Dr Rosamond Faith is a leading historian of the Englishpeasantry in the early and central Middle Ages. In a series of influential studies,she has uncovered the basic structures of rural society, revealing how economicorganisation, physical environment, and ideology shaped the lives of ordinarypeople in the earliest documented centuries. In this Festschrift, friends and colleagues take upher theme, offering new perspectives on people who worked for a living betweenthe seventh and fourteenth centuries. King Alfred famously divided society intothree 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 berecovered indirectly. The essays collected here approach rural society underthree different headings, each examining a different dimension of peasant life. The first section addresses the organisation of ruralsociety. Every locality was subject toinstruments and processes regulating the exploitation of the landscape, whetheradministrative or co-operative in nature, and whether operating on a regionalor manorial scale. A second group of essays considers how the rural populationwas classified, and how this reflected or obscured realities on the ground. Administrativedocuments employed social categories which did not necessarily align with everydayusage, while people whose livelihood was not wholly agricultural, or notentirely encompassed by the manor, had a light documentary footprint. Furtherpapers address the practicalities of agricultural production. While much wasdictated by universal constraints, scientific and topographical studies shedlight on adaptations in technology and cultivation systems. Theexpert contributions assembled in this lively volume include local studiesranging from Devon to Lincolnshire and will be of interest to anyone thinkingabout the social history of medieval England.
