Landscapes and Producers in Medieval England: Essays presented to Rosamond Faith (Studies in Regional and Local History)

Dr Rosamond Faith is a leading historian of the Englishpeasantry in the early and central Middle Ages.In a series of influentialstudies, she has uncovered the basic structures of rural society, revealing howeconomic organisation, physical environment, and ideology shaped the lives ofordinary people in the earliest documented centuries. In this Festschrift, friends and colleagues takeup her theme, offering new perspectives on people who worked for a livingbetween the seventh and fourteenth centuries.King Alfred famously dividedsociety into three orders, but whereas the lives of ‘those who fight’ and ‘thosewho pray’ are recorded in their own words, the experience of ‘those who work’can only be recovered indirectly.The essays collected here approach ruralsociety under three different headings, each examining a different dimension ofpeasant life. The first section addresses the organisation of ruralsociety. Every locality was subject to instruments and processesregulating the exploitation