Peasants have been despised, underrated, or disregarded in the past. Historians and archaeologists are now giving them a more positive assessment, and in Peasants Making History, Christopher Dyer sets a new agenda for this kind of study. Using as his example the peasants of the west midlands of England, Dyer examines peasant society in relation to their social superiors (their lords), their neighbours, and their households, and finds them making decisions and taking options to improve their lives. In their management of farming, both cultivation of fields and keeping of livestock, they made a series of modifications and some dramatic changes, not just reacting to shifts in circumstances but also devising creative initiatives. Peasants played an active role in the development of towns, both by migrating into urban settings, but also by trading actively in urban markets. Industry in the countryside was not imposed on the rural population, but often the result of peasant enterprise and flexibility. If we examine peasant attitudes and mentalities, we find them engaging in political life, making a major contribution to religion, recognizing the need to conserve the environment, and balancing the interests of individuals with those of the communities in which they lived. Many features of our world have medieval roots, and peasants played an important part in the development of the rural landscape, participation of ordinary people in government, parish church buildings, towns, and social welfare. The evidence to support this peasant-centred view has to be recovered by imaginative interpretation, and by using every type of source, including the testimony of archaeology and landscape.

Dramatic social and economic change during the middle ages altered the lives of the people of Britain in far-reaching ways, from the structure of their families to the ways they made their livings. In this masterly book, preeminent medieval historian Christopher Dyer presents a fresh view of the British economy from the ninth to the sixteenth century and a vivid new account of medieval life. He begins his volume with the formation of towns and villages in the ninth and tenth centuries and ends with the inflation, population rise, and colonial expansion of the sixteenth century. This is a book about ideas and attitudes as well as the material world, and Dyer shows how people regarded the economy and responded to economic change. He examines the growth of towns, the clearing of lands, the Great Famine, the Black Death, and the upheavals of the fifteenth century through the eyes of those who experienced them. He also explores the dilemmas and decisions of those who were making a living in a changing world—from peasants, artisans, and wage earners to barons and monks. Drawing on archaeological and landscape evidence along with more conventional archives and records, the author offers here an engaging survey of British medieval economic history unrivaled in breadth and clarity.

Traces the history of the disease of smallpox from its possible origins in prehistoric times to its eradication in 1977

Peasants have been despised, underrated, or disregarded in the past. Historians and archaeologists are now giving them a more positive assessment, and in Peasants Making History, Christopher Dyer sets a new agenda for this kind of study. Using as his example the peasants of the west midlands of England, Dyer examines peasant society in relation to their social superiors (their lords), their neighbours, and their households, and finds them making decisions and taking options to improve their lives. In their management of farming, both cultivation of fields and keeping of livestock, they made a series of modifications and some dramatic changes, not just reacting to shifts in circumstances but also devising creative initiatives. Peasants played an active role in the development of towns, both by migrating into urban settings, but also by trading actively in urban markets. Industry in the countryside was not imposed on the rural population, but often the result of peasant enterprise and flexibility. If we examine peasant attitudes and mentalities, we find them engaging in political life, making a major contribution to religion, recognizing the need to conserve the environment, and balancing the interests of individuals with those of the communities in which they lived. Many features of our world have medieval roots, and peasants played an important part in the development of the rural landscape, participation of ordinary people in government, parish church buildings, towns, and social welfare. The evidence to support this peasant-centred view has to be recovered by imaginative interpretation, and by using every type of source, including the testimony of archaeology and landscape.

This remarkable history foregrounds the most marginal sector of the Roman population, the provincial peasantry, to paint a fascinating new picture of peasant society. Making use of detailed archaeological and textual evidence, Leslie Dossey examines the peasantry in relation to the upper classes in Christian North Africa, tracing that region's social and cultural history from the Punic times to the eve of the Islamic conquest. She demonstrates that during the period when Christianity was spreading to both city and countryside in North Africa, a convergence of economic interests narrowed the gap between the rustici and the urbani, creating a consumer revolution of sorts among the peasants. This book's postcolonial perspective points to the empowerment of the North African peasants and gives voice to lower social classes across the Roman world.

France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.

Around 1500 England's society and economy had reached a turning point. After a long period of slow change and even stagnation, an age of innovation and initiative was in motion, with enclosure, voyages of discovery, and new technologies. It was an age of fierce controversy, in which the government was fearful of beggars and wary of rebellions. The 'commonwealth' writers such as Thomas More were sharply critical of the greed of profit hungry landlords who dispossessed the poor. This book is about a wool merchant and large scale farmer who epitomises in many ways the spirit of the period. John Heritage kept an account book, from which we can reconstruct a whole society in the vicinity of Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire. He took part in the removal of a village which stood in the way of agricultural 'improvement', ran a large scale sheep farm, and as a 'woolman' spent much time travelling around the countryside meeting with gentry, farmers, and peasants in order to buy their wool. He sold the fleeces he produced and those he gathered to London merchants who exported through Calais to the textile towns of Flanders. The wool growers named in the book can be studied in their native villages, and their lives can be reconstructed in the round, interacting in their communities, adapting their farming to new circumstances, and arranging the building of their local churches. A Country Merchant has some of the characteristics of a biography, is part family history, and part local history, with some landscape history. Dyer explores themes in economic and social history without neglecting the religious and cultural background. His central concerns are to demonstrate the importance of commerce in the period, and to show the contribution of peasants to a changing economy.