The New Middle Ages?

The economic and social history of medieval England has been a notably animated scene for more than thirty years, since M. M. Postan provided a powerful model of surging growth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, catastrophic demographic crisis in the fourteenth, and economic stagnation in the fifteenth.¹ The historiography of the period is rich and varied; the academic debates lively and productive; the field crowded with textbooks; and the topic still attractive to students despite the collapse of economic and social history as a departmentally distinctive discipline.

In the end, the fact that Postan's view of a complex society over a whole four centuries can be boiled down to such a simple proposition was always going to make him a sitting duck. While his view of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has remained substantially intact, for the period after the Black Death of 1348–9 he has come under sustained fire from every side and all calibres of weaponry, providing target practice for rural and urban historians alike, and for the empirically rich as readily as for the theoretically informed. Christopher Dyer's new book now takes the whole topic significantly further forward by delineating a new picture of the later Middle Ages in England to replace the mutilated carcass of the old.

Dyer's late Middle Ages stretches to cover the whole period from 1250 to 1550, starting not with the Black Death but well before the demographic peak and the beginnings of economic crisis in the decades either side of 1300. His grasp of the preceding and following periods gives him a clear perspective of what was and was not distinctive about the 'long' fifteenth century, the period from 1350 to the 1520s which was the locus of the supposed and prolonged economic crisis. For that period Postan's duck has been dead some while, and Dyer needs to make only the most perfunctory of post mortems before proceeding to a sustained, persuasive, and highly readable attempt to put something in its place.

Dyer explains his approach in the conclusion: much of the evidence which has been taken to represent the period has always been from the archives of the great landed estates, which paint a gloomy picture of 'decayed rents, ruinous buildings, and declining wealth', but 'another story, more interesting and more positive, can be told from new sources, or rather sources that were being preserved for the first time, such as wills' (p. 242). Above all we should not rely on normative accounts such as legislation but recognize that a top-down view of society is unlikely to reveal all its workings. Instead, historians should attempt to recover scattered information about the real economy from both documentary and archaeological sources. Dyer phrases his objective as 'hidden trade, hidden investment, and [the] concealed economy' (p. 242). They were not hidden from contemporaries, only from modern historians: by the force of Postan's model; by the difficulty of assembling fragmentary evidence from thousands of unpublished documents, dozens of local record offices, and scores of archaeological reports; and by early modernist claims for novelty in the period after 1520 or 1550.

Dyer's book is based on his Ford Lectures, delivered at Oxford in 2001. It preserves the structure of six much expanded and closely interlinked lectures, the arguments now deployed in the round with much supporting evidence. They cohere wonderfully and are cogently argued and meatily evidenced. As a result the book is part synoptic textbook, part research monograph, and part theoretical rethinking. In short the format of a lecture series allows Dyer to do what some other commission or book proposal might not. By straddling three types of historical writing Dyer can make use of the strengths of each.

Perhaps in part because of the book's origin as a high-profile lecture series, it has embedded in its structure an effective rhetorical device. Many sections open by presenting a conventional view of the...