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[parution] Christopher Dyer, Peasants Making History. Living In an English Region 1200-1540

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Peasants Making History

  • Offers some new ideas about pre-modern society and the roles played by peasants
  • Develops our understanding of attitudes and relationships between peasants and their social superiors (their lords), their neighbours, and their households
  • Provides unique insights into the practicalities of life in the past
  • Supported by ingenious use of evidence
  • Gives voice to underprivileged people, including the poor and the women who have decisive roles in this history

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.

Source : site des presses universitaires d’Oxford

Joséphine Moulier

Doctorante en histoire médiévale

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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Joséphine Moulier (9 juillet 2022). [parution] Christopher Dyer, Peasants Making History. Living In an English Region 1200-1540. Doc-Ciham. Consulté le 12 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/nu9n


Joséphine Moulier

Doctorante en histoire médiévale

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