Although keen to stress the familial and communal nature of modern peasant existence, anthropologists and sociologists have long been disinclined to characterize the peasantry as entirely subsistence-based and insular. Almost forty years ago, Thorner cogently insisted that the present or past environments which permitted a peasant sector to exist in isolation, either socially, politically or economically, were rare indeed. Half a century before Thorner, Chayanov, an individual often associated, though not entirely accurately, with a subsistence model of the peasantry, argued that it was a lack of opportunity, not a lack of will, that may have confined peasants to family and village. Even if peasants concentrated their attentions upon and built their life experiences in and around the world of the family and the village, this was not to say that significant moments and forces did not play upon them from beyond the boundaries of household and local community. Further, as these forces increased or decreased or changed their nature, so opportunity for the peasantry altered and, in so doing, affected the nature of the family and the local community.
Medieval historians have, partly, perhaps largely, as a consequence of this literature, tended to describe the peasantry of medieval England in similar terms. In recent years, most especially, some attempt has been made to free the peasantry from the bonds of family and of community and to admit them into a broader world where they have taken their place beside lawyers, the religious, politicians and merchants. This change of focus has, inevitably, affected historians’ understanding and regard for the peasant family and the local community. This does not mean that historical interest in family and community has waned, rather that the significance of their roles has been redefined. Although no longer the limits of peasant experience and worldliness, family and community have retained an importance in discussions of the medieval peasantry because of their variety and their potential to mould opportunities and life experiences. The behaviour of the medieval family and of the community in the countryside, changes in their form or function, have served as barometers of the pressures playing upon rural society. It is, therefore, in a growing awareness of the variety of the form and role of the peasant family that the history of the medieval English peasant is being rewritten.
Historical explorations of this diversity have produced significant departures from any prevailing orthodoxy regarding the medieval peasant family and community. Where once the family of the wealthy villein peasantry of central, open-field or ‘champion’ England tended to stand for all peasant families in the middle ages, a partial consequence of an early seminal study by Homans, it is now acknowledged that the structure and function of the medieval peasant family were more diverse and that, in a sense, the peasant family which dominates the literature served as an ideal to which few peasants could possibly aspire. The demographic study of the peasant family, best exemplified in the work of historians such as Razi and Smith, has drawn attention both to the differentiation of family structure within particular communities and to the regional distinctiveness of family forms. The results of close research into peasant families within individual communities have been employed to support broader discussions of rural society and explanations of change in that society. Macfarlane, for instance, employing the particular research of medieval historians and contrasting it with a rather partial definition of ‘peasantry’, has felt sufficiently encouraged to question the extent to which medieval rural society was, in essence, a peasant society. Further, the researches of, inter alia, Smith, Razi and Poos have led them to stress certain features of the peasant family as indices of the demographic regime. Whilst Razi has stressed the persistence of extended familial forms and their associated features, such as early marriage and kin dependency, Smith and Poos have posited a rather different view of the peasantry, one based upon nuclearization and life-cycle service. Both theses have important implications for explanations of population movement in the high and late middle ages. Such work on the nature of the peasant family has also caused historians to reassess the bonds and dependencies which operated in rural society. Consideration of the extent to which the wider community was dependent upon biological, economic, political, religious and social relationships established in and around the peasant family has sat at the centre of historical discussions of the village community. Historians working within a Marxist tradition, such as Hilton and Dyer, as well as historians who have promoted a social stratification thesis, notably the so-called ‘Toronto School’ led by Raftis, whilst far from rejecting the role of the peasant family as a cohesive force within the village community, have also investigated the roles of political and economic relationships in moulding the relationships of the peasantry. Most recently, historical accounts of the commercialization of high and late medieval society by, amongst others, Britnell, Masschaele and Raftis have sought to locate the peasant, the peasant family and the village community within, rather than beyond, widespread networks of trade. The extent to which individuals, especially women, moved between communities, and the demographic, social and economic implications of such movement, have also been fiercely discussed in recent years, notably in the work of Poos, Goldberg and, from a contrary standpoint, Bailey. Alongside these economic networks, historians have also attempted to explore the extent to which communities were linked to rather than divorced from politics, government and administration. Relations between landlords and their tenants, a staple of Marxist historians, have attracted further attention as historians have developed an awareness of the multiplicity of agendas and loyalties which challenge any simple categorization of the peasant community as homogeneous. Most evidently, the role of members of the peasant family and the village community in arenas other than those of the family or the village, as, for instance, county court jurors or taxation assessors, encourages scrutiny of the notion of an integral village community while, at the same time, admitting sections of the peasantry into other communities including, as the work of Maddicott and Carpenter has shown, the community of the realm.
Whilst the effect of this research might indeed appear to challenge notions of ‘peasantry’ in ways consistent with the attempt already made by Macfarlane, it seems more sensible to consider such explorations of the variety of peasant family and community experience as a growing corpus of evidence for the interaction of a predominantly agrarian society with exogenous and endogenous demographic, political, economic and social processes in the way envisaged by Thorner and others. This intricate and ongoing (re)definition of ‘peasantry’ and the role of the peasantry inevitably continues to generate its own debates and, since the centrality of the family and the local community, even within this ‘new peasantry’, are generally acknowledged, historical discussion of family and community remains of paramount importance.
World History
