Through published work spanning more than four decades, Christopher Dyer has made an unparalleled contribution to the study of the economy and society of the Middle Ages. It is very difficult to think of a significant topic within the field as a whole on which Dyer has not made a seminal intervention somewhere in his six single-authored books and countless occasional papers, articles, and chapters, and he has himself helped to pioneer several whole areas of flourishing research. Peasants Making History can be seen as the culmination of two important dimensions of Dyer's wider scholarly achievement. The first is his contribution to the study of the English west midlands, defined in this book as the historic counties of Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire. The second is his long-term insistence on the importance of what he calls here the “peasant-centred” approach to medieval history (1). Dyer's rich new study brings the reader into close familiarity with the varied landscapes, manors, villages, and towns of the medieval west midlands and its people, and builds a consistent argument to show that changes sometimes associated with lordly and urban elites—such as the establishment of towns, the emergence of industries, or alterations to land use—were more often the consequence of peasant initiatives and collaborations. A variegated yet clearly distinguishable social group that it makes sense to describe as “peasants” still existed at the end of his period, Dyer argues, and its members remained as willing to innovate and to change as they had been at its beginning.
In seeking to provide a rounded picture of life in a region, Peasants Making History has echoes of Rodney Hilton's markedly annaliste work A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century, published in 1966; the debt is noted in passing by Dyer (10). Yet the approach taken in Dyer's new study, and the sheer range of subjects and new evidence sifted, means the book actually bears little resemblance to that or indeed any other predecessor. Starting with the landscape (chapter 2), Peasants moves through chapters on landholding and serfdom (chapter 3), migration, community, and poverty (chapter 4), and family and household (chapter 5), before focusing on husbandry in chapters 6 and 7. These concern crop cultivation and pastoral agriculture, respectively. Chapter 8 tackles towns, while chapter 9 considers industry. Finally, chapter 10 is dedicated to outlook, values, perceptions, and attitudes. The chapter titles—“Peasants and landscapes,” “Peasants changing society,” “Peasants and towns,” and so on—make clear the author's priorities and the distinctive way in which he approaches each successive larger topic. The bulk of the footnotes consists of references to a remarkable array of written primary sources and archaeological reports. Specialist publications on the west midlands figure quite prominently in the secondary studies cited, which underlines the fact that the book is framed less by elaborate models or fashionable debates than it is by a testing of the author's own distinctive research questions, themselves honed through many years of close study of the region's surviving primary evidence. That said, despite his determination to follow his own agenda, Dyer still manages to make stimulating contributions to current controversies. His sections on serfdom, for instance, contrast with recent work by Mark Bailey in insisting that servile obligations remained important yet contested well into the fifteenth century.
Dyer reflects in the volume's introduction on the problems of doing peasant-centered history without sources written by the peasants themselves. The book itself underlines the point that just because a phenomenon appears poorly recorded, this does not mean it does not deserve discussion, or was unimportant. A good example highlighted here is the linen industry; its products were clearly ubiquitous, but its manufacture and circulation leave few traces in the written or material records. Elsewhere in the book, although the surviving sources have been scoured to produce valuable new information, a frustrating degree of uncertainty remains with respect to the questions on which we most want answers. This is a characteristic of the chapters on peasant farming, where hard data on productivity and stocking densities prove still hard to come by. Elsewhere, however, the author's skills of interpretation allow the available evidence to be unlocked in order to facilitate rich case studies that eloquently support broader points. Just two examples of this among many would be the use of the late medieval trade and connections of the small town of Alcester as an anchor point for chapter 10, and the discussion in chapter 9 of smallholder craft activity around 1300 on the fringes of Coventry, Gloucester, and Worcester.
Those are memorable sections in what are arguably two of the strongest and most innovative chapters in a book with many highlights. What comes through on every page is the author's exceptional knowledge of the region and period he is describing. This comes not just from reading the documents, but also from a half-century or so of doing “history on the ground.” One example: a discussion of the width of ploughing ridges is based on the author's own fieldwork observations (34). The sheer range and vitality of the evidence presented and the clarity and authority with which it is discussed makes Peasants Making History a deeply rewarding read.
