One of the most significant and prolific students of medieval British social and economic history of the last generation has been Christopher Dyer. Some of his syntheses, like Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; rev. edn, 1998) and Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–1520 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), have become staples of both undergraduate and graduate student reading lists. Dyer, using a multidisciplinary approach melding the close study of texts, archaeology, and landscape history has helped substantially refine our understanding of the medieval English peasantry. Dyer's peasants are not an inert, oppressed and downtrodden mass whose lives were dictated by a dull adhesion to custom but a “shrewd, intelligent, and capable” (p. 3) group. They played an active role not only in managing their own affairs, but in ensuring the smooth functioning of local government and manorial organization. In a field where urban and agrarian history have often been treated separately, he has been a pioneer in seeing how urban and rural life in medieval England fit together in an organic whole.

To celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday in 2009, Dyer's friends, students, and colleagues have brought together essays organized around two of the major themes of his work, “survival” and “discord.” As the editors' introduction notes, these themes embrace such wide-ranging questions as how well the people of Britain lived, how resources were shared among them, and what were the complex tensions and stresses that characterized relations between different groups.

The volume contains fifteen essays ranging over a wide variety of material and it is not possible to touch on all of them in a brief review. At least four of the essays on the theme of “survival” struck this reviewer as particularly interesting. Harold Fox argues that the “wastes” of Dartmoor were not merely marginal lands, but were vital to the economic interests of both local lords and peasants. Robert Swanson calls attention to the importance in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century of the income derived by the dean and chapter of Lichfield from spiritualities in the Peak District. While other revenue streams declined, these remained relatively steady; indeed, farming them became attractive to the more forward thrusting, “go-ahead,” local gentry. John Langdon, using data from royal building sites, argues that although in the long-term wages were quite “sticky,” changing only very slowly, there were periods, such as the 1270s and 1290s, when demand for labor produced wages that were high enough to meet not only the subsistence needs of workers but, by allowing them to lay aside money for such expenses as dowries and entry fines, facilitated the formation of new households and thus spurred population growth. Matthew Tompkins discusses the unusual case of the villagers of Great Horwood who, beginning in 1320, leased the manor's demesne continuously for almost three hundred years. This lease simultaneously illustrates the capacity of the peasants to engage in collective enterprise and the limits to that collective action, since over time the leaseholders gradually evolved into a distinct oligarchical group within the village.

Under the theme of “discord,” Jean Birrel and Jane Laughton discuss, respectively, tenant lord tensions at Alrewas in Staffordshire before the Black Death and the efforts by town authorities in Chester to control conflict and disorder in the fifteenth century. Miriam Müller provides an interesting essay on how class tension and conflict played out around issues of food consumption. As the laboring classes after the Black Death began to eat more high-status food—meat and wheat bread—the ruling classes took steps to ensure that their culinary habits remained clearly differentiated from those of their inferiors, primarily by eating more exotic meats—fowl and game—and engaging in conspicuous consumption at ever more lavish feasts.

Bas J. P. van Bavel and Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., enlarge the geographic scope of the volume beyond the British Isles. Bavel looks at five areas where major rural revolts took place in the Low Countries before the Black Death. All were characterized by a high degree of peasant freedom and secure property rights, a virtual lack of manorialization, and traditions of strong community self-organization. What sparked the revolts was the growing political centralization by local territorial princes, which went hand in hand with efforts by local nobles to enhance their power. Contrary to what one is usually led to believe about popular rebellions, these revolts enjoyed a considerable degree of success. Cohn sets late medieval English rebellions in a European wide context. He argues that the English experience of rebellion was quite different from that of the rest of Europe. Religion, for example, played a much bigger role in English revolts than was often the case on the continent. The great rising of 1381, for example, produced demands for a radical reorganization of the church while members of the lesser clergy played an important leadership role in the events. Overall, rebellion was much less common in England than on the continent. Cohn also argues, contrary to the classic views of R. H. Hilton, that rebellions were more common and successful in English towns than in villages. Seen in a European wide context, English commoners appear to have had less capacity to challenge the power of lords, city oligarchs, and the royal government than their contemporaries across the Channel.

Like all essay collections, this is an uneven volume. Although all the essays are well done, some will appeal primarily to an audience of specialists. Nevertheless, Dyer has good reason to be pleased with what his students and colleagues have produced.