Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850-1520 (review)

The series in which Christopher Dyer's excellent new work appears already has generated comment, much of it lauding the content of the books but an equal amount criticizing their format. In the case of Dyer's book, perhaps it would be preferable to deal with these latter criticisms before examining the former. Professional historians will immediately be struck by the fact that despite the enormous breadth of scholarship so amply demonstrated in Dyer's pages, there are no footnotes and the scholarly apparatus is limited to a rather short select bibliography. Most if not all reviewers of the books in this series—and I must now add myself to the list—have found this omission enormously frustrating and judge that to an important extent it mitigates their usefulness for scholars and students alike.

Dyer has recently defended himself on this point (www.ihrinfo.ac.uk/reviews/paper/dyerC3.html), noting that the volume was commissioned by Penguin to be produced without footnotes so that it might appeal to a popular audience. By eliminating the "off-putting paraphernalia of conventional academic writing," it aimed to attract new converts to economic history. Dyer admits to drawing no small amount of inspiration from the prospect of participating in the Penguin tradition of producing high-quality monographs that were both cheap and accessible.

Of course, participating in the Penguin tradition does not necessarily mean eschewing footnotes or endnotes, except perhaps under the current economic conditions of publishing, nor does the elimination of notes necessarily make a book more accessible. Yet Dyer's defense pointedly avoids dealing with the broader epistemological issue at stake here, which is the basis of history's claim to be a valid intellectual discipline. Writing history, as Ludmilla Jordanova has so aptly observed, is not really about establishing an absolute truth, it is about establishing trust between author and reader. The citation is an essential element because it opens up the author's judgments to scrutiny and verification and thus functions to establish the work's reliability and judiciousness. Without this "off-putting paraphernalia," this book unfortunately is much less useful than it ought to be.

If this important issue is put aside, however, it would then not be unfair to judge Making a Living in the Middle Ages on the basis of Dyer's stated intention to write an inspiring book for a popular audience. In this, there is much to commend here. Unlike M. M. Postan's The Medieval Economy and Society (1972), which this book is intended to replace, Dyer's approach is chronological rather than topical and emphasizes sources of dynamism and inventiveness during the medieval period rather than the demographic, institutional, and technological limits of economic growth. Rejecting the "grand narratives" that have dominated our understanding of the medieval past—the rise of the middle class, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the Malthusian trap—Dyer substitutes instead a view based on the "quiet actions by millions" (p. 57) and the "change [that] emerged from the combination of thousands of uncoordinated actions, involving people at all levels" (p. 7).

This new Smithian image, needless to say, makes the medieval past look much less like a foreign country and much more like an embryonic modern one. Peasants, though acting within the limits of the village community, were not hamstrung by it. Instead, they responded to price signals, moved into market niches, altered production practices, and accumulated land when possible. Medieval Chester sported a "high density of shopping outlets" while the seld in Cheapside was "the medieval version of the shopping mall" (p. 217). Urban workers valued thrift and maximized their earnings potential; competitive and acquisitive lords took risks, undertook new investments, and ran their demesnes in a rational manner; inventiveness and investment were evident in everything from blast furnaces to paper...