In so doing she draws upon a vast array of sources including documents, material culture, place-names and family names, and the landscape itself. At the same time, she explores the approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology and historical geography.

This highly interdisciplinary process reveals exciting insights into peasant mentalities. For example, cultural geographers’ understanding of the ways in which different groups ‘read’ their local landscape has profound implications for the ways in which we might interpret evidence left to us by medieval English peasant communities, while anthropological approaches to place-naming demonstrate the distinct possibility that there were similarities between the naming practices of First Nations people and medieval society. Both groups used key landscape referents and also used names as the means by which locally important history, folklore and legends were embedded within the landscape itself.

Among many valuable insights, this study also reveals that, although uneducated in the formal sense, peasants understood aspects of contemporary scientific thought.

In addition to enhancing academic understanding of the lived experience, this new approach augments our comprehension of subjects such as social status, peasant agency, peasants’ economic experiences and the construction of communal and individual memory.

Susan Kilby’s groundbreaking study enables us to reclaim significant elements of the environment inhabited and traversed by English people over 700 years ago.

Read an extract from Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape