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Redefining the Peasant Community in Medieval England: The Regional Perspective

Historians of the medieval English peasantry have tended to assume that the history of peasants and their culture can best be revealed through the history of the village as a social and economic unit. As a result, the important recent advances in our understanding of peasant culture have been made by historians who, borrowing heavily from the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, have written studies of particular villages or small towns. The mystique of the “village community” has retained a hold on the historian's imagination. Even as the peasant and his family now attract more attention from scholars, studies of family size, household structure, and inheritance and marriage patterns are usually carried out within the context of a particular village or small town, largely because collections of local records naturally coalesce around a parish name. These close examinations of specific vills have been made possible primarily through the exploitation of the village court rolls that survive from the mid-thirteenth century. Ironically, it has been these very village court rolls that, in the end, have forcefully demonstrated that the assumptions identifying peasant history with village history must now be abandoned. The numerous studies of medieval English villages that have made possible the study of peasant family structure and behavior are now demonstrating that the history of the peasant family and the history of the particular village must part company. Certainly, the study of a single series of village court rolls makes possible the discovery within the village of family groups with characteristic behavior patterns.