Rosamond Faith's Moral Economy of the Countryside is a magnificent contribution to medieval history that promises to have an enduring impact. In clear and elegant prose, Faith sets out a central problem that has seldom been tackled so directly or so effectively, namely how lordship established itself in late Anglo-Saxon England and strongly tightened its grip after the Norman Conquest. This is a question too often taken for granted because the Middle Ages has so long conjured up the image of powerful lords holding sway over dependent peasants. Yet, as Faith emphasizes, that picture is inappropriate for the early Middle Ages and even after the Conquest lordly dominance was far from inevitable. Peasants were well able to run their own affairs—it was their own collective action that formed the basis of local government in village and hundred—and at times of crisis they mounted strong resistance to lordship based on a sense of injustice and a perception of lost freedoms.

The idea that lordship grew over the medieval centuries is well established, not least thanks to Faith's own earlier work. What Faith does so successfully in this book is to offer a framework for understanding how this happened. The framework is based on the concept of a “moral economy,” which has proved useful in studies of a number of different societies, from eighteenth-century England to modern southeast Asia. Rather than ignoring hard economics, such an approach recognizes the power of ideas—the way in which shared values could shape relationships between lords and peasants. The book's focus is on England, but the analysis takes account of the fact that many developments were felt on both sides of the Channel. The first three sections set out an early medieval “moral economy” based on rank, reciprocity (both horizontal and vertical), and worth/reputation; the second three explain its transformation into a twelfth-century and later economy framed around tenure and class. It is argued that earlier ways of thinking helped set limits on the extractive power of lords, while later on the greater appropriation of peasant labor was achieved not simply through force (although that undoubtedly played a role) but also through the introduction of a new conception of property. In both cases, for all the inequalities, contemporary ideas amounted to more than a “legitimating theory” propounded by the elite because they were widely shared and assimilated.

Faith sees the twelfth century as the fulcrum of change. The creation of small local manors and lordships in the tenth century brought a new kind of landlord eager to obtain extra labor, and some farmers probably lost independence as a result. Yet, for her, the crucial change came later with the Norman introduction of “feudal” thinking about property, which emphasized the conditional tenure of land as “fee” across all ranks of society. The new system, embodied in Domesday Book, made the exaction of services legitimate, as well as, perhaps, muddying the sense of a separate peasant class. At the same time, Angevin legal reforms and lordly pressure restricted the category of “free” to those who could demonstrate their lack of servility and access to the king's justice, creating a large group of unfree tenants unable to resist the imposition of weekly agricultural work and other services. In increasing their demands, lords presumably took advantage of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century population growth that put pressure on land, although this is not a factor given detailed consideration. Faith argues that these developments shaped the demands and aspirations of those involved in late medieval risings.

Faith's concise survey of complex structural changes offers much to specialists and students at alike. The book makes a profound contribution to ongoing debates about the emergence of feudalism and the impact of the Norman Conquest. A deep knowledge of medieval agrarian life shines through on every page, notably a strong awareness of geographical variations in farming and settlement, and in turn the possibilities for lordly control. Above all, the book rightly puts culture and values at the heart of change, notably through a masterful analysis of the language used in contemporary texts, including what appear to be mundane managerial documents. The reader is made to think about what Faith aptly calls the “moral universes of the past” (ix), and reassured that something of their character can be recovered even for poorly documented societies and groups. Fertile possibilities are opened up for comparison, for instance of earlier and later medieval ideas of trust and reputation (a theme so successfully developed for the later Middle Ages by Ian Forrest's Trustworthy Men [2018]). Future studies might dig further into differences within the broad category of “peasant,” for instance by tracing the outlook of the free tenants who keep such a low profile in the manorial documents of the thirteenth century and later.