Popular protest
Essay and seminar questions
-
Was conflict inherent within medieval social relations?
- Can popular protest be explained solely in economic terms?
- Was the English Rising of 1381 typical of popular rebellions in the Middle Ages?
- To what extent was manorialism responsible for the English Rising of 1381?
documents
- Jean Froissart: on the Jacquerie, 1358
- Anonimalle Chronicle: English Peasants' Revolt 1381
- Froissart: Beginning of the English Peasants Revolt & Death of Sir Robert Salle in the English Peasants Revolt & King Richard punishes the rebels in Kent
Introductory Reading (see also Rural society readings)
Barber, The Two Cities, 43-46
Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 106-166
Waley and Denley, Later Medieval Europe, 90-105
e-resources
- The Internet Medieval Sourcebook has a section on rural life.
- The Domesday Book online - explore the contents of the Domesday Book and its historical context
- Medieval manors and their records
- "The Peasants' Revolt" Voices of the Powerless. BBC Radio programme, Thursday 25 July 2002.
- 'The Peasants' Revolt'. In Our Time. BBC Radio programme, Thursday 16 November 2006.
- The Peasants' Revolt: The time when women took up arms 14/6/2012
- The Online Froissart. Online edition with translation of the important French chronicle which covers much of the C14th.
Further Reading (see also Rural Society readings)
Aston, Margaret, 'Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the Peasants' Revolt', Past & Present 134 (1994), 3 - 47.
Aston, T.H., and Philpin, C.H.E., (eds.), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985)
Bailey, Mark (ed. and trans.), The English Manor c. 1200-c.1500 (Manchester, 2002)
Bloch, Marc, French Rural History, trans. Janet Sondheimer (London, 1966)
Chick, Joe, ‘Leaders and Rebels: John Wrawe’s Role in the Suffolk Rising of 1381’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute for Archaeology & History, 44 (2018), pp. 214-234.
Cohn, Samuel Kline, Jr., (ed. and trans.), Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe: Italy, France and Flanders (Manchester, 2004)
Cohn, Samuel Kline, Jr., 'Popular insurrection and the Black Death: a comparative view' in Rodney Hilton's Middle Ages : an exploration of historical themes, Christopher Dyer, Peter Coss, and Chris Wickham eds., (Oxford, 2007).
Cohn, Samuel Kline, Jr., Lust for liberty : the politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200-1425 : Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge, MA, 2008)
Cohn, Samuel Kline, Jr., 'The ‘Modernity’ of Medieval Popular Revolt', History Compass 10.10 (2012): 731-41.
Dobson, R.B. (ed.), The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (1983). [A collection of sources].
Duby, Georges, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago, 1980)
Dyer, Christopher, Making a Living in the Middle Ages (Yale, 2002).
Dyer, C. 'The social and economic background to the rural revolt of 1381' in The English Rising of 1381 eds. R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp.3-42.
Hanawalt, Barbara, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986)
Herlihy, David, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass., 1985)
Hilton, R.H., English and French Towns in Feudal Society (Cambridge, 1992)
Hilton, R.H. and Aston, T. H. (eds.), The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984).
Hilton, R.H., The English Peasantry in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975)
Mollat, Michel, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History (New Haven, 1986)
Michel Mollat, Philippe Wolff, The popular revolutions of the late Middle Ages (1973)
Postan, M.M., (ed.), Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 1: Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, 2nd rev. edn. (Cambridge, 1966)
Rösener, Werner, Peasants in the Middle Ages, trans. Alexander Stutzer (Champaign, 1992)