Rural History Today, Issue 45 (July 2023)
This issue features an article by Christopher Dyer on medieval peasants’ contributions to the countryside; Elizabeth Pimblett on women’s roles in the story of cider; Tony Pratt on the British cattle census of 1866; and Paul Warde on land valuation and surveying in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.
How peasants made the rural landscape
Peasants were not rich or powerful, but they had a capacity, often when operating together in a community, to make decisions and change the world around them. The peasant contribution to the medieval countryside has emerged gradually in the thinking of historians and archaeologists.