I am professor of medieval history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. As a PhD student, I was electrified by the historian E. P. Thompson’s call to rescue the masses ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’, but it’s often only when peasants revolt, as they did outside Paris in 1358, that we get much evidence about the masses in the Middle Ages. I loved writing The Jacquerie of 1358 because it allowed me to get very close to the men (and a few women) who risked everything to make their society a more just and equal one. It was a privilege, and a pleasure, to tell their story.
On 28 May 1358, hundreds of peasants came together to murder nine noblemen in a village north of Paris, sparking the largest revolt that medieval France had ever known. Named for the sobriquet Jacques Bonhommes given to common-born soldiers in the Hundred Years War, the Jacquerie revolt swept across northern France, destroying over a hundred castles and killing dozens of noblemen before being suppressed in a bloody wave of violence that saw whole villages razed and their inhabitants slaughtered. The Jacquerie of 1358 tells the story of this harrowing movement, beginning with its roots in a disastrous French defeat through to the revolt’s aftermath, when peasants and nobles sought an uneasy peace with one another at a time of unceasing war with France’s many enemies.
I really appreciate this book because it explains how medieval people thought about the grossly unequal society they inhabited and how they tried to reconcile its obvious injustices with Christian morality.
I particularly like how it shows peasants’ criticism of the medieval idea of society as being composed of Three Orders: those who fought (the knights and nobles), those who prayed (monks and priests), and those who worked (peasants).
The Three Orders idea supposedly justified the way that nobles and clerics profited from peasant labor, but peasants sometimes threw it back at them, arguing that if the nobles were defeated in war or the Church was full of hypocrites, then the peasants really didn’t owe them anything. It’s a fair argument.
The medieval clergy, aristocracy, and commercial classes tended to regard peasants as objects of contempt and derision. In religious writings, satires, sermons, chronicles, and artistic representations peasants often appeared as dirty, foolish, dishonest, even as subhuman or bestial. Their lowliness was commonly regarded as a natural corollary of the drudgery of their agricultural toil.
Yet, at the same time, the peasantry was not viewed as "other" in the manner of other condemned groups, such as Jews, lepers, Muslims, or the imagined "monstrous races" of the East. Several crucial characteristics of the peasantry rendered it less clearly alien from the elite…
One of the most disquieting things about medieval peasants for me is that many of them were not free.
Some were outright slaves, particularly at the very beginning and the very end of the Middle Ages, but by 1100, most ‘unfree’ peasants were serfs. Although not a commodity to be bought or sold like slaves, serfs did unpaid labor and suffered serious limitations on their liberty, like the inability to move or marry at will.
Many historians have written on the medieval transition from slavery to serfdom (and back again), but what I like about Rio’s book is her attention to the variety of forms that ‘unfreedom’ could take and to how and why people might lose or gain freedom in the centuries after the fall of Rome and its slave system.
Slavery After Rome, 500-1100 offers a substantially new interpretation of what happened to slavery in Western Europe in the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The periods at either end of the early middle ages are associated with iconic forms of unfreedom: Roman slavery at one end; at the other, the serfdom of the twelfth century and beyond, together with, in Southern Europe, a revitalised urban chattel slavery dealing chiefly in non-Christians. How and why this major change took place in the intervening period has been a long-standing puzzle. This study picks up the various threads linking…
Tormented Voices often brings me close to tears. Although based on records from 800 years ago, it feels very immediate in its account of the lordly oppression that often blighted peasants’ lives.
The records detail villagers’ complaints against knights who had violently forced them to hand over grain, money, or animals. The villagers say that heads were broken, a woman’s nose cut off, houses made uninhabitable, and so on. The villagers employed scribes to write out these complaints to send to their Count-King in Barcelona, but we don’t know if he even replied, let alone if anything was ever done.
By restoring the peasants’ voices, the book does what it can to right the wrongs done to them so long ago.
Mute in life as in death, peasants of remote history rarely speak to us in their own voices. But Thomas Bisson's engagement with the records of several hundred twelfth-century people of rural Catalonia enables us to hear these voices. The peasants' allegations of abuse while in the service of their common lord the Count of Barcelona and his son the King reveal a unique perspective on the meaning of power both by those who felt and feared it, and by those who wielded it. These records-original parchments, dating much earlier than other comparable records of European peasant life-name peasants in…
It’s a real frustration of mine that so much historical writing pays little or no attention to women, even though they made up half the population.
However ‘important’ whatever the men were doing was, they couldn’t have done it without women. There’s more written on elite medieval women—queens, noblewomen, abbesses, etc.—than there used to be, but peasant women remain mostly neglected.
I like Bennett’s book not only because she pays attention to village women but also because it doesn’t sugarcoat the story. Peasant women could do many things in medieval England, like owning property, going to court, and running businesses, but their options were sharply curtailed by male domination.
As Bennett puts it, "Insofar as these women had choices about their lives, the choices were always poor ones."
In this book, Judith Bennett addresses the gap in our knowledge of medieval country women by examining how their lives differed from those of rural men. Drawing on her study of an English manor in the early-fourteenth century, she finds that rural women were severely restricted in their public roles and rights primarily because of their household status as dependents of their husbands, rather than because of a notion of female inferiority. Adolescent women and widows, by virtue of their unmarried status, enjoyed greater legal and public freedom than did their married counterparts.
This is a work of fiction, but one so well imagined that I felt like I was actually in the medieval English countryside.
It’s the story of Will, a peasant heading to France to join the English army as an archer in the Hundred Years War during the summer of 1348, when the Black Death swept across northern Europe. Along with him travel a gentlewoman avoiding an unwelcome marriage, some soldiers harboring a sordid secret, and a cleric with troubles of his own.
Following behind is Will’s gender-fluid childhood friend and would-be lover, Hab-Madlen, who is endangered as much by people’s prejudices as by the disease stalking the population. Will they escape England and their pasts before the plague catches up with them?
'Inventive and original' The Times 'Fans of intelligent historical fiction will be enthralled' Hilary Mantel
Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Three journeys. One road.
England, 1348. A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a proctor sets out for a monastery in Avignon and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais. In the other direction comes the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of…
My life and work have been profoundly affected by the central circumstance of my existence: I was born into a very large military Catholic family in the United States of America. As a child surrounded by many others in the 60s, I wrote, performed, and directed family plays with my numerous brothers and sisters. Although I fell in love with a Canadian and moved to Canada, my family of origin still exerts considerable personal influence. My central struggle, coming from that place of chaos, order, and conformity, is to have the courage to live an authentic life based on my own experience of connectedness and individuality, to speak and be heard.
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in the parish, Annie is tortured by her own dishonesty. But when “The Hands” visits her in her bed and when her sister finds herself facing a scandal, Annie discovers her parents will do almost anything to uphold their reputation and keep their secrets safe.
Questioning all she has believed and torn between her own gut instinct and years of Catholic guilt, Annie takes courageous risks to wrest salvation from the tragic sequence of events set in motion by her parents’ betrayal.
