Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 280

The ‘Toronto School’ of medieval historians, established by the late J. A. Raftis in the 1960s and 1970s, specializes in the court roll-based study of Ramsey abbey manors in eastern England. Characterized by the detailed reconstruction of individual families and communities, Sherri Olson’s analysis of two Huntingdonshire villages is firmly rooted within that tradition. A mute gospel examines several different aspects of rural society and culture, including the extent and uses of peasant literacy, the prosecution of trespass in the manor court, and changing patterns of personal naming. Two distinctive features of the book call for special mention. First, Olson is heavily influenced by modern cultural theory, and analogies are drawn with such varied societies as those of classical Athens and nineteenth-century slave communities in the United States. Secondly, the author does not engage with critics of the Toronto School’s methodology and overlooks much recent relevant research, particularly that published by British historians.

The book focuses on the well-documented manors of Ellington and Upwood, both open-field parishes to the south-west of Ramsey. Conveying a sense of place is not Olson’s chief concern and she provides no description of these manors, or even a map outlining their distinctive features of landscape and settlement. Reconstruction of the physical landscape is very much secondary to reconstructing the mental landscapes of the inhabitants, though several chapters demonstrate that the two are inextricably intertwined. At Ellington, for example, Olson claims that distinct neighbourhoods (called Coten and Sybethorpe) emerged in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and entered into local consciousness because they were inhabited by an unusually high proportion of women. The suggestion that some places were distinctively female in the Middle Ages may be true, though difficult to substantiate with any certainty. But it is not tenable, in this case, to argue that the preponderance of women created newly recognizable communities. Nowhere in this book does Olson make clear that, like many other parishes with nucleated villages, Ellington also included some dispersed settlements. Coten and Sybethorpe were hamlets whose separate histories and identities almost certainly long pre-dated their first appearance in the surviving manor court rolls.

Other assertions made by Olson are also unlikely to go unchallenged. In a discussion of the village court as an arena for performance, ritual and storytelling, an incident of park-breaking in which several villagers ‘maliciously’ ploughed up land is related to the observance of Plough Monday celebrations, marking the resumption of labour in January after the winter holiday (p.82). But an alternative explanation of the case, which was heard on 3 December 1299, is that land-hungry tenants attempted to convert a few extra acres to tillage during the winter sowing season. More successful is an interesting chapter on the chronology of trespass, in which Olson argues that, before the Black Death ‘the term transgressio for landed trespass showed a strong, though not exclusive, tendency to refer to trespass against the lord’s landed interests’ (p.161). By contrast, in the post-plague era, trespass was as likely to be committed against neighbours, individuals, and the community. The nature of the offence had also changed, from deliberate acts of damage (to wood, grain, and meadow) before the plague, to a ‘new spirit of violation by inaction’ thereafter, in which tenants failed to clean ditches, mend hedges, and clear footpaths (p.170). By the fifteenth century, it is claimed, an atmosphere of lawlessness had arisen, caused by the increasing number of animals in streets that seemed so empty of people.

This is in many ways a disorientating book for British agricultural and social historians. The emphasis on cultural theory, the failure to take account of much relevant historiography, and the lack of topographical context make it difficult for readers to fully engage with the arguments presented and to evaluate the interpretations proposed. By no means is this a bad book, but it stands somewhat apart from the mainstream of current medieval social and economic studies. For that reason its impact, like the countryside it describes, will probably be muted.