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A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1297-1344
Judith Bennett Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0072903317 |
Book Description
This history of medieval village life is told through the experiences of Cecilia Penifader, a peasant woman who lived on one English manor in the early fourteenth century. This truly unique book offers a wealth of insight into medieval peasant society, bringing many of the characteristics of a time and a people to life. Short and readable, it is an ideal text for undergraduate teaching, suitable for courses in Western civilization, medieval history, women's history, and English history.Customer Reviews:
Full of "perhaps" and "maybes".......2007-04-08
An interesting book about a peasant's life.......2006-08-17
cecilia who?.......2005-04-11
Price is nuts.......2004-01-30
An Excellent Primer for Medieval History.......2000-10-04
One of the best things to be said about this book is how Bennett highlights terms that the reader is most likely to not be familiar with. These words are listed in a handy glossary in the back of the book. Most people aren't familiar with terms such as heliot, so this addition to the book is very helpful. As mentioned above, the brevity and clarity of the book go a long way to making the text more enjoyable. The book foregoes footnotes and endnotes, which would certainly help the non-scholars who can't stand wading through tons of citations. There are also some nice diagrams that help the reader visualize various aspects of peasant life.
The lack of footnotes and endnotes is a problem for the historian and student, such as myself. I wouldn't go so far as the other reviewer here and pan the entire book, but that reviewer certainly has a point. Bennett also relies on inference more than she probably should. Although her deductions seem sound, her conclusions, backed up with more evidence and properly cited, would have been much appreciated.
I think this is an excellent survey text that would make a nice addition to any library. After reading the book, the reader can readily picture Cecilia and feel as if they almost know her, and any book that can accomplish that is always worth a read.
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A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 15381840 (Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time)
Ann Kussmaul Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0521458315 |
Book Description
In rural England prior to the Industrial Revolution people generally married when they were not busy with work. Parish registers of marriage therefore form an important and innovative source for the study of economic change in this period. Dr Kussmaul employs marriage dates to identify three main patterns of work and risk (arable, pastoral and rural industrial) and more importantly to show the long-term changes in economic activities across 542 English parishes from the beginning of national marriage registration in 1538. No single historical landscape emerges. Instead A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538–1840 maps the changes in economic orientation from arable through regional specialization to rural industrialization and explores how these changes had implications for the extent of population growth in the early modern period. Dr Kussmaul’s study presents a view of early modern English economic history from a unique standpoint.
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From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers
Allan Kulikoff Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0807848824 Release Date: 2000-10-25 |
Book Description
With this book, Allan Kulikoff offers a sweeping new interpretation of the origins and development of the small farm economy in Britain's mainland American colonies. Examining the lives of farmers and their families, he tells the story of immigration to the colonies, traces patterns of settlement, analyzes the growth of markets, and assesses the impact of the Revolution on small farm society.Beginning with the dispossession of the peasantry in early modern England, Kulikoff follows the immigrants across the Atlantic to explore how they reacted to a hostile new environment and its Indian inhabitants. He discusses how colonists secured land, built farms, and bequeathed those farms to their children. Emphasizing commodity markets in early America, Kulikoff shows that without British demand for the colonists' crops, settlement could not have begun at all. Most important, he explores the destruction caused during the American Revolution, showing how the war thrust farmers into subsistence production and how they only gradually regained their prewar prosperity.
Customer Reviews:
Worth three and a half stars, but not easy reading........2001-03-22
The result is a synthesis of the Colonial farmer to the American Revolution based on amazingly extensive reading of the secondary literature. This has to be the first book where the bibliography (104 pages) is longer than the endnotes (73 pages), and Kulikoff seems to have read every scholarly article on rural history. However, the actual connection between yeomanry and the rise of democracy is slated for another volume, as is their eventual demise. What we have here is a book that discusses the economics changes that lead the British and later the Germans to move to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We have a chapter on how emigration took place, how the new immigrants met and eventually conquered the Indians, how they expanded up until 1776 and how they set up households and fixed themselves in relations to markets. Crucial to Kulikoff's account is how enclosure and other acts against the peasantry encouraged mass migration. Most migrants in fact moved within Europe (either to Ulster or to Eastern Europe), but enough moved to the Western hemisphere to successfully conquer it.
All this is very thorough and thoughtful but it is not easy reading. One problem is that Kulikoff abbreviates the books he is citing in his notes, so not only do you have to turn from your reading to the endnotes(which is always irritating), but then you often have to move from the endnotes to the bibliography. I am aware that many readers have a philistine prejudice against footnotes, but since this is not a book for a general audience their opinions should be ignored. Because of the structural focus of Kulikoff's work, the human element is somewhat downplayed in this book. Despite talking about such subjects as the dispossession of the British peasantry, war and atrocities against the Indians, the beating of wives and the maltreatment of servants, Kulikoff writes about these subjects in a style with the life bleached out of it. The contrast with Thompson and Genovese is striking. One might cruelly say that there is much here about demography, but little actual sex, much about diet as an ecological concept but little about food. While Kulikoff is right to discuss the ill-treatment of servants, the subordination of women and the first shoots of the weeds of a rural proletariat, more could have been said about the general trends in the standard of living, especially compared to Britain. Moreover what scholarly differences Kulikoff has are confined to brief comments in the endnotes, so Kulikoff's own voice is blurred. The result is that it is not clear to the reader that Kulikoff is saying something new. As such his emphasis that farmers were not simply small scale capitalists and that landownership rates rose as high as 90% in many areas of America is not made as forcefully as it could be. Only the last chapter, actually the epilogue, does Kulikoff come to life as he portrays a new picture of the American Revolution as a violent conflict, with various armies looting and pillaging both sides. There was mass emigration and hundreds were killed, indeed murdered, in Indian wars alone. (One remembers in particular the massacre of 90 peaceful praying Moravian Delawares who were slaughtered by frontier militia as they sang hymns and prayed.) Given the way American conservatives have prided themselves on their "successful" revolution in contrast to the French, it is very useful to learn that the per-capital income dropped more than 40% during the decade of revolution and had not returned to its pre-war level thirty years later. One can only wait for the next volume.
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Transforming English Rural Society: The Verneys and the Claydons, 16001820 (Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time)
John Broad Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 052182933X |
Book Description
John Broad explores the rise and fall of the Verney family of Middle Claydon, Buckinghamshire, demonstrating the family's rise to wealth as motivated by a strong dynastic imperative. He reveals how the family managed its estates to maximize income and used its wealth to transform the Claydon villages and landscape, creating a pattern of "open" and "closed" parishes. Based on the formidable Verney family archive with its abundant correspondence, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the English countryside as a dynamic force in English social, economic and demographic history.
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The Rural Economy of New England a Regional Stufy
John Donald Black Manufacturer: Harvard ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: B000IZC0X2 |
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The Rural Economy of England
Joan Thirsk Manufacturer: Hambledon & London ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 090762829X |
Book Description
No one has done more to emphasise the significance of the land in early modern England that Joan Thirsk, whose writings are both an important contribution to its history and point the way for future research. The subjects of this collection include the origin and nature of the common fields, Tudor enclosures, the Commonwealth confiscation of Royalist land and its subsequent return after the Restoration, inheritance customs, and the role of industries in the rural economy, among them stocking knitting.
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Rural Economy of the West of England
William Marshall Manufacturer: David & Charles PLC ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0715347632 |
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The Rural Economy of New England, a Regional Study
john black Manufacturer: Harvard University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Unknown Binding ASIN: B0000CHSFH |
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The Transformation of a Peasant Economy: Townspeople and Villagers in the Lutterworth Area 1500-1700 (Communities, Contexts and Cultures : Leicester)
John Goodacre Manufacturer: Ashgate Publishing ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 1859280730 |
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Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 16601900 (Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time)
K. D. M. Snell Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0521335582 |
Book Description
This collection of inter-connected essays is concerned with the impact of social and economic change upon the rural labouring poor and artisans in England, and combines a sensitive understanding of their social priorities with innovative quantitative analysis. It is based on an impressive range of sources, and its particular significance arises from the pioneering use made of a largely neglected archival source - settlement records - to address questions of central importance in English social and economic history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Levels of employment, wage rates, poor relief, the sexual division of labour, the social consequences of enclosure, the decline of farm service and traditional apprenticeship, and th equality of family life are amongst the issues discussed in a profound re-assessment of a perennial problem: the standard of living (in its widest sense) of the labouring poor during the period of industrialisation. The author’s conclusions challenge much of the prevailing orthodoxy, and his extensive use of literary and attitudinal material is closely integrated with the quantitative restatement of an interpretation that owes much to the older tradition of the Hammonds’ Village Labourer.Books: