Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 1 (2021), p. 146

More than two decades after the release of her commanding survey of the English peasantry, Rosamond Faith returns once again to the vexing subject of relationships between lords and peasants in her latest monograph. Having worked on the agriculture, farmers, and peasantry of England and France for the better part of fifty years, Faith now turns her attention not only to the mechanics of how the peasantry were exploited but, rather, why lords in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were able to appropriate their labour. This is a particularly timely contribution to the field given something of a flurry of publications addressing the topic of early medieval peasant society (see, for examples, recent works by Constance Bouchard, G. G. Astill, Alexander Langlands and Charles West). Despite the focused nature of this question, Faith’s monograph also seeks to intervene in another, much older debate: when did ‘feudalism’ appear in early medieval England? In a distant echo of John Horace Round, Faith argues that the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 marked a distinct moment of transition between a ‘profoundly un-feudal society’ to a ‘profoundly feudal one’. This is not Chris Wickham’s steady but sure march of the feudal mode, but, rather, a mutation féodale. Faith suggests that pre-Conquest lords and institutions controlled one of the two Marxist means of production: land. However, she argues it was only after the Norman influx that lords ‘gained control’ over the second: labour.

This ambitious work is divided into six sections: ‘Rank’; ‘Reciprocity’; ‘Reputation and Witness’; ‘The Wolf Sniffs the Wind’ (a reference to the infamous Archbishop Wulfstan of York); ‘The Aftermath of the Conquest’; and ‘In the World of the Manor’. These sections are further sub-divided into sixteen chapters – arranged in a broadly chronological order – in which she moves through each topic in a lively style, deftly demonstrating the various issues at hand. Using her hard-earned knowledge of the pre- and post-Conquest peasantry, Faith surveys an impressive breadth of evidence and the reader is guided through an extensive selection of narrative, legal, and archaeological evidence. In the first third of this book, Faith makes a case for a prevalent culture of reciprocity in pre-Conquest England – or, at least, a shared idea of fair reciprocal behaviours – and its potential roots; elements of which she traces to an idea of a shared, ‘imagined past’. For those unfamiliar with the complexities of early medieval obligations, her examinations of customs such as mannrædenn (man-rent) and feormian (to provide hospitality) render a potential maze of relationships easily navigable. This makes way for the following exploration of dispute settlement, an increasingly commercialized rural environment, and the influential narrative literature of late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The last third, broadly speaking, focuses on the introduction of new legal concepts and new vocabulary after the Norman Conquest. The Domesday Book, Lies Willelme, and the procedures of manor courts form the backbone of this section and provide a glimpse of incoming Norman cultural ideas.

Given the title of this work, it is no surprise that the central argument of the book is underpinned by the idea of the ‘moral economy’; a term made popular in academia in the late twentieth-century works of E. P. Thompson and James Scott. For Faith, the ‘moral economy’ of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England – ‘values which were shared across class and rank’ – acted as check on lordly exploitation of the peasantry until the Conquest of 1066. Faith points to literary and legal sources which potentially evidence a shared sense of what were ‘legitimising notion[s]’. For instance, Faith contends that weorð (entitlement) – unlike later chivalric ideas of honour – was a concept that included both peasant and noble. Although the common standards of the ‘moral economy’ changed across the sixth to eleventh centuries, Faith argues that the Conquest wiped the slate clean of these shared values, as the installation of a new nobility left previous understandings of peasant entitlements adrift and paved the way for ‘feudal’ thinking. Given that Thompson noted that ‘if values, on their own, make a moral economy’ then they could be found anywhere, a fuller clarification of Faith’s interpretation of this framework would have helped to robustly locate her findings in relation to more recent considerations of ‘moral economies’. Nevertheless, this is a stimulating analytic framework and provides much food for thought.

Like her previous works, this is a dynamic contribution to the study of an often neglected but vital segment of society. Though attempting, as she does, to get into ‘the hearts and minds’ of the English peasantry is always fated to be an uphill struggle given the nature of the surviving sources, Faith admirably navigates this dense world of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ obligations in an approachable manner. Indeed, her stimulating and, at times, provocative conclusions regarding the development of ‘feudal thinking’ and the disjuncture wrought by King William’s invasion will surely fuel debate for decades to come. While there are still many questions left to answer, this volume will become a valuable touchstone for future scholars studying medieval social relations.