About the book

“Many of the contributors offer touching personal acknowledgements of Ros Faith's influence on their work, usually citing hours of productive conversations whether in her kitchen, at the pub, or along muddy footpaths. As the editors' preface states, ‘no one has done more to rescue the nameless early medieval peasant from modern condescension than Ros Faith’. The result is a fitting tribute to a distinguished historian and a kindly human being.” Mark Bailey, The Local Historian

Dr Rosamond Faith is a leading historian of the English peasantry in the early and central Middle Ages. In a series of influential studies, she has uncovered the basic structures of rural society, revealing how economic organisation, physical environment, and ideology shaped the lives of ordinary people in the earliest documented centuries.

In this Festschrift, friends and colleagues take up her theme, offering new perspectives on people who worked for a living between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. King Alfred famously divided society into three orders, but whereas the lives of ‘those who fight’ and ‘those who pray’ are recorded in their own words, the experience of ‘those who work’ can only be recovered indirectly. The essays collected here approach rural society under three different headings, each examining a different dimension of peasant life.