English Society In The Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender

by Stephen H. Rigby

What was the social structure of England in the period 1200 to 1500? What were the basic forms of social inequality? To what extent did such divisions generate social conflict? How significantly did English society change during this period and what were the causes of social change? Is it useful to see medieval social structure in terms of the theories and concepts produced within the medieval period itself? What does modern social theory have to offer the historian seeking to understand English society in the later middle ages? These are the questions which this book seeks to answer. Beginning with an analysis of class structure of medieval England, Part One of this book asks to what extent class conflict was inherent within class relations and discusses the contrasting successes and outcomes of such conflict in town and country. Part Two of the book examines to what extent such class divisions interacted with other forms of social inequality, such as those between orders (nobility and clergy), between men and women, and those arising from membership of a status-group (the Jews). Dr Rigby's discussion of medieval English society is located within the context of recent historical and sociological debates about the nature of social stratification and, using the work of social theorists such as Parkin and Runciman, offers a synthesis of the Marxist and Weberian approaches to social structure. The book should be extremely useful to those undergraduates beginning their studies of medieval England whilst, in offering a new interpretative framework within which to examine social structure, also interesting those historians who are more familiar with this period.

424 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Emeritus Professor Stephen H. Rigby

"Although I retired from the University of Manchester in 2010, I have remained research active. I have four main areas of interest in my research, all of which relate to the undergraduate and postgraduate teaching which I did before retirement. In all of these areas, I have tried to show how traditional medievalist scholarship and empirical historical research can be enhanced by an engagement with a variety of theoretical approaches.
The first of these research topics is medieval English social and economic history, particularly in the period c.1086-1530. Much of my work, including my book on Medieval Grimsby, my edition of the Boston customs accounts, 1377-99 and my article on late-medieval urban population in Economic History Review (2010), has explored urban economic development in the period after the Black Death and I have also published on town government and urban social and political conflict. My English Society in the Later Middle Ages attempted to provide an overview of the period and of the variety of sociological and economic theories with which historians have made sense of it.
My second area of research and teaching is late medieval English literature in its historical context. My Chaucer in Context was a survey of critical attempts to establish the social meaning of medieval literature, an area I also explored in my article on medieval defences of women for Chaucer Review, my discussion of literature as social ideology in the Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages and my Wisdom and Chivalry which discusses Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ in relation to medieval political theory.
My third area of research has been the philosophy of history and the relationship between history and social theory. In particular, I have been interested in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of historical materialism and of Marxist historiography, a subject that I explored in my Marxism and History, Engels and the Formation of Marxism, in my article on ‘Historical causation’ and in the paper on Marx and Engels’s views on medieval society published in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. More recently I have offered an assessment of Foucauldian theory in my discussion of Cabrera’s attempt to codify a ‘postsocial’ historiography.
Finally, in more recent years, my work on medieval literature has led to an interest in medieval social and political theory. Here I have published on Giles of Rome’s defence of contemporary social hierarchies, on the social and political theory of Christine de Pizan and on the use of Aristotelian ethical and political theory by late medieval moralists.
I am currently editing a volume for Oxford University Press in which historians attempt to locate Chaucer’s pilgrims in the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales in their historical context and future projects include an article on the representation of peasants in medieval social ideology."