| There is very little literature that can be attributed with any certainty to the medieval English peasantry; what little literature can be so attributed is mediated through the literate agency of hostile elites. Nonetheless, the countryside and its agriculturally-productive inhabitants are represented in the literature. While we can't recover the voices of the peasantry, by examining the various literary discourses of the countryside we can get a sense of the lives of the medieval English agricultural world. Chapter One, "Walter of Henley and the Rational, Disciplined Manor," examines the late thirteenth-century estate management treatise, Walter of Henley's Husbandry. Walter of Henley provides an early model of the rational capitalist enterprise---exhibiting capital accounting, a disciplined labor force, and landlord ownership of all the physical means of production on the manor---well before Protestantism and its famous work ethic. Chapter Two, "Oswald, Piers, and Estate Management Discourse," examines how the discourse of estate management continued in the century after Walter of Henley's treatise first appeared. Langland's Piers the Plowman and Chaucer's Oswald the Reeve are figures who embody the tensions in estate management discourse between the imaginative model of mutual social responsibility and the real exploitation and resistance that simmered beneath---tensions which were exacerbated by the changing economic realities that followed in the wake of 1348. Chapter Three, "The Representational Landscape: A Survey of Literary Representations of the Rural Commons," examines a broad range of literary representations of the lower rural commons in order to produce a diachronic portrait of the literary peasantry. As a result of this examination, patterns emerge that reflect the significant demographic, economic and political changes that affected the fourteenth-century English countryside. |
