Conclusions

The articles in this book reflect Rodney Hilton's work remarkably well. They show us a multi-faceted set of approaches, illuminating medieval England and continental Europe from a great variety of directions, but at the core of them is a set of common assumptions and problems: that the study of the peasantry is central, that one of the most illuminating ways into understanding medieval society is through the study of conflict, that the socio-economic dynamism of the central and later middle ages had very complex roots, and that it is crucially important to tease them all out and then try to work out how they related to each other. Rodney himself, indeed, across his working life, increasingly recognized how complex the causal elements of medieval social and economic change were, while never renouncing his core principle, that 'conflict between landlords and peasants, however muted or however intense, over the appropriation of surplus product of the peasant holding, was a prime mover in the evolution of medieval society'.¹ I do not think that any of the contributors to this book would disagree with that—indeed, not many medieval social or economic historians at all would disagree with that, whether Marxist or not, although non-Marxists would put it in a different language. But it is the complexities that emerge most strongly from this volume, and its contributors have in some cases moved away from both Rodney's main interests and from his interpretations, always coming back to the Hilton oeuvre in order to interact with it, but then moving on again. This is as it should be: Rodney Hilton's Middle Ages is not a closed system, but an ongoing debate.

That complexity also means, of course, that there are many ways in which a conclusion could bring these articles together. I shall do so here under three broad headings: lords and peasants; revolts; and the economic dynamism of the middle ages. These seem to me, at least, the best ways into the richness of the debate, both at Birmingham in 2003 and in this volume.

Lords and peasants

It is a truism that the medieval world was a peasant world. 80 per cent of the population of late medieval England was rural-dwelling; the percentage was probably less in France, but only Italy and the Low Countries had a substantially lower rural population, and many parts of Europe (as Dick Holt stresses in this book) had a substantially higher one. Lords cannot be understood without the overwhelming peasant majority: how they defended their domination of that majority, as also how much money and goods they extracted from their peasant dependants, are essential elements in understanding who they were. Peasants, however, although the primary producers, and in control of their own labour power for the most part, nonetheless lived inside a world constructed by lordship, and they too cannot be approached properly unless their relationship with lords is understood. Medieval history itself turns on that permanent agonistic relationship, and most of our contributors faced it one way or another.

1. Peasant society was never uniform; it was always internally stratified. Knowledge of that stratification was important to Rodney Hilton, for at the back of his mind was always the knowledge that peasant élites, in England and elsewhere, would in the end buy up their neighbours, hire them back as wage labourers, and move in the direction of agrarian capitalism, ending the coherence of the peasantry as a class. That process was far from generalized even in a highly commercialized county such as Norfolk before the late sixteenth century, as Jane Whittle stresses; it was not a main focus of attention in this book as a result. But the way peasant élites related to their middling and smallholding neighbours, and how far internal inequalities affected the coherence of peasant communities, recurred in studies of England, Spain and France. Miriam Müller focuses on the ways communities sought to contain internal conflict between peasant strata in England; across the divergent and ever-changing social structures of fourteenth-century English villages, peasants aimed to maintain their cohesiveness in the face of seigneurial authority, despite...