Download or read book A Rural Society After the Black Death written by Lawrence Raymond Poos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Rural Society after the Black Death is a study of rural social structure in the English county of Essex between 1350 and 1500. It seeks to understand how, in the population collapse after the Black Death (1348-1349), a particular economic environment affected ordinary people's lives in the areas of migration, marriage and employment, and also contributed to patterns of religious nonconformity, agrarian riots and unrest, and even rural housing. The period under scrutiny is often seen as a transitional era between 'medieval' and 'early-modern' England, but in the light of recent advances in English historical demography, this study suggests that there was more continuity than change in some critically important aspects of social structure in the region in question. Among the most important contributions of the book are its use of an unprecedentedly wide range of original manuscript records (estate and manorial records, taxation and criminal-court records, royal tenurial records, and the records of church courts, wills etc.) and its application of current quantitative and comparative demographic methods.

Download or read book Historical Geography of England and Wales written by Robert A. Dodgshon and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text has been designed to cover all aspects and phases of the historical geography of England and Wales in a single volume. In its substantially revised and enlarged form, the treatment of standard themes has been completely re-written to take account of recent work and shifts in viewpoint while its overall coverage has been extended to embrace newer themes like symbolic landscapes and the geography of the inter-war period. Its comprehensiveness and freshness of approach ensure its continuing value and success as a text. - Breadth of coverage from prehistory to 1939 - Uses a range of data sources and approaches - Well illustrated with particular emphasis on key themes - Major revision of 1st edition with much wider range of topics

Download or read book The Medieval Antecedents of English Agricultural Progress written by Bruce M.S. Campbell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until recently, historians tended to stress the perceived technological and ecological shortcomings of medieval agriculture. The ten essays assembled in this volume offer a contrary view. Based upon close documentary analysis of the demesne farms managed for and by lords, they show that, by 1300, in the most commercialized parts of England, production decisions were based upon relative factor costs and commodity prices. Moreover, when and where economic conditions were ripe and environmental and institutional circumstances favourable, medieval cultivators successfully secured high and ecologically sustainable levels of land productivity. They achieved this by integrating crop and livestock production into the sort of manure-intensive systems of mixed-husbandry which later underpinned the more celebrated output growth of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If medieval agriculture failed to fulfill the production potential provided by wider adoption of such systems, this is more appropriately explained by the want of the kind of market incentives that might have justified investment, innovation, and specialization on the scale that characterized the so-called 'agricultural revolution', than either the lack of appropriate agricultural technology or the innate 'backwardness' of medieval cultivators.

Download or read book Land and People in Late Medieval England written by Bruce M.S. Campbell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the third collection of articles by Bruce Campbell to appear in the Variorum series. Late medieval England was an overwhelmingly rural society. Never since has such a large proportion of the population lived in the countryside or relied so directly for its livelihood upon agriculture. The lot of a majority of that population was always a hard one - and never more so than during the first half of the 14th century, when peasants competed with each other for ever-scarcer land and work and a succession of major harvest failures jeopardised the survival of many. Nevertheless, experience varied considerably, both during this era of mounting population pressure and the century and more of population decline and stagnation that followed the demographic disaster of the Black Death. How well individual communities coped during these contrasting conditions of expansion and contraction owed much to the quality and composition of their natural-resource endowment, a good deal to their ability to take advantage of changing commercial opportunities, and sometimes almost everything to how exposed they were to military conflict. Always, however, much hinged upon how the twin feudal institutions of lordship and serfdom were mapped onto land and people via the manorial system. These are the themes variously explored by the eight essays assembled in this volume, which range from a case-study of a single crowded Norfolk manor to a consideration of the broad and, towards the end of the Middle Ages, widening contrasts that persisted between North and South.

Download or read book The Medieval English Landscape 1000 1540 written by Graeme J. White and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landscape of medieval England was the product of a multitude of hands. While the power to shape the landscape inevitably lay with the Crown, the nobility and the religious houses, this study also highlights the contribution of the peasantry in the layout of rural settlements and ridge-and-furrow field works, and the funding of parish churches by ordinary townsfolk. The importance of population trends is emphasised as a major factor in shaping the medieval landscape: the rising curve of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries imposing growing pressures on resources, and the devastating impact of the Black Death leading to radical decline in the fourteenth century. Opening with a broad-ranging analysis of political and economic trends in medieval England, the book progresses thematically to assess the impact of farming, rural settlement, towns, the Church, and fortification using many original case studies. The concluding chapter charts the end of the medieval landscape with the dissolution of the monasteries, the replacement of castles by country houses, the ongoing enclosure of fields, and the growth of towns.

Download or read book Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 932 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Older research on the premodern world limited its focus on the Church, the court, and, more recently, on urban space. The present volume invites readers to consider the meaning of rural space, both in light of ecocritical readings and social-historical approaches. While previous scholars examined the figure of the peasant in the premodern world, the current volume combines a large number of specialized studies that investigate how the natural environment and the appearance of members of the rural population interacted with the world of the court and of the city. The experience in rural space was important already for writers and artists in the premodern era, as the large variety of scholarly approaches indicates. The present volume signals how much the surprisingly close interaction between members of the aristocratic and of the peasant class determined many literary and art-historical works. In a surprisingly large number of cases we can even discover elements of utopia hidden in rural space. We also observe how much the rural world was a significant element already in early-medieval mentality. Moreover, as many authors point out, the impact of natural forces on premodern society was tremendous, if not catastrophic.

Download or read book Everyday Life in Medieval England written by Christopher Dyer and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday Life in Medieval England captures the day-to-day experience of people in the middle ages - the houses and settlements in which they lived, the food they ate, their getting and spending - and their social relationships. The picture that emerges is of great variety, of constant change, of movement and of enterprise. Many people were downtrodden and miserably poor, but they struggled against their circumstances, resisting oppressive authorities, to build their own way of life and to improve their material conditions. The ordinary men and women of the middle ages appear throughout. Everyday life in Medieval England is an outstanding contribution to both national and local history.

Download or read book Coping with Crisis The Resilience and Vulnerability of Pre Industrial Settlements written by Daniel R. Curtis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why in the pre-industrial period were some settlements resilient and stable over the long term while other settlements were vulnerable to crisis? Indeed, what made certain human habitations more prone to decline or even total collapse, than others? All pre-industrial societies had to face certain challenges: exogenous environmental hazards such as earthquakes or plagues, economic or political hazards from ’outside’ such as warfare or expropriation of property, or hazards of their own-making such as soil erosion or subsistence crises. How then can we explain why some societies were able to overcome or negate these problems, while other societies proved susceptible to failure, as settlements contracted, stagnated, were abandoned, or even disappeared entirely? This book has been stimulated by the questions and hypotheses put forward by a recent ’disaster studies’ literature - in particular, by placing the intrinsic arrangement of societies at the forefront of the explanatory framework. Essentially it is suggested that the resilience or vulnerability of habitation has less to do with exogenous crises themselves, but on endogenous societal responses which dictate: (a) the extent of destruction caused by crises and the capacity for society to protect itself; and (b) the capacity to create a sufficient recovery. By empirically testing the explanatory framework on a number of societies between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century in England, the Low Countries, and Italy, it is ultimately argued in this book that rather than the protective functions of the state or the market, or the implementation of technological innovation or capital investment, the most resilient human habitations in the pre-industrial period were those than displayed an equitable distribution of property and a well-balanced distribution of power between social interest groups. Equitable distributions of power and property were the underlying conditions in pre-industrial societies that all

Download or read book Farming in the First Millennium AD written by P. J. Fowler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book Field Systems and Farming Systems in Late Medieval England written by Bruce M.S. Campbell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The later Middle Ages was an overwhelmingly rural world, with probably three out of four households reliant upon farming for a living. Yet conventional accounts of the period rarely do justice to the variety of ways in which the land was managed and worked. The thirteen essays collected in this volume draw upon the abundant documentary evidence of the period to explore that diversity. In the process they engage with the issue of classification - without which effective generalisation is impossible - and offer a series of solutions to that particularly thorny methodological challenge. Only through systematic and objective classification is it possible to differentiate between and map different field systems, husbandry types, and land-use categories. That, in turn, makes it possible to consider and evaluate the relative roles of soils and topography, institutional structures, and commercialised market demand in shaping farm enterprise both during the period of mounting population before the Black Death and the long era of demographic decline that followed it. What emerges is an agrarian world more commercialised, differentiated, and complex than is usually appreciated, whose institutional and agronomic contours shaped the course of agricultural development for centuries to come.

Download or read book Charters and Custumals of Shaftesbury Abbey 1089 1216 written by N. E. Stacy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a critical edition of six twelfth-century surveys of the vast estates of Glastonbury Abbey, five of which are printed for the first time." "They deal with both the monastic household and the Abbot's lordship as tenant-in-chief. They throw much light on the changing methods by which he exploited the resources of his demesne manors, and provide evidence of how the services and holdings of the peasantry were affected by a rising population." "The introduction explains the contemporary context of surveys - documents which are of fundamental importance for the economic, social, and monastic history of twelfth-century England."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Companion Encyclopedia of Archaeology written by Graeme Barker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-08-13 with total page 1267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive, fully illustrated Companion answers the need for an in-depth archaeology reference that provides authoritative coverage of this complex and interdisciplinary field. The work brings together the myriad strands and the great temporal and spatial breadth of the field into two thematically organized volumes. In twenty-six authoritative and clearly-written essays, this Companion explores the origins, aims, methods and problems of archaeology. Each essay is written by a scholar of international standing and illustrations complement the text.

Download or read book Horses Oxen and Technological Innovation written by John Langdon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the introduction of the horse as a replacement for oxen in English farming.

Download or read book Flinders Essays in Economics and Economic History written by Ralph Shlomowitz and published by Wakefield Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers prepared for a conference in 2005, held to honour the three founders of the economics discipline at Flinders University.

Download or read book English Society in the Later Middle Ages written by S.H. Rigby and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1995-05-10 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the social structure of England in the period 1200 to 1500? What were the basic forms of social inequality? To what extent did such divisions generate social conflict? How significantly did English society change during this period and what were the causes of social change? Is it useful to see medieval social structure in terms of the theories and concepts produced within the medieval period itself? What does modern social theory have to offer the historian seeking to understand English society in the later middle ages? These are the questions which this book seeks to answer. Beginning with an analysis of class structure of medieval England, Part One of this book asks to what extent class conflict was inherent within class relations and discusses the contrasting successes and outcomes of such conflict in town and country. Part Two of the book examines to what extent such class divisions interacted with other forms of social inequality, such as those between orders (nobility and clergy), between men and women, and those arising from membership of a status-group (the Jews). Dr Rigby's discussion of medieval English society is located within the context of recent historical and sociological debates about the nature of social stratification and, using the work of social theorists such as Parkin and Runciman, offers a synthesis of the Marxist and Weberian approaches to social structure. The book should be extremely useful to those undergraduates beginning their studies of medieval England whilst, in offering a new interpretative framework within which to examine social structure, also interesting those historians who are more familiar with this period.

Download or read book The Agrarian History of England and Wales Volume 2 1042 1350 written by H. E. Hallam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 1210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1988 volume examines the agrarian history of England and Wales from Edward the Confessor to the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348.

Download or read book Theirs Were But Human Hearts written by Brian Brenchley Wheals and published by Theirs Were But Human Hearts. This book was released on 1984 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: