Peasant Perceptions of Landscape

Abstract

This is the first book about peasant perceptions of landscape. It marks a step-change in the discipline of landscape history, as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places where they lived. This book provides exactly such an analysis by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from AD 500 to 1650. It takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient parishes. The analysis draws on a range of sources including legal depositions and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the framework for inhabitants’ spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialized, the book supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.

From Field Walking to Phenomenology: A Review of Recent British Landscape Historiography

“…But there were also more regionally distinctive contrasts, notably between the more abundant collective resources in the vale villages, which the authors argue promoted a stronger sense of shared belonging, and the lack of such resources (and hence perhaps reduced identification with the landscape) on the Chiltern Hills above. 96 Some of these themes are echoed in Susan Kilby's research on peasant perceptions of landscape and environment in eastern England between 1066 and 1348. Kilby's concerns are with how peasants viewed, moved through, trespassed over, and contested land and landscapes.…”

Current trends and future directions in the rural history of later medieval England (c. 1200–c. 1500)

“…As one useful and typically broad recent definition has it, peasants were 'country dwellers who sustained themselves mainly by working the landsmallholding farmers, village labourers, and rural craftsmen (most of whom were farming too, part of the time)'. 21 Schofield's 2016 discussion of this terminological question concludes that anxieties over the appropriateness of the term 'peasant' are now largely of historiographical interest. 22 Christopher Dyer's recent magnum opus, Peasants Making History, with its telling title, and proud defence of a 'peasant-centred' approach, perhaps represents the culmination of this tendency.…”

What is a village? Agroscapes, collective action and medieval villages in northern Iberia

“…The 'landscape turn' of the past 25 years has, however, seen archaeologists engage in a deep theoretical reconceptualisation of village landscapes. As a result, more detailed archaeological proxies have been generated and new topics addressed, including rural economies, the relationship between villages and towns, the perceptions and experiences of villagers, the local negotiation of power and the governance of common goods (Stagno 2017;Mileson & Brookes 2021). Yet, paradoxically, these developments have fragmented the notion of the village into a heterogeneous universe of concept and realities, challenging rather than resolving the dialogue between the disciplines.…”