Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 131

In an era when there were likely to have been butterflies everywhere, why would medieval people have named a local meadow boterflyemede ,‘butterfly meadow’? Susan Kilby suggests three practical explanations in a book which is a major contribution to a long-standing field of study and an important source for English landscape history: that of place-names.

‘Minor’ names, such as those for roads, streams, and farms, for which local inhabitants are the source, have long been collected and recorded by the English Place-Names Society and the work of Margaret Gelling and Ann Cole has revealed the perceptions of landscape features contained in major place-names. Dr Kilby investigates the micro-toponomy, the words that local people used for much smaller features: furlongs and lanes, ponds and ditches, lanes and paths. Her book is far more, however, than an introduction to a new source for place-name scholarship: her aim is to show us ‘the medieval world through peasants’ eyes’ and is an example of an emerging direction in rural studies towards cultural geography, exemplified by recent work by Stephen Mileson, Stuart Brookes and Richard Jones on peasant perceptions of their environment. This theoretical grounding leads her to look for links that might be made with other disciplines and to robust engagements with other fields and approaches. Sometimes this has paid dividends. The archaeological evidence for the village of Elton, for instance, has revealed the external boundaries of ‘plots’. Known as messuages, these are often taken to be the base of the typical peasant landholding in the medieval village. In the high-pressure conditions before the Black Death micro-toponomy reveals what is long lost to archaeological record: they were minutely, and often controversially, divided by an informal network of fences, walls and ditches as well as containing more than one dwelling. From the manor court rolls we learn more. The lord of the manor found it necessary to determine which occupant of which crowded plot his labour services were to come from: it was decided that ‘each house, having a door open onto the street should provide a man for the loveboon’. The ‘on-the ground’ reality and the way that the resulting conflicts were settled, are thus laid out before us.

Kilby’s approach takes us even further. She finds that locational by-names, such as ‘in the lane’ were more typical of servile tenants than of free. The village layout at Elton could thus well have reflected a similar situation to that at Cuxham, Oxfordshire, where, as Paul Harvey revealed, the position of servile tenants’ holdings along the village street was the result of the landlord, Merton College, organizing the labour for demesne production. How they named their surroundings could preserve local people’s ideas about the remote past and could pass on valuable farming practice. It reveals a thriving unofficial micro-economy of fishing, fowling, and small-scale pastoralism which evaded the seigneurial eye and thus the seigneurial records.

The contribution that micro-toponomy makes to what we can learn about the everyday language of medieval country people is fascinating in itself: these East Midlanders saw and named their world with the same closely engaged perception as did a later East Midlander, John Clare. Whether micro-toponomy, or cultural geography more broadly, brings us closer to peasants’ ‘lived experience’ demands closer examination. Two possible problems suggest themselves. The first is that, as displayed here, it has a very narrow perspective. Like those in traditional ‘labours of the months’, Kilby’s peasants seem to do nothing but work. Surely, even for the poorest smallholder there was more to life than work? After all, in the books which Zvi Razi, Barbara Hanawalt, Rodney Hilton and others based on very similar source material peasants are found loving, marrying, and dying, bringing up children, joining rural protests… We learn from LeRoy Ladurie’s Montaillou not simply what medieval French peasants’ experience of everyday life was like, but what they believed about the origins of good and evil, life, death and the hereafter! A second problem in this approach is also inherent in its very quality of intense localism. Kilby’s sources are the surveys drawn up on behalf of the landowners and the proceedings of the manorial courts of three manors: Elton (Hunts.), Lakenheath (Suff.) and Castor (Northants.). As all are in ‘Village England’ (and had been in the Danelaw) and all practised open-field farming, the implications of her work might perhaps have profited from moving further away from the geographical constraints this has imposed. Descriptions of her sources, perhaps a legacy from the book’s origins in her Ph.D. thesis, make her first chapters somewhat of a trudge (could the series editors have pruned a little?), and, for a book which depends so much on micro-topography, the size at which the OS maps are reproduced makes the topography of the villages, so essential for her argument, very hard to make out. Cavils aside, this is a deeply fascinating book.