A Mute Gospel. The People and Culture of the Medieval English Common Fields (review)

Studies of cultural, and to a certain extent, social history often tend to carry subjective character, resulting in subjective interpretations. The current study by Sherri Olson, dealing with the cultural life of two late-medieval parishes in Huntingdonshire, is one such recent example. In her monograph, Olson aims to “gain a more balanced view of medieval society by considering how peasants thought about themselves and their world as revealed in English manorial court rolls.” In a lengthy introduction (pp. 1–49), Olson exposes her methodology, key-questions, and concepts that serve her in her study of late-medieval village culture. In Chapter One (pp. 52–91), the author speaks of “ritual” and “performance” at local manorial courts, which turned into a “theatric arena”, during sessions. Chapter Two (pp. 92–123) deals with (mostly sur-)names, with a particular attention to women’s surnames and the relation of the latter to the social status of their bearers. Olson concludes that surnames tended to be dynamic, changing over and sometimes within generations. In Chapter Three (pp. 124–148), Olson considers “pragmatic literacy” of Huntingdonshire peasants, their access to and reliance on contemporary Latin documents, which provided safeguards of their personal status. In Chapter Four (pp. 149–177), the author studies the history of trespasses (transgressiones, in Latin) from the late thirteenth until the late fourteenth centuries, showing dynamics of their nature and meaning and concluding that in the post-Black Death period, there was an increasing number of trespasses not only on the demesne, but also within the tenancy. In Chapter Five (pp. 178–200), Olson surveys the shift in naming landscape elements (fields, crofts, etc.), after the Black Death. She argues that after the pestilence, more and more villagers assigned their own surnames to the landscapes. In the conclusion (pp. 201–6), Olson reminds the reader that it is impossible to understand medieval peasants, unless we understand how they thought and acted.

It is rather a pity that the latter notion is hardly reflected anywhere in the book. Instead, Olson tends to study late-medieval peasants through the prism of a set of our own contemporary, often heavily jargonized, superimposed (if not anachronistic) sociological views. Thus, the notion of “culture,” “ritual” and “performance” in the “manorial court theatre” may derive from Olson’s own interpretation of late-medieval reality, based on sociological, anthropological and cultural theories, but it does not derive from the manorial court rolls themselves. The same could be said about the notions of “literacy” (Chapter Three) and “memory” (Chapter Five). The Huntingdonshire peasants did not think in these categories and there is no evidence in excerpts quoted throughout the book that they did. As a result, many interpretations and claims remain largely unreflected and unsubstantiated by these quotations from the court rolls. For instance, it is unclear how the impersonal expression et dicunt quod (they say that …) and similar figures of speech reveal “a language of performance, of appearance and retirement from a ‘performance arena’ upon which collective attention is centred” (p. 68).

Another shortcoming derives from the very nature of Olson’s source material. She confines her study (as her previous ones) to only two manors (Ellington and Upwood, both in Huntingdonshire, belonging to Ramsey Abbey). But the estate of Ramsey Abbey has been extensively studied, both economically and socially, by the so-called “Toronto School of Peasant Studies” represented by Ambrose Raftis (1922–2008) and his students, Olson included. The “Toronto School” has tended to take an optimistic picture of peasant status or peasant freedom and this book subscribes wholeheartedly to this spirit. However, sticking to two manors of a single and now over-studied estate, with obvious chronological gaps, can hardly add anything new and it is even less likely to advance the discourse further. It would be much more fertile to turn to new, unstudied evidence, available in abundance at various archives and repositories...