Peasants Making History is an impressive magnum opus by one of Britain’s most influential medieval historians. Christopher Dyer has investigated a wide range of economic and social phenomena in many publications, but here draws on that alongside much completely new research to make a compelling case for a theme that has long run through his work, namely, the significance of peasants in processes of historical change. He does this through a comprehensive regional case study of peasant activities within the West Midlands (defined as the counties of Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire). Dyer argues that we should see peasants not as inherently conservative and passive but as innovators who were capable of driving change both as a collective and as individuals. To demonstrate these points, he draws contrasts between the roles of lords and townspeople on the one hand, and those of peasants on the other, in transforming the medieval world, showing that while elites naturally had a significant influence, processes such as the formation of landscapes, the management of open fields, the growth of enclosures, the rise of urban centres and the creation of industry were the result of peasant initiative. He similarly shows how peasants adapted to changing economic and social conditions, for example through their role in taking on new lands in the period of population expansion of the thirteenth century. Another example, on a more micro scale, is the many peasants who chose to migrate both before and after the Black Death, depending on their individual circumstances.

The book itself is split into 11 chapters. It begins with a brief overview of historiographical developments in the study of peasants and the approach taken in the book. The nine substantive chapters deal with a range of themes. Some of these are important but familiar topics, such as landholding, family and household composition, and arable farming, but others break newer ground. For instance, one chapter covers peasant pastoralism in detail, providing discussions of multiple types of animal, ranging from horses and cattle to poultry and bees. Another chapter considers the depth of peasant involvement in industry, showing not only the spread of industrial activities in both specialised areas and the wider countryside but also the scale of certain peasant enterprises that operated outside of seignorial and urban control. This leads to the striking conclusion that perhaps a third of peasants’ time was spent on non-agricultural activities. Chapter 10 compares the idealized view of the peasantry and their interaction with other social groups found in Piers Plowman with the messier reality of conflicts and compromises between varying outlooks and attitudes among the peasantry. A brief conclusion draws together the threads of the book and makes the wider claim that, before 1500, peasants helped create the pre-conditions for several important developments that would occur in the following centuries. These include industrialization as a fundamental economic change associated with Britain, but also cultural and political developments. In making such a claim, Dyer challenges narratives that associate ‘modernization’ with the disappearance of peasantries.

The strengths of this book are manifold. It draws on an impressive array of sources, and particularly combines written and material evidence to great effect, highlighting areas neglected by historians and archaeologists not working in this interdisciplinary frame. Even within the written material, Dyer casts the net unusually wide, making use of sources such as the poll taxes and manorial court rolls that are the bread-and-butter material of the field, alongside more unique finds such as village-level assessments of tax payments from the fifteenth century. One particularly imaginative use of source material is the investigation of peasant plays through payments recorded in the registers of heads of religious houses; this illuminates an aspect of medieval rural culture that is invisible in more-traditional sources. The book has a wonderful sense of place and the natural environment in which its subjects lived and worked, and, as is typical of all his work, Dyer writes engagingly with a great eye for illustrative examples. The book is also excellently presented, with detailed and informative maps and a helpful glossary. However, while all archival materials are precisely referenced in the footnotes, the lack of a consolidated list of manuscript sources is a disappointing omission in terms of getting a sense of all the material consulted and identifying useful archives for future research.

While the book makes its wider case for the importance of peasant agency clearly and compellingly, this reader felt that on occasion Dyer could have engaged a little more explicitly with more-specific debates in the field. For instance, at points he highlights the significance of serfdom in limiting peasant activity and the role of peasant resistance in throwing off the yoke of unfreedom in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Dyer notes obliquely that this perspective gainsays recent revisionist arguments that serfdom both had limited effects on peasant welfare and was quickly ameliorated by lords in the face of competition for tenants in the wake of the Plague. Such a challenge to an interpretation that is rapidly emerging as the orthodoxy is, of course, welcome, but it would have been even stronger had the case been made more precisely, explaining how the impressive mass of evidence collected specifically responds to claims in the revisionist narrative. This would have allowed readers to better evaluate the relative strength of each perspective.

However, this criticism does not in any way detract from this book’s value on its own terms. Dyer brings together a wealth of sources and expertise to reconstruct the lived experiences of the peasantry in the best tradition of economic and social history. Peasants Making History will rightly become a fixture of undergraduate reading lists as well as providing inspiration for new avenues of research by experts in the field.