Custom and Commercialisation in English Rural Society

Historical anniversaries can be a curse as well as a blessing. Indeed, on the face of it, there seems little logic to a collection of chapters on the themes of R.H. Tawney’s The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912) and M.M. Postan’s The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain, 1100–1500 (1972), beyond the fact that they were both published in a year ending with ‘2’. Tawney and Postan came from very different theoretical perspectives and worked on different periods: Postan was a medievalist Malthusian, Tawney a socialist scholar of the Tudor age. Yet both works have been crucial to the historiography of agrarian England, and both have spawned debate, challenge and critical further research. The editors of this volume (J.P. Bowen and A.T. Brown) have highlighted two aspects of their work, custom and commercialisation, and used these as threads to bring together a diverse collection. Indeed, the disconnect between the two historians’ periods becomes a virtue, as it allows the collection to traverse the divide—much more of a historiographical chasm than a historical one—between the periods we call ‘late medieval’ and ‘early modern’

Agrarian society · Archaeology · Art history · Blessing · Curse · Historiography · Theology · Tribute · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy