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Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England
E. B. FRYDE, 1996
New York: St. Martin's Press
pp. xi + 567; $45.00
During the half-century that followed the revolt of 1381, serfdom virtually disappeared from England. Fryde attributes this dramatic development only partially to the long-term effects of the Black Death-population decline advantages peasants exploited in the wake of the population decline and agricultural depression-which favored peasant initiatives. He tends to emphasize landlord schemes to lighten the burden of peasant dependency on themselves, sometimes by "murdering" whole villages in favor of pasturage.
The English peasantry had been almost completely subordinated by the Anglo-Saxon landlords before the conquest. Thus the Normans could govern English peasants with far more rigor than they could impose on continental serfs during the agrarian expansion of the high middle ages. Happily, Fryde abandons the use of the discredited adjective, "feudal," after a couple of pages and settles down to a smooth survey of the well-oiled collaboration between the monarchy and its landlord supporters to secure maximum profit from agriculture at the expense of the laborers in the fields. Without the romanticizing that too often mars studies of long-ago farmers, the story emerges as an important contribution to the history of the Western economy.
Fryde highlights the grim side of this story with numerous illustrations from the sources which downplay the happier lot of the upwardly mobile tenantry...