Description: This book gives a picture of the daily and yearly round of the English peasant in the Middle Ages. H. S. Bennett explains the feudal system which linked the poor man to the soil and to the service of his lord and the church in a pattern of customary dues and rights, payments, labours and small privileges. The author gives lively details of the pattern of medieval country life: the influence of the seasons and the state of contemporary knowledge on the work of the fields; the place of religion in everyday life; the workings of feudal justice; popular attitudes to the social structure; the business of getting a living. Since all the inhabitants of England outside the few large towns were essentially countrymen, this is an introduction to life in medieval England as a whole.
Review Quotes: 'Its scholarship, which is actually exhaustively patient, interferes not one whit with its open, positively exciting readability ... No student of literature, no lover of medieval past should be without its modest assistance. In itself it has the quiet charm of unpretentious knowledge; as a bridge to an age not easily approached, it is of profound usefulness.' The Saturday Review