No abstract

Historians' impressions of the position of agricultural servants and wage labourers within the medieval English rural society and economy remain as imprecise as the picture which most contemporary documents provide. Research to date on medieval agricultural labourers has concentrated upon estate workers within the seigneurial economy, primarily because manorial accounts provide fairly detailed information about famuli or estate labourers employed by particular manors, their terms of employment, and the remuneration they received. But the role of servants and labourers employed on tenant holdings by medieval villagers, and their importance for non-agricultural production within rural communities, are still extremely uncertain. They appeared fleetingly if at all in manorial documentation, which seldom had reason to be concerned with them as such, while another source which historians have used to approach the problem, nominative polltax returns furnishing household or occupational information, poses serious difficulties of interpretation.

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.