This substantial new volume is very welcome. It provides clear and well-explained overviews of the important themes pertaining to a period of considerable stress and disruption in English society. Not all the chapters address the latest research, and the “Further Reading” appendix is (as in many multiauthored collections) somewhat scattershot. But the contributors strike a happy balance between meaningful generalization and well-selected detail—meaning that specialists and novices, students and scholars will learn from them. This review mirrors the book's structure, with more attention to the five large chapters than to the surrounding specialized discussions.
S. H. Rigby's articulate and comprehensive introductory chapter, “Social Structure and Economic Change in Late Medieval England,” should be required reading for all students of medieval social history. It sets a standard of clarity and sophistication, particularly in its discussion of historiography, not met by all the volume's contributors. In explaining his theme through modern analytic categories, Rigby clearly delineates the emphases of Marxist and non-Marxist scholarship. On social structure, he stresses inequity, showing how it could lead to either conciliation or conflict. And who knew that our picture of English society might differ so much depending on whether the English population doubled or trebled between 1066 and 1300?
Also outstanding is Peter Coss's chapter, “An Age of Deference.” Coss uses language as a key to social distinctions and engages with exceptional thoughtfulness on the relationship between literature and lived reality. His cogent discussion argues that social definitions became stronger in the fourteenth century.
Michael Prestwich provides a compact chapter, “The Enterprise of War,” that clearly conveys the significance of war and the military in a turbulent era of English history, distinguishing between ideals and reality. Prestwich's definition of “knight” is especially admirable. The late Simon Walker's “Order and Law” confidently describes the justice systems of medieval England, with notable attention to the connection between the cultural and the political significances of law (in explaining popular antipathy to lawyers). Walker's discussion progresses smoothly from the “authoritarian ideal” of official law to community systems of order and law. It neglects gender, however, as a factor determining individuals’ access to the law. Philippa Maddern's “Social Mobility” will be a most useful piece for discussions of the variable meaning of social hierarchies in individual lives. Maddern concludes that social immobility was the norm, but not before showing what different destinies could emerge even in this strictly demarcated world.
Richard Britnell examines “town life” in terms that speak to the emphases of present-day scholarship. To be sure, traditional topics such as the towns’ commercial significance, their political institutions, and their social structures receive due attention, but with some fresh treatments. Through attention to variation among towns, Britnell shows that, for example, the size of a town helped to determine its social structure and its regional role. Students will also learn what life in a medieval town was actually like, because Britnell's thorough overview also includes the physical urban environment, urban culture, and religion.
Bruce Campbell's chapter, “The Land,” is fittingly the book's longest, given that it addresses the fundamental underpinning of medieval social life. Campbell corrects misconceptions about land use, servile status, landlords’ status, and peasant self-sufficiency, probably still widespread. Students will learn, in addition, how variable peasant status was and how rare violence between landlords and tenants was.
Maryanne Kowaleski leaves no doubt that medieval people were consumers, provocatively locating the “consumer revolution” in the late Middle Ages amid an increase in purchasing power after the Black Death. Her discussion takes in food, clothing, living spaces, material culture, and the role of piety in stimulating consumption. The book's lack of illustrations is a handicap here. Wendy Childs dispels the myth of a medieval society of homebodies by demonstrating the centrality of the movement of people and goods in the functioning of late medieval society and even politics. Mavis Mate's piece, “Work and Leisure,” unavoidably overlaps with earlier chapters and is more valuably informative on leisure than on work, though it does address the always-intriguing question of whether women's work opportunities improved in the late Middle Ages.
Eamon Duffy's chapter, “Religious Belief,” is distinguished by particularly fine writing and from its opening is a pleasure to read. One wonders, however, how appropriate the chapter title is, since Duffy seems to concentrate more on religious organization (forms of association), structure (a nonregimented E church's apparent tolerance of “magical” activity. Janet Burton's “Renunciation” focuses on the religious orders, which, as she makes clear, were only one of several viable paths to God by the late Middle Ages. Charles Phythian-Adams has more difficulty discussing “ritual constructions of society” in a clearly organized manner, but he does illustrate the variety and extent of ritual in medieval life, connected to both ritual space and ritual time.
Of the book's few abstract category concepts, perhaps the most resistant to containment in a single chapter—“Identities”—fell to Miri Rubin. Though the result is somewhat diffuse, the chapter will be valuable for stimulating further discussion and, in classroom use, further reading. Rubin explains the oversimplifications of previous historiography on identity and shows us the challenges to finding medieval identity presented by medieval sources. Some of her observations are stimulating. Punishment, so pervasive in medieval life, created a “negative” identity; the powerful subverted identity by taking on postures of submission or by simply not conforming. The chapter needed, however, a more explicit discussion of theoretical approaches to identity, so that we could see how these function in a historical analysis of late medieval evidence.
P .J. P. Goldberg in “Life and Death: The Ages of Man” provides, with his usual clarity, a well-balanced overview of important points on age structure, marriage, and courtship, always tempering generalizations with attention to regional variations. Robin Frame's attempt to address English connections to “the wider world” is best when the discussion sticks to the British Isles. Given the difficulty of writing about writing, Paul Strohm's contribution, “Writing and Reading,” manages to convey something of the variety of late medieval written culture in England: changes in the status of English, the meaning of literacy, censorship, and the impact of printing. Rosemary Horrox provides a perceptive and incisive conclusion, which valuably addresses periodization and stresses that “medieval” should not mean “inimical to all change.”
This book will find a wide audience and will be especially useful for teaching—not only to supply lecture material but also for readings and discussion in upper-year undergraduate and, indeed, postgraduate courses. I, for one, fully intend to employ it to these ends.
