R. H. Hilton

Reasons for inequality among medieval peasants

The stratification of the medieval peasantry cannot be attributed only to the markets in land and agricultural products. The division between the free and the unfree and between the holders of family subsistence holdings and inadequate smallholdings is found in periods of very low production for the market. The complex interplay between land availability, technical progress, inheritance and endowment customs, demands for rent and tax and the resistance capacity of the peasants must also be examined. The relative strength of these various factors changed considerably during the medieval period, especially between 1300 and 1500 circa, when the land:labour ratio shifted dramatically.

Medieval peasants: Any lessons?

The study of the medieval peasantry should be made in terms of its role in European feudal society. This was a distinct social formation, so that comparisons with peasantries in capitalist society or under economic and political pressures from world imperialism, should be made with the utmost care. The internal constitution of the medieval peasantry is discussed in terms of the composition of the household and the social stratification of the peasant community. It is suggested that the village hierarchy was economic rather than age‐ or sex‐determined. The relation of peasants to the rest of medieval society was mainly determined by the fact that the surplus to subsistence needs of the peasant product was appropriated by landowners, directly or through the medium of church and state. In other respects, too, peasants did not form an autonomous world, being linked with the towns through marketing arrangements and with upper class culture through the resident clergy and through contacts with peripatetic noble...

Why was there so little champart rent in medieval England

The reasons for the relative unimportance of champart (share‐cropping) rent in medieval England are explored. An explanation is suggested in terms of the considerable power of the English landlord class: a class with great social control over an unfree peasantry, and which, therefore, was free to choose the most suitable form of rent. This was sometimes labour rent and sometimes money rent. The need for money was great, but there was no need to resort to sharecropping ‐ unlike, for example, Europe, where, during the period of rising grain prices (especially during the thirteenth century) money rents tended to stay fixed, because of peasant resistance. English landlords, further, preferred to realise their rents in money because sterling currency was relatively stable ‐ compared, certainly, with continental currencies.

Towns in societies–medieval England

There is an old historical tradition which saw the towns in the middle ages as being an antagonistic element within the whole society which was seen—quite rightly of course—as being predominantly rural and agricultural. Put in more abstract terms the agrarian economy was seen as a natural economy and as such incompatible with the exchange economy of the towns. This simplistic vision could hardly stand the test of empirical investigation since clearly the urban and rural economies could not operate independently of each other. More sophisticated writers indeed saw the towns, not as an antagonistic element but as innovatory. The towns were literally responsible for a civilizing process. They sowed the seeds of the future in the not always receptive soil of feudal society.