Bruce M.S. Campbell
Ashgate
Hardback
332
The later Middle Ages was an overwhelmingly rural world with probably three out of four households reliant upon farming for a living. Yet conventional accounts of the period rarely do justice to the variety of ways in which the land was managed and worked. The thirteen essays collected in this volume draw upon the abundant documentary evidence of the period to explore that diversity. In the process they engage with the issue of classification - without which effective generalisation is impossible - and offer a series of solutions to that particularly thorny methodological challenge. What emerges is an agrarian world more commercialised differentiated and complex than is usually appreciated whose institutional and agronomic contours shaped the course of agricultural development for centuries to come.
Ashgate
Hardback
332
The later Middle Ages was an overwhelmingly rural world with probably three out of four households reliant upon farming for a living. Yet conventional accounts of the period rarely do justice to the variety of ways in which the land was managed and worked. The thirteen essays collected in this volume draw upon the abundant documentary evidence of the period to explore that diversity. In the process they engage with the issue of classification - without which effective generalisation is impossible - and offer a series of solutions to that particularly thorny methodological challenge. What emerges is an agrarian world more commercialised differentiated and complex than is usually appreciated whose institutional and agronomic contours shaped the course of agricultural development for centuries to come.