The Monograph Publishing Programme of Cardiff University Press was launched in 2019 and aimed to publish 2-3 Open Access monographs per year. We’ve succeeded in keeping to this schedule, publishing our tenth title in September 2023. The Material Culture of English Rural Households c.1250-1600 is authored by Ben Jervis (formerly Cardiff University, now University of Leicester), Chris Briggs (University of Cambridge), Alice Forward (University of Leicester), Tomasz Gromelski (University of Oxford) and Matthew Tompkins (University of Leicester).
The monograph provides a detailed examination of the possessions of non-elite rural households in medieval England. Drawing on the results of the project “Living Standards and Material Culture in English Rural Households, 1300-1600”, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, it represents the first national-scale interdisciplinary analysis of non-elite consumption in the later Middle Ages.
The research takes into account the rise in living standards in England following the Black Death, the commercialisation of the English economy and the timing of a “revolution” in consumer behaviour. Its focus on non-elite rural households is unusual. Considerable research has been done on the possessions of the great households and of people living in larger towns, but researchers have struggled to identify appropriate sources for understanding the possessions of those living in the countryside, even though they formed the majority of England’s population in medieval times. This monograph addresses the gap in understanding.
The study combines three sources of data to address two questions: what goods did medieval households own, and what influenced their consumption habits? The first source is archaeological evidence, comprising 14,706 objects recovered from archaeological excavations. The monograph collects together this data, much of which is unpublished and therefore inaccessible to researchers. The second dataset comes from lists of the seized goods of felons, outlaws and suicides collated by the Escheator, a royal official, in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Escheator’s work is poorly understood, but these lists, relating to some of the poorest people in medieval society (for whom traditional sources such as wills and probate inventories don’t exist), provide new insights into the living standards of rural households. The lists typically record and value the possessions of a household, meaning that it’s possible to present a quantitative analysis of non-elite consumption for the first time. The final dataset comes from equivalent lists compiled by the Coroner for the 16th century. An interdisciplinary approach is essential, as many objects identified archaeologically don’t occur in the written records, and goods such as textiles don’t survive in the ground. Drawing these sources together therefore allows the presentation of a more comprehensive analysis of the possessions of medieval households. The possessions include kitchen equipment, tableware, furniture, clothing and personal items.
Discover this and other CardiffUP monographs at https://cardiffuniversitypress.org/site/books/ – free to read and download.
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