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Full Description
Dr Rosamond Faith is a leading historian of the English
peasantry in the early and central Middle Ages. In a series of influential
studies, she has uncovered the basic structures of rural society, revealing how
economic organisation, physical environment, and ideology shaped the lives of
ordinary people in the earliest documented centuries.
In this Festschrift, friends and colleagues take
up her theme, offering new perspectives on people who worked for a living
between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. King Alfred famously divided
society into three orders, but whereas the lives of 'those who fight' and 'those
who pray' are recorded in their own words, the experience of 'those who work'
can only be recovered indirectly. The essays collected here approach rural
society under three different headings, each examining a different dimension of
peasant life.
The first section addresses the organisation of rural
society. Every locality was subject to instruments and processes
regulating the exploitation of the landscape, whether administrative or
co-operative in nature, and whether operating on a regional or manorial scale.
A second group of essays considers how the rural population was classified, and
how this reflected or obscured realities on the ground. Administrative
documents employed social categories which did not necessarily align with
everyday usage, while people whose livelihood was not wholly agricultural, or
not entirely encompassed by the manor, had a light documentary footprint.
Further papers address the practicalities of agricultural production. While
much was dictated by universal constraints, scientific and topographical
studies shed light on adaptations in technology and cultivation systems.
The expert contributions assembled in this
lively volume include local studies ranging from Devon to Lincolnshire and will
be of interest to anyone thinking about the social history of medieval England.
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
1
Introduction: approaches to the medieval English peasantry
H.C. Boston and Richard Purkiss
Part I: Organising the landscape
2
Rendlesham in context: Anglo-Saxon territories in East Anglia
Tom Williamson
3 Old hides
for new thegns: the Witney charter bounds and estate development, 969 and 1044
John Blair
4 Commons
and property in the south Lincolnshire fens
H.C. Boston
5
Westminster Abbey's mandates to the bailiff of the manor of Birdbrook (Essex)
in the early fourteenth century
Phillipp R. Schofield
Part II: Peopling the landscape
6 The
significance of the geneat in Rectitudines Singularum
Personarum
Tom Lambert
7 Wicing
Batswegen: an eleventh-century witness in south-west England
Lesley Abrams
8
Independent peasants on the eve of the Conquest
Richard Purkiss
9
Classifying the English manorial population in the Domesday Survey
C.P. Lewis
10 Finding freedom in
the thirteenth-century English countryside
Stephen Mileson
Part III: Farming the landscape
11 Ymbhwyrft:
the farming year in early England
Debby Banham
12 Experimental
archaeology and the study of early medieval farming
Helena Hamerow, Claus Kropp and Amy Bogaard
13 Little England?
Mapping Pembrokeshire settlement
David Austin
Bibliography of Rosamond Faith's writings
