Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 131

Christopher Dyer is one of the outstanding scholars of our generation of medieval social and economic historians, a prolific and wide-ranging author, and past President of the BAHS. This collection of essays has been brought together to honour him on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. As the editors acknowledge in their introduction, it is very difficult to do justice to the breadth and depth of Dyer’s considerable research interests and influences. To overcome the problem they have devised two rather artificial motifs of ‘survival’ and ‘discord’ to group this disparate collection of essays by past students, colleagues and friends.

One of Dyer’s great strengths has been his ability to integrate and harness archaeological and archival research in the pursuit of a plethora of topics encompassing standards of living, economic exchange and numismatics. The single archaeological contribution by Astill reflects another of Dyer’s interests; in this instance, rural settlement and the interaction with towns and the economy. In his wide-ranging survey Astill argues against unilineal or incremental development and gives importance to regional differences. Astill provides a long chronological perspective within which he places greater emphasis on the eighth and twelfth centuries as periods of profound change.

Local and regional themes are maintained in the section on survival, which also includes a posthumous essay by Fox on lords’ exploitation of ‘waste’, demonstrating the depth of his understanding of the intricacies of the Devon countryside. Britnell provides a re-assessment of Postan’s interpretation of the fifteenth-century economy; whilst Goddard focuses on the mid-century recession and the availability of credit in towns, although data from the decades of the slump are missing from his tables. Swanson focuses on the local economy of Derbyshire and argues for the important contribution of income derived from spiritualities. Langdon’s essay provides novel insights into the far-from-static picture of wage labour and uncovers the dynamics of family groups, women and working partnerships from royal building accounts.

Essays by Masschaele and Schofield straddle the two sections and are concerned with developments in the law. Masschaele takes Dyer’s research on the interaction between town and countryside as his starting point for an exploration of itinerant royal courts and their impact on the places and people where they were held. Schofield returns to his legal roots in a study of trespass litigation within the jurisdiction of the manor court and argues for the impact of some degree of peasant agency on developments in the law in the local court.

The second half of the book is more closely allied to Dyer’s earlier interests in conflict and the range of essays is correspondingly broad, ranging from individual communities to comparisons across Europe. Birrell’s essay is a superb example of how a meticulous and nuanced study of one record, in this instance a rental of 1341 for Alrewas, when combined with the author’s command of historical and local contexts, can tease out its significance and inform on a wide range of topics including lord-tenant relations, dues and services, peasant attitudes to the written word and peasant recourse to the law, all subjects that Dyer has addressed. Dyer’s work has not been limited to England and the contribution by van Bavel on the revolts in the Low Countries expands our understanding of the contrasting contexts in which urban and rural revolts occurred in that region. The unusual nature of the English revolts is a theme explored polemically by Cohn who argues that English commoners were less self-confident than their continental counterparts. Laughton adds an urban dimension by examining the management of discord in fifteenth-century Chester.

Other local studies in this section include Briggs’s evaluation of the effectiveness of the demesne farming system before and after the Black Death in eastern England, through a case study of Great Eversden. A closely studied communal lease of Great Horwood is employed by Tompkins to address issues of individualism and collectivism. Diet is a topic that Dyer has done so much to elucidate, and Müller’s rather eclectic collection of sources for studying food as a point of conflict is a gesture towards this important area of his research.

The final section of the book, the bibliography of Dyer’s writings 1968–2009, further attests to the scope of his interests, and ‘The Story So Far …’ leaves us in happy anticipation of what is still to come.