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Peasant and Community in Medieval England 1200-1500.

Article Excerpt
Phillipp R. Schofield. Peasant and Community in Medieval England 1200-1500. New York: Palgrave. 2003. Pp. vi, 279. $21.95 paper. ISBN 0-333-64711-4.

The study of the medieval English countryside has undergone major historiographical transformations over the last thirty years as new approaches to a variety of questions have been inspired by a growing appreciation of the commercialization of the English countryside, theories of economic development, demographic studies, women's and gender studies and cultural studies, as well as continued work by legal and institutional historians. The challenge remains: how can we comprehend an authoritarian, hierarchical regime that seemingly relied heavily on the cooperation of those near the bottom of the social ladder, especially since those "peasants" constituted a majority of the population?

One window onto medieval rural life is to recognize the peasantry's enduring commitment to the "virtues of a land-based hierarchy [that] accorded the individual a sense of place or identity within his community on the basis of his family's landholding" (Ian Blanchard, Labour and Leisure in the Historical Perspective, Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries [1994], p. 12) Phillipp R. Schofield's book provides an extremely valuable summary of the current state of scholarly debate regarding those very issues of community, family, and landholding. As part of a series of studies on medieval culture and...

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