Overview

This is a new collection of essays on agriculture and rural society in the late Middle Ages, in particular following the Black Death. It combines a broad perspective on agrarian problems, such as depopulation and social conflict with illustrative material from detailed local and regional research to show how these general problems were worked out in specific contexts. The contributors explore the wide regional variety across Europe (which was influenced by climatic differences and broad spatial variables such as levels of urbanisation and commercial infrastructure), yet they argue that a European history is nevertheless possible. They also supply detailed studies from regional British contexts relating to, amongst other issues, the use of the land, the movement of prices, the distribution of property, the organisation of trade and the cohesion of village society.There is new research on several aspects of regional development in medieval England and other European countries: Robert Swanson, a leading authority on the history of the late medieval Church, discusses how the collection of tithes to maintain local clergy in the medieval Church contributed to the commercialisation of trade in grain and other agricultural products; Peter Larson shows how villagers became increasingly prone to violence in the generations following the Black Death, in response to the social upheavals caused by the epidemic. If there is a single overarching idea that gives the collection coherence, it is that trends in agriculture during the late Middle Ages were more varied than has usually been supposed. Taken as a whole, the book supplies a valuable introduction to problems and research methods together with original contributions to knowledge based on current research.

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9781902806785

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Emeritus Professor Richard Britnell taught in the University of Durham from 1966 until his retirement in 2003. He has specialized in the economic and social history of the medieval period, and is the author of several monographs and textbooks as well as having written articles and edited collections of papers. He is currently a joint editor of the Surtees Society, and is preparing an edition of Durham court records. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005.Dr Ben Dodds is a lecturer in the Department of History in Durham, specializing in late-medieval economic and social history. He has recently published Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: the Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536 (Boydell Press, 2007), as well as a number of related articles. He has been closely involved in a collaborative project on tithe and the peasant economy of southern England and is currently engaged in writing up the results. His next project will involve a comparative study, using the approaches developed for medieval sources to study the peasantry of early modern Spain.

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