People and Things: Power in Early English Development

Abstract

Where there are people, it is said, there are things. Does this mean that when you admit the former you must also admit the latter? Time will tell. (Beckett 1965:292).Debate over the rise of agrarian capitalism in Europe has established the historiographic chronology, locus, and conceptualization of European development. Proponents of contending schools (the "commercial" or the "political") have focused on the late medieval through early modern period in England as the crucial time and place of the transformation but argue whether agrarian capitalism derived from economic or political structures (Ashton and Philpin 1985).' Neither school has questioned the common methodology of mapping social and cultural transformation onto a structural matrix. Steps taken by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists to decenter the European narrative of development have faltered at this same structuralist dilemma.Medieval historians have traditionally favored the twelfth century as the transformative moment of European development, which in Marc Bloch's cultural model divides the First and Second Feudal Age and marks the separation of people and things, status and tenure, oath and contract, consumption and production (Bloch 1961(Bloch , 1966. The European economy "took-off' (Georges Duby's words) at this time, as the urban economy gained dominance over the countryside (Duby 1974:270), and Fernand Braudel has cautioned that the study of European capitalism has to begin not with the early modern period but with a European world economy that took shape during the twelfth century (Braudel 1984:57;Abu-Lughod 1988).

Towards a social archaeology of the late medieval English peasantry

“…1 Although scholars involved in medieval peasant studies (whether based on documentary or archaeological evidence) still tend to conceive of power as emanating from institutions, with people's power being solely related to their access to these institutions (cf. Biddick, 1990Biddick, , 1993, other archaeologists have not been slow to consider the implications of the 'newer' theorizing for their own work. Notable among these are Miller and Tilley (1984) as well as a number of feminist archaeologists (e.g.…”