, no. 4 (1994), pp. 407–29; J. A. Raftis, ‘Changes in an English Village after the Black Death’, in: Medieval Studies, vol. 29 (1967), pp. 158–77; P. Blickle, Kommunalismus: Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform. Volume 1, Oberdeutschland (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000); P. Blickle, Kommunalismus: Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform. Volume 2, Europa (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000). See also on this the discussion by Scribner: R. W. Scribner, ‘Communalism: Universal Category or Ideological Construct? A Debate in the Historiography of Early Modern Germany and Switzerland’, in: The Historical Journal, vol. 37, no. 1 (1994), pp. 199–207.
26. See for example: P. Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective. Translated by Thomas A. Brady Jr. and H. C. Erik Midelfort (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); P. Blickle, Der Bauernkrieg, Die Revolution des Gemeinen Mannes (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998). See also in particular his very ambitious two volume exploration of the concepts around ‘Community’, or Kommunalismus: Blickle Peter, Kommunalismus: Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform. Volume 1, Oberdeutschland (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000); Blickle Peter, Kommunalismus: Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform. Volume 2, Europa (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000). See also on this the discussion by Scribner: Scribner, ‘Communalism’, pp. 199–207.
27. See for example, R. H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London and New York: Methuen, 1973); S. Cohn, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); S. Cohn, Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders. Series: Manchester medieval sources series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
28. For the peasantry as class see for example: Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages; Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages; Müller, ‘A Divided Class?’ pp. 115–31.
29. The literature on this topic is vast. See for example: P. Lagerås, ed., Environment, Society and the Black Death; An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Late -Medieval Crisis in Sweden (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2016); C. Platt, King Death; The Black Death and Its Aftermath in England (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); M. Ormrod and P. Lindley, eds., The Black Death in England (Stamford: Paul Watkins Publishing, 1996); R. Horrox presents us with an excellent collection of sources from across Europe with very helpful and wide ranging introductions in her edited book The Black Death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).