Rural society
Seminar and Essay Questions
- Was serfdom primarily an economic institution?
- 'The manor played a central role in the medieval countryside'. Discuss.
- Why did the manorial system begin to break down in the later Middle Ages?
documents
- (for a description of feudal dues)
introductory reading
Power, Central Middle Ages, 28–56.
Bartlett, Making of Europe, 106–66.
Barber, Two Cities, 36–41.
e-resources
- Information about This village was destroyed at around the time of the Black Death. Archaeological study of the site gives us an idea of what a medieval village would have looked like.
- : open-field strip farming, some enclosures, triennial crop rotation, demesne and manse, common woodland, pasturage and meadow.
further reading
Bailey, Mark, The English Manor, c.1200-c.1500 (Manchester, 2002)
Bailey, Mark, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England: From Bondage to Freedom (Suffolk : Boydell & Brewer, 2014)
Balestracci, Duccio, The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Peasant, trans. Paolo Squatriti and Betsy Merideth (University Park, 1999)
Bennett, H.S., The Pastons and their England, 2nd ed. (London, 1968)
Bisson, Thomas N., , Speculum 70 (1995), 743-59.
Bisson, Thomas N., , Past and Present 142 (1994), 6-42.
Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1965)
Brown, Elizabeth, , American Historical Review 79.4 (1974), 1063-88.
Duby, Georges, The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1974)
Duby, Georges, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago, 1980)
Dyer, Christopherm Peter Coss, and Chris Wickham, eds, Rodney Hilton's Middle Ages : an exploration of historical themes (Oxford, 2007) (Lots of useful articles, esp. relevant: Dyer, Alfonso, Burin, Muller, Schofield)
Freedman, Paul, (Cambridge, 1991)
Ganshof, F.L., Feudalism, trans. Philip Grierson (London, 1952)
Hanawalt, Barbara, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986)
Head, T., and R. Landes (eds), The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY, 1992)
Hilton, R.H., Bond Men Made Free (London, 1973)
Hilton, R.H., The English Peasantry in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975)
Hilton, R.H., Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (London, 1985)
Muller, Miriam, in: C. Beattie and M. F. Stevens eds., Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe (Boydell and Brewer, 2013)
Reynolds, Susan, (Oxford, 1994)
Reynolds, Susan, , 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1997)
Rosener, Werner, (Cambridge, 1992)
Schofield, Phillipp, (2002)
White, Lynn, Jr., (Oxford, 1966)
Woolgar, C. M., The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven, 1999)
