Anyone who owns a copy of Dyer’s Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989) must surely share my experience of having watched the pristine volume deteriorate under the weight of heavy annotation, dog-earing of pages, and the copious proliferation of multi-colored sticky notes. The deplorable condition of my copy of the book is a testament to its usefulness. It is the book that I most frequently loan out to both students and colleagues; it is also the book that I rely on to keep me grounded in my expectations of what it was like to live in medieval England. Dyer’s latest book stands in good company; more important still, I expect it to be just as well used as its literary sibling.
Irked by seeing peasants regularly described as passive participants in their lords’ modernizing designs, Dyer hopes to put such arguments to rest by establishing how...