This compelling new study forms part of a new wave of scholarship on the
medieval rural environment in which the focus moves beyond purely
socio-economic concerns to incorporate the lived experience of peasants.
For too long, the principal intellectual approach has been to consider
both subject and evidence from a modern, rationalist perspective and to
afford greater importance to the social elite. New perspectives are
needed. By re-evaluating the source material from the perspective of the
peasant worldview, it is possible to build a far more detailed
representation of rural peasant experience. Susan Kilby seeks to
reconstruct the physical and socio-cultural environment of three
contrasting English villages--Lakenheath in Suffolk, Castor in
Northamptonshire, and Elton in Huntingdonshire--between c. 1086 and c.
1348 and to use this as the basis for determining how peasants perceived
their natural surroundings. In so doing she draws upon a vast array of
sources including documents, material culture, place-names and family
names, and the landscape itself. At the same time, she explores the
approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including
onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology, and
historical geography. This highly interdisciplinary process reveals
exciting insights into peasant mentalities. For example, cultural
geographers' understanding of the ways in which different groups 'read'
their local landscape has profound implications for the ways in which we
might interpret evidence left to us by medieval English peasant
communities, while anthropological approaches to place-naming
demonstrate the distinct possibility that there were similarities
between the naming practices of First Nations people and medieval
society. Both groups used key landscape referents and also used names as
the means by which locally important history, folklore, and legends were
embedded within the landscape itself. Among many valuable insights, this
study also reveals that, although uneducated in the formal sense,
peasants understood aspects of contemporary scientific thought. In
addition to enhancing academic understanding of the lived experience,
this new approach augments our comprehension of subjects such as social
status, peasant agency, peasants' economic experiences, and the
construction of communal and individual memory. Susan Kilby's
groundbreaking study enables us to reclaim significant elements of the
environment inhabited and traversed by English people over 700 years
ago.
