Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region, 1200-1540 (2022) is a highly detailed and excellently crafted book by English historian Christopher Dyer. Himself a historian of the Midlands and everyday English life, Dyer’s work is the culmination of years of research into a vast swath of documentary and archaeological evidence that originate from the West Midlands region of southwest England (Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire). The author’s choice of geography stems largely from familiarity with the region and its varied landscape. In addition to his own studies, Dyer draws on the efforts from historians of other topics and also across disciplines into fields such as archives and archaeology. As his title suggests, he takes a peasant-centered approach to the analysis from the High to Late Middle Ages. His emphasis is on the ways in which peasants brought about, adapted to, and resisted changes in their worlds. Whilst he concedes that medieval peasants have not been wholly ignored by historians, he does claim that “no one has attempted an overview of the importance of peasants over a wide range of themes, from agriculture to religion,” (Dyer, 1). Likewise, Dyer scrutinizes the perception of peasants viewed as a mass — a largely negative one — and instead breaks West Midland peasants into small groups and individuals. His findings lead him to argue that contrary to peasants being subject to the whims of lords and other superiors in society, they in fact had a large amount of agency and were “people with varied ambitions, concerns, knowledge, and the ability to make something of their lives,” (Dyer, 1). It is ultimately these advancements and and labors by peasants that enable England to undertake the role it assumes during the sixteenth century. This idea is not entirely new, as showcased in the 2021 article by Claridge and Gibbs “Waifs and Strays: Property Rights in Medieval England,” who make similar arguments in regards to the stray animal system in England; that it was run on the ground effectively by peasants. While not necessarily a novel idea, Peasants Making History is a deeply humanizing work that brings peasants to the forefront of their worlds.
Dyer organized his book into nine main chapters, plus his introduction. Rather helpfully for readers, he begins each chapter with a brief abstract and summary of the chapter’s goals and questions, and each chapter’s conclusions are equally as concise and readable. Each chapter is organized more-or-less chronologically, with a divide in the chapters for studying the West Midland pre-Black Death and then post. Dyer notes that while the disease was undoubtedly a huge factor in West Midland society, many of the changes that he illuminates among peasants were in fact beginning well before the outbreak. He points to the commonly cited example of women seizing more responsibility for themselves after the Black Death, and notes that “records used for this book show women behaving decisively in the management of their inheritance in the early fourteenth century,” (Dyer, 7). Rather than being the sole driver for the death of serfdom, Dyer clarifies that it was but one factor. He states that “The rise and slow death of serfdom seems more straightforward, as it is essentially a story of peasants pressing for freedom,” (Dyer, 82).
He employs a wide array of topics to cover in each of his chapters, all of which lend further credence to the notion of peasants being active agents in the West Midlands. His survey begins with the landscape and how peasants directly affected it before and during the period covered. Despite the landscape offering limited opportunities due to its varied makeup, Dyer argues it was still changed to fit the needs of its inhabitants. He states that the changing of landscape in the West Midlands was not purely peasant-driven or lord-driven, but a collaborative effort on both a conscious and an unconscious level. Surviving road networks from the Roman period were still used centuries later and seawalls were built by inhabitants along the Severn estuary (Dyer, 19). Peasant landholding continues to be a prevalent theme in his book as he discusses topics like tenure, agricultural and pastoral activities, and migration. A particular interest of his in this book is exploring how peasants exploited opportunities of their life chances, looking beyond the relationship between lords and peasants. Chapter 4, ‘Peasants Changing Society,’ talks about this in detail. He argues that even though social mobility was severely limited, and migration did not always work in a peasant’s favor, the choices they made had important consequences. New tenants in towns, marriages, and the spread of ideas from one settlement to another are all examples he names, (Dyer, 112). Dyer also provides an intervention in history’s understanding of the nature of a “pre-industrial” society. He argues that labelling the West Midlands (and possibly by extension, the rest of Medieval Europe), as pre-industrial, it ignores the labor of people done in manufacturing and non-agricultural activities, (Dyer, 271). These themes ultimately contribute to his concluding argument that the “brave new world” of sixteenth century England — oceanic voyages, the Protestant Reformation, new government reform, and much more — were made possible by the advances of peasants in the centuries prior (Dyer, 342-343).
The discussion of sources opens a question he asks in the introduction: “How can we write peasant centred history, emphasizing their contribution to change without any sources written by them?” (Dyer, 8). It is in finding this answer that Dyer’s methodology shines through brilliantly. Primary sources like court rolls, manorial surveys, clerk’s writing last wills, and also material culture discovered through fieldwork reveal the lives of peasants. He says that behind many of the sources, the voices of the peasants can be found. In Chapter 6, “Peasants and their crops,” Dyer draws on 383 documentary references and 250 finds from fieldwork (Dyer, 168). In another example during Chapter 8, “Peasants and towns,” he is able to draw a conclusion about coins that were owned specifically by peasants based on where they are dug up and cut. As coins were not plentiful, they would have been highly valued by peasant families and not typically lost in houses or villages, but instead in fields, where peasants may have misplaced them (Dyer, 261).
Peasants Making History delivers on what is promised as an examination of the West Midlands peasantry from 1200-1540. The one question I was left with at the end of the book was how may this be applied to other regions? By his own admission, the west midland region is atypical from its neighbors in that it does not have a powerful lord dominating it, nor was it heavily urbanized or as densely populated (Dyer, 7). With that in mind, was the experience of peasants in other regions of England vastly different to conflict with his argument that peasants enjoyed much more agency than is believed? These questions aside, the book is easily digestible, even for inexperienced readers of the field, and made even more so by helpful charts and maps of the region.