Three fantastic papers on Prosopography from #KZOO2015.
‘Falseness Reigns in Every Flock’: Literacy and Eschatological Discourse in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
November 30, 2014 By
The literature of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a miscellany of fourteenth-century poetry and prose penned before, during, and after the insurrection, often stresses the importance of literacy to the nonaristocratic population of England.
INTERVIEW: A Conversation with SD Sykes about Plague Land
October 3, 2014 By
My interview with fiction author, SD Sykes about her fantastic medieval crime novel, Plague Land.
The Black Death, Economic and Social Change and the Great Rising of 1381 in Hertfordshire
December 10, 2013 By
What drove medieval people to such desperation that they felt they had no other course of action other than revolt? Was this a spontaneous reaction to a perceived injustice or a desperate response to years of simmering resentment?
The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
December 8, 2013 By
Life for the revolutionary peasants was structured by feudal ties and obligations. The villein was tied to the soil until he could buy his freedom. He lived in a wattle and daub hut with his family and animals on a floor of mud. Work began at dawn on his few (often separated) strips of land; he was obligated to work on his lord’s land three days a week, tend and shear his sheep, feed his swine, and sow and reap his crops.
The commons in medieval England
April 21, 2013 By
Why was the same term ‘commons’ used to describe both a part of the English legislature and a large gathering of rebellious people? How had this double meaning come about and what did it imply for the workings of politics in late medieval England?
The Mind’s Eye: Reconstructing the Historian’s Semantic Matrix Through Henry Knighton’s Account of the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381
February 11, 2013 By
The Mind’s Eye: Reconstructing the Historian’s Semantic Matrix Through Henry Knighton’s Account of the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381 Sarah Marilyn Steeves Keeshan Master of Arts, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia December (2011) Abstract The medieval historian engaged with the systems of power and authority that surrounded him. In his account of the Peasants’ Revolt in late medieval […]
Flemings in the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381
November 14, 2012 By
While the Peasants’ Revolt has been studied in depth by generations of medieval historians, the same cannot be said of England’s foreign-born inhabitants, and the largest group among these, the so-called Flemings (a term which was also applied to those from other principalities in the Low Countries besides Flanders).
Agricultural wage labour in fifteenth-century England
August 22, 2012 By
In the period when agriculture dominated almost every aspect of daily life, the lords and wealthy peasants relied on paid labourers for farming business, yardlanders hired labourers to work with them, whilst moderate and landless villagers worked for hire. Agrarian wage labour is a window on the economy as well as on agricultural society.
Labor Markets After the Black Death: Landlord Collusion and the Imposition of Serfdom in Eastern Europe and the Middle East
August 19, 2012 By
The differences in the imposition of serfdom led to different economic and political effects for the peasantry in Europe. In Western Europe, wages rose, grain prices fell, and the consumption of meat, dairy products, and beer increased. More and more peasants moved into a widening “middle class” that could afford to buy manufactured goods.
A Hotbed for Dissidence: Southeast England in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
May 2, 2012 By
What were the causes and circumstances that led not only to the ebullient revolt in Southeast Europe, but also to ist relative success?
The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century
October 17, 2008 By
Until recently it was widely believed that feudal tenurial relationships sanctioned and facilitated the extra-economic exploitation of tenants by their lords. Together, the heaviness of rent charges and the arbitrariness of lordship discouraged and depressed tenant investment in agriculture.
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