The late medieval period poses a formidable challenge in the study of English peasants. Amidst a backdrop of tumultuous economic and social change characterized by poverty, starvation, disease, and death, historians have tended to portray the decline and eventual recovery of this era as motivated by forces outside of peasants’ control. Yet, Christopher Dyer's ambitious and comprehensive study of the late medieval peasantry, Peasants Making History, seeks to incorporate a “peasant-centered approach” (3) in order to place his subjects at the center of this narrative of change. Dyer contests the conventional depiction of peasants as “weak, miserable, poverty-stricken, ignorant, and unchanging” (1). Instead, he sees them as “players in their own right” (3) who actively instigated and resisted changes throughout the period between 1200 and 1540. Dyer focuses his research on the West Midlands, an area with which he has obvious familiarity and that he views as “a representative region” (9) for England—one with a varied landscape and without particularly specialized characteristics. A study this wide-ranging in themes seems to necessitate such geographic restrictions. However, Dyer confidently applies many of his conclusions to the English peasantry as a whole, admitting the limits of his generalizations when necessary.
Peasants Making History designates 1349 as its clear chronological partition, contrasting the growth of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries with the “subsequent period of retreat but also new developments” (7). In many ways, Dyer's central assertion that peasants played an integral role in shaping both their own lives and the structure of change throughout the late medieval period hinges on an examination of the transformative developments of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The monograph's conclusion asserts a series of substantial claims, including that peasant innovation and improvement made “the brave new world of the sixteenth century” (342–43)—with its revolutions in government, religion, exploration, culture, and science—possible. Dyer maintains that the earliest foundations of the Industrial Revolution can even be found among the conditions created by the late medieval peasantry. Peasants Making History makes it clear that ordinary individuals, including those traditionally lumped together in largely unidentifiable masses, such as serfs and paupers, were not always the passive victims of circumstances or events. Instead, they maintained agency over their own lives, even during periods of crisis, and played a pivotal role in the overall shape of progress.
Dyer works decisively with plentiful evidence from his selected region, turning a critical eye to the limited written sources available. For example, he finds suggestions of compromise and negotiation among lords’ surveys of tenants, which traditionally utilized language depicting the peasants as subordinates and subject to both hereditary obligations and the whims of their social superiors. The monograph also employs archaeological evidence when necessary, such as in the discussion of peasant households as places of both functionality and dignity, occasionally mirroring the examples of their social superiors. Peasants Making History is a complex and dense work that is made more accessible through the author's clear prose and organization. He never loses sight of his central claim, and he manages to tie each subtopic seamlessly into his thesis. The chapters are divided into clear sections, each with a helpful concluding segment. Chapters 2 and 3 examine peasants’ relationships with land, from environmental, agricultural, legal, and social perspectives. Chapters 4 and 5 assess peasants’ roles within both wider society and their individual family units. Chapters 6 and 7 provide a rich amount of detailed material on peasant agriculture and pastoralism. Chapters 8 and 9 explore peasants’ relationships with towns and their participation in early industrial activities. Finally, chapter 10 uses the poem Piers Plowman as a lens through which to scrutinize peasant worldviews. This chapter, which focuses more directly on the peasant mindset than the others, is particularly intriguing against the backdrop of Dyer's other claims. The well-defined formatting of the chapters means that the work could be read as a whole or used as a reference source for more focused investigations. The monograph also provides abundant tables and figures, as well as a glossary of terms. Peasants Making History therefore gives the favorable impression that it was produced for a specialist audience but with general readers in mind.
