Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape

Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape PDF Author: Susan Kilby
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781912260218
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This compelling new study forms part of a new wave of scholarship on the medieval rural environment in which the focus moves beyond purely socio-economic concerns to incorporate the lived experience of peasants. For too long, the principal intellectual approach has been to consider both subject and evidence from a modern, rationalist perspective and to afford greater importance to the social elite. New perspectives are needed. By re-evaluating the source material from the perspective of the peasant worldview, it is possible to build a far more detailed representation of rural peasant experience. Susan Kilby seeks to reconstruct the physical and socio-cultural environment of three contrasting English villages--Lakenheath in Suffolk, Castor in Northamptonshire, and Elton in Huntingdonshire--between c. 1086 and c. 1348 and to use this as the basis for determining how peasants perceived their natural surroundings. In so doing she draws upon a vast array of sources including documents, material culture, place-names and family names, and the landscape itself. At the same time, she explores the approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology, and historical geography. This highly interdisciplinary process reveals exciting insights into peasant mentalities. For example, cultural geographers' understanding of the ways in which different groups 'read' their local landscape has profound implications for the ways in which we might interpret evidence left to us by medieval English peasant communities, while anthropological approaches to place-naming demonstrate the distinct possibility that there were similarities between the naming practices of First Nations people and medieval society. Both groups used key landscape referents and also used names as the means by which locally important history, folklore, and legends were embedded within the landscape itself. Among many valuable insights, this study also reveals that, although uneducated in the formal sense, peasants understood aspects of contemporary scientific thought. In addition to enhancing academic understanding of the lived experience, this new approach augments our comprehension of subjects such as social status, peasant agency, peasants' economic experiences, and the construction of communal and individual memory. Susan Kilby's groundbreaking study enables us to reclaim significant elements of the environment inhabited and traversed by English people over 700 years ago.

Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape

Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape PDF Author: Susan Kilby
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781912260218
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This compelling new study forms part of a new wave of scholarship on the medieval rural environment in which the focus moves beyond purely socio-economic concerns to incorporate the lived experience of peasants. For too long, the principal intellectual approach has been to consider both subject and evidence from a modern, rationalist perspective and to afford greater importance to the social elite. New perspectives are needed. By re-evaluating the source material from the perspective of the peasant worldview, it is possible to build a far more detailed representation of rural peasant experience. Susan Kilby seeks to reconstruct the physical and socio-cultural environment of three contrasting English villages--Lakenheath in Suffolk, Castor in Northamptonshire, and Elton in Huntingdonshire--between c. 1086 and c. 1348 and to use this as the basis for determining how peasants perceived their natural surroundings. In so doing she draws upon a vast array of sources including documents, material culture, place-names and family names, and the landscape itself. At the same time, she explores the approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology, and historical geography. This highly interdisciplinary process reveals exciting insights into peasant mentalities. For example, cultural geographers' understanding of the ways in which different groups 'read' their local landscape has profound implications for the ways in which we might interpret evidence left to us by medieval English peasant communities, while anthropological approaches to place-naming demonstrate the distinct possibility that there were similarities between the naming practices of First Nations people and medieval society. Both groups used key landscape referents and also used names as the means by which locally important history, folklore, and legends were embedded within the landscape itself. Among many valuable insights, this study also reveals that, although uneducated in the formal sense, peasants understood aspects of contemporary scientific thought. In addition to enhancing academic understanding of the lived experience, this new approach augments our comprehension of subjects such as social status, peasant agency, peasants' economic experiences, and the construction of communal and individual memory. Susan Kilby's groundbreaking study enables us to reclaim significant elements of the environment inhabited and traversed by English people over 700 years ago.

Peasants Making History

Peasants Making History PDF Author: Christopher Dyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019258653X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
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.

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape PDF Author: Stephen Mileson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This volume marks a change in the areas of landscape history and the history of everyday life, offering the first sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places they lived, focussing on the area of Ewelme hundred.

Landscapes Decoded

Landscapes Decoded PDF Author: Susan Oosthuizen
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
ISBN: 9781902806587
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Presenting the research into the landscape history of the Bourn Valley, west of Cambridge, this book is published as the first volume in a series of mid-length monographs on unusual subjects within local and regional history. It is illustrated throughout with maps and photos.

Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: Spike Gibbs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009311832
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Shows how lordship and state formation affected local authority in the transition between medieval and early modern England.

The Catch

The Catch PDF Author: Richard C. Hoffmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108845460
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 583

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Book Description
Insightful analysis of relationships between human communities and aquatic ecosystems of Europe from c. 500 to 1500 CE.

The Significance of Doorway Positions in English Medieval Parochial Churches and Chapels

The Significance of Doorway Positions in English Medieval Parochial Churches and Chapels PDF Author: Geoffrey Sedlezky
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803275766
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book analyses the positions of external church doorways in England to investigate the significance that positioning had for the function and design of these buildings. The author proposes a link between the design and function of parochial churches and chapels with the number and attributes of their doorways.

Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy

Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy PDF Author: Maryanne Kowaleski
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503551562
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Professor Bruce Campbell's career has been devoted to providing systematic and highly influential studies of the medieval economy and society of the British Isles, including his innovative work on the role of the elites in defining medieval agricultural practices. This volume draws together essays from a distinguished group of researchers who have been inspired by Campbell's work and the spirit of collegiality and inclusiveness that he has always demonstrated, and who wish to celebrate his significant contributions to scholarship. Many of the essays collected here engage directly with critical issues raised in Professor Campbell's own research: how medieval society fed itself with reputedly very low levels of technology, the productivity of medieval society as a whole, the impact of external forces (particularly climate), the relationship between lords and peasants, and the importance of non-seigniorial contributions to the medieval economy.

The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life

The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life PDF Author: Miriam Müller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000450732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life brings together the latest research on peasantry in medieval Europe. The aim is to place peasants – as small-scale agricultural producers – firmly at the centre of this volume, as people with agency, immense skill and resilience to shape their environments, cultures and societies. This volume examines the changes and evolutions within village societies across the medieval period, over a broad chronology and across a wide geography. Rural structures, families and hierarchies are examined alongside tool use and trade, as well as the impact of external factors such as famine and the Black Death. The contributions offer insights into multidisciplinary research, incorporating archaeological as well as landscape studies alongside traditional historical documentary approaches across widely differing local and regional contexts across medieval Europe. This book will be an essential reference for scholars and students of medieval history, as well those interested in rural, cultural and social history.

Rethinking the Great Transition

Rethinking the Great Transition PDF Author: Peter L. Larson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192849875
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This case study of two rural parishes in County Durham, England, provides an alternate view on the economic development involved in the transition from medieval to modern, partly explaining England's rise to global economic dominance in the seventeenth century. Coal mining did not come to these parishes until the nineteenth century; these are an example of agrarian expansion. Low population, favourable seigniorial administration, and a commercialised society saw the emergence of large farms on the bishopric of Durham soon after the Black Death; these secure copyhold and leasehold tenures were among the earliest known in England. Individualism developed within a strong parish and village community that encouraged growth while enforcing conformity: tenants had freedom to farm as they wished, within limits. Along with low rents, this allowed for a swift expansion of agricultural production in the sixteenth century as population rose and then as the coal trade expanded rapidly. The prosperity of these men is reflected in their lands, livestock, and consumer goods. Yet not all shared in this prosperity, as the poor and landless increased in number simply by population growth. Through reformation and rebellion, these and other parishes prospered without experiencing severe disruption or destruction. In north-eastern England, agrarian development was an evolution and not a revolution. This study shows England's economic development as a single narrative, woven together from a collection of regional experiences at different times and at different speeds.