Towards a social archaeology of the late medieval English peasantry

Abstract

This article sets out to develop an approach to the archaeology of the late medieval peasantry that allows questions pertaining to the experience of power and resistance to be addressed by practitioners in this field. It is identified at the outset that the aims of the majority of late medieval rural archaeology studies are those to do with long-term issues of settlement development and determinations of the chronology and function of material culture types. This article puts an alternative interpretive emphasis on the material culture of the period and — focusing on the most comprehensively investigated medieval village in England — comes to conclusions about the experience and tempo of the deployment of social power in the village as well as the nature of resistant practices that occurred therein.