Medieval England

To ask what life was like in the Middle Ages, how people related to one another, how people made a living, how children were brought up to become adults, or what people knew and what they thought, is to pose the most difficult questions. These are the very questions 'Medieval England' addresses. It introduces us to the richness of the documentary (and non-documentary) evidence that survives, but at the same time alerts us to some of the enigmas that this evidence contains. All too often the medieval social past has been explored as an adjunct to high politics.

This book places ordinary men and women, for whom the politics of the manor, the village or the borough were often far more real and pressing, at centre stage. It engages with questions relating to the various structures of society, be they social hierarchy, household and family, guild or confraternity, parish or manor, lay or clergy. It also considers the ways in which age, gender, and marital status shaped people's lives. Above all, in this period punctuated by the ravages of the Black Death, by profound social unrest and religious upheaval, it locates these concerns within the context of change over time.