Peasant Perceptions Of Landscape

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape marks a change in the discipline of landscape history, as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places where they lived. This volume provides exactly such an analysis by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from AD 500 to 1650. The study takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically-rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient parishes. The analysis draws on a range of sources including legal depositions and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the framework for inhabitants' spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialised, Peasant Perceptions of Landscape supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.

Essays exploring the potential of the Inquisitions post mortem to shed important new light on the medieval world.

This is a brilliant and original study of the attitudes of town-dwellers in the Middle Ages to nature, their surroundings, and the human body. Fumagalli describes the natural landscape of Italy in the early Middle Ages as a sinister wilderness of dense forest and ruined towns, destroyed in the barbarian invasions or abandoned after a long decline. He shows how, in a period of growth in the ninth century, Italian towns became significant centres of power, and their populations set out to restore their sense of superiority over the wild countryside and its peasant inhabitants. He describes how the draining and massive forest-clearance which they subsequently undertook led to a catastrophic ecological imbalance, devastating floods and violent uprisings. Fumagalli describes the living conditions of townspeople, peasants, priests and the nobility during this time of upheaval; he examines their behaviour in a hierarchy, as well as among peers, their fear of death and of the adverse forces of nature. What was it, he asks, that made people in the Middle Ages fear solar eclipses more than wars? Drawing on a rich variety of literary and visual sources, including paintings, frescoes and sculpture, Fumagalli analyses medieval attitudes to the body and its relationship to the spirit, arguing that, from the sixteenth century onwards, these changed profoundly, depending on a combination of economic, political and cultural factors.

Peasants have been despised, underrated, or disregarded in the past. Historians and archaeologists are now giving them a more positive assessment, and in Peasants Making History, Christopher Dyer sets a new agenda for this kind of study. Using as his example the peasants of the west midlands of England, Dyer examines peasant society in relation to their social superiors (their lords), their neighbours, and their households, and finds them making decisions and taking options to improve their lives. In their management of farming, both cultivation of fields and keeping of livestock, they made a series of modifications and some dramatic changes, not just reacting to shifts in circumstances but also devising creative initiatives. Peasants played an active role in the development of towns, both by migrating into urban settings, but also by trading actively in urban markets. Industry in the countryside was not imposed on the rural population, but often the result of peasant enterprise and flexibility. If we examine peasant attitudes and mentalities, we find them engaging in political life, making a major contribution to religion, recognizing the need to conserve the environment, and balancing the interests of individuals with those of the communities in which they lived. Many features of our world have medieval roots, and peasants played an important part in the development of the rural landscape, participation of ordinary people in government, parish church buildings, towns, and social welfare. The evidence to support this peasant-centred view has to be recovered by imaginative interpretation, and by using every type of source, including the testimony of archaeology and landscape.

Presenting the complete publication of the objects and coins in the Watlington Hoard, the authors discuss its wider implications for our understanding of hoarding in late 9th-century southern Britain, interactions between the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, and the movements of the Viking Great Army after the Battle of Edington in 878.

Political Landscapes of Capital Cities investigates the processes of transformation of the natural landscape into the culturally constructed and ideologically defined political environments of capital cities. In this spatially inclusive, socially dynamic interpretation, an interdisciplinary group of authors including archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians uses the methodology put forth in Adam T. Smith’s The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities to expose the intimate associations between human-made environments and the natural landscape that accommodate the sociopolitical needs of governmental authority. Political Landscapes of Capital Cities blends the historical, political, and cultural narratives of capital cities such as Bangkok, Cusco, Rome, and Tehran with a careful visual analysis, hinging on the methodological tools of not only architectural and urban design but also cultural, historiographical, and anthropological studies. The collection provides further ways to conceive of how processes of urbanization, monumentalization, ritualization, naturalization, and unification affected capitals differently without losing grasp of local distinctive architectural and spatial features. The essays also articulate the many complex political and ideological agendas of a diverse set of sovereign entities that planned, constructed, displayed, and performed their societal ideals in the spaces of their capitals, ultimately confirming that political authority is profoundly spatial. Contributors: Jelena Bogdanović, Jessica Joyce Christie, Talinn Grigor, Eulogio Guzmán, Gregor Kalas, Stephanie Pilat, Melody Rod-ari, Anne Parmly Toxey, Alexei Vranich

An exciting study of the social and landscape phenomena of the Estate Landscape. In recent years, the post-medieval landscape has attracted new interest from archaeologists, historians, and geographers concerned to understand the development of the historic environment. One of the key structuring elements within these landscapes from the sixteenth century until the aftermath of the Second World War was undoubtedly the landed estate. However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that any systematic attempt to quantify the presence of these estates was undertaken, prompted by the move to democratic reform and the persistent link between political power and landed wealth. Yet the importance of the landed estate in structuring power, social relationships, and both agricultural and industrial production was not limited to the UK. From the eighteenth century, the link between the UK estates and patterns of landholding and exploitation in the colonies became increasingly complex and recursive. This volume explores the relationships between the form and structure of British and Colonial estate landscapes, their agricultural management and the political structures and social relationships they reproduced. The articles address themes as diverse as the creation and development of the agrarian landscape, improvement, ornamental landscapes and gardens and estate architecture. Overall, it highlights the wealth and diversity of existing scholarship and suggests new directions for post-medieval archaeology in this dynamic area of research.