The study of the medieval English peasantry is an extremely rich vein of scholarship, but very little has revealed how peasants viewed and understood the world they inhabited. A presumed lack of direct peasant testimony, the challenging nature of the source material— almost always written by, or for, elites—plus the modern, rationalist, intellectual approach of historians and the traditional focus of scholars on form, function, and productivity have all contributed to this gap. In Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape: A Study of Three Communities, Susan Kilby addresses this lacuna directly, stating that the “central aim of this book is to establish what it might be possible to determine about peasants’ varied relationships with their local environment using the sources that remain to us” (18). She vividly demonstrates how, with the careful use of a range of available source material, and with an interdisciplinary approach, it is, in fact, possible to say rather a lot about how peasants viewed the world in which they lived.

Central to Kilby's exploration of peasant perspectives is the application of an original methodology. Kilby draws upon an array of source material including documents, material culture, and the landscape, and reevaluates it in fresh ways from the perspective of the medieval peasant. In addition, she combines methodological approaches from diverse academic disciplines, including archaeology, geography, ethnography, anthropology, and place names. This puts Kilby's research within a growing body of work that integrates multiple disciplinary approaches to uncover the experience of those living in rural environments. Her methodology enables her to successfully reconstruct the physical and sociocultural environment of three contrasting English villages—Lakenheath (Suffolk), Castor (Northamptonshire), and Elton (Huntingdonshire)—between c. 1086 and c. 1348. Kilby teases out new findings from her sources that enable her to develop a more detailed representation of the peasant experience in medieval England and a range of new insights into peasant mentalities.

Kilby sets the scene by placing her monograph within its historiographical context, providing a useful overview of her case studies, and summarizing each of their relevant documentary material. (The addition of a brief discussion on how she defined who was a peasant would also have been beneficial at this point because of the debate this term has generated.) Kilby then lays out the lordly perspective on the rural environment by evaluating the evolution of elite elements of settlement and landscape, and the establishment of the lordly presence there, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the fourteenth century.

In the next two chapters, Kilby explores socially constructed ideas of space in the medieval village. Firstly, she considers the physical organization of the village, including the placement of the manorial curia relative to the peasant dwellings, the zoning of different peasant status groups, and the peasants’ varying levels of access to different parts of the village and the wider landscape. Matters of privacy and ownership are discussed, along with the regulation of movement through the local environment, and the ways that peasants chose to move through it themselves. Secondly, she investigates socially constructed ideas of place through the examination of bynames and family names that closely linked particular families with their local environment. Kilby concentrates on why topographical names were commonly associated with servile individuals especially, and seeks to explain this through an analysis of Huntingdonshire. A key conclusion is that there were subtly different naming practices within settlements that were distinguished by weaker and stronger lordship.

Examining peasant attitudes toward local landscapes, Kilby uses field names and other minor landscape names to investigate the naming practices adopted by medieval communities. She observes that the strength of lordship and the balance of different status groups were important factors in determining the permanency of field names in all three case studies and that field names were subject to earlier and more frequent change where weaker lordship and more free individuals prevailed. Memory is another theme studied by Kilby. Concentrating on one small part of the Castor landscape, she employs field names, documents, and material culture to reveal the significant role of the landscape as a store for local legend and folklore. She demonstrates how seemingly transparent field names preserved collective memory for peasant communities, and highlights through this one focused study the value of an intimate knowledge of local context in combination with a holistic approach. A major strength of Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape is the manner in which Kilby uses field names, minor landscape names, and family names in new ways to reveal a deeper and more nuanced understanding of peasant attitudes to their local environment.

In the penultimate chapter, Kilby returns to a more familiar topic for historians of the medieval peasantry: the agrarian economy. Using manorial records, including the less conventional use of court rolls, she argues that historians cannot consider the peasant economy as a standardized entity because it was a series of interlinking economies not necessarily aligned with the aims of the demesne. Kilby's final theme is peasant strategies for managing the local landscape. Rereading the manorial documents from the peasant perspective, Kilby suggests that medieval scientific ideas underpinned the approach of peasant communities to the treatment of their fields, that peasants reacted and employed counterstrategies to the impositions of lords and prominent peasants, and that field names served as a mnemonic system, conveying information relevant to soil conservation. Overall, Kilby makes it abundantly clear that the medieval landscape held innumerable meanings for the peasants who lived within it, and that the peasant experience of it was multifaceted and highly variable, both socially and temporally.

Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how medieval peasants viewed and understood the world in which they lived. Kilby's application of an innovative methodology and her reinterpretation of traditional evidence in exciting new ways will, one hopes, encourage future studies of this nature.