Living Standards and Material Culture in English Rural Households, 1300–1600, by Ben Jervis, Chris Briggs, Alice Forward, Tomasz Gromelski and Matthew Tompkins

When the Leverhulme Trust funds a large research project, it expects that that the results will be published. In the case of ‘Living Standards and Material Culture in English Rural Households, c.1300–1600’ which ran from 2016 to 2020, the Trust could not have anticipated a book of such length, detail and complexity, and within a few years. A body of data assembled during the project is also available in electronic form. The work deserves to be noticed by anyone working in the field of late medieval history and archaeology.

This data has been collected in order to address a significant problem facing both archaeologists and social and economic historians. It has long been argued that material possessions of ordinary people, such as clothing, furnishings and household utensils, increased in quality and quantity in the period 1349–1500, reflecting rising incomes and living standards of peasants, artisans and wage earners. The generalisation was connected to underlying tendencies, such as higher daily wage-rates, and increasing cloth production. The ‘Living Standards and Material Culture’ project was designed to examine direct evidence of possessions from both documents and archaeological small finds.

The analysis is focused on the rural lower classes, in specific regions, and on selected artefacts. The range of people stretches to include those living in moated sites, who could have been gentry and clergy, as well as villages and hamlets. Small towns, commonly regarded as urban, are also added. The main documentary sources are the lists of goods and chattels compiled by escheators and coroners, from 1370 onwards. This core data is supplemented by occasional reference to inventories such as those found in manorial court rolls, and archaeological finds from excavations and the reports from metal detectorists made to the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The chapters take us through the various categories of material, such as food and drink, meaning mainly utensils used in the kitchen, and for baking and brewing; artefacts for eating and drinking, such as tables and cups; household textiles and furnishings; clothing; ‘personal objects’ (such as knives and whetstones); and objects linked to household production, especially in clothmaking. In each case, the testimony of the chosen archival sources is analysed, followed by information from other documents, and archaeology. A challenging and formidable amount of data is presented. The text will likely be used by those searching for specific items, rather than being read from cover to cover.

The main conclusion that the researchers derive from this diligent information gathering is to express scepticism about the claim that major advances were made in the quantity and range of goods consumed in the century and a half after the Black Death. In place of the ‘consumer revolution’, the authors propose that material culture went through an evolution, and that developments were ‘complex and variable’. In the chapters that lead up to this conclusion, there are some observations of significant changes, such as an argument that developments in food preparation put bread making, for example, into the hands of specialists. The advance of pewter tableware, and the growth in possession of more comfortable bedding, are demonstrated convincingly, and might seem to many observers to point to elements of more general improvement in living standards.

The conclusions of this book are useful interim statements on consumption of selected possessions in the period 1300–1600, but this is not the last word on the general problem of changes in consumption. The written sources used, the escheators and coroners records, are of limited value, as is apparent from the brevity of the lists of goods. Future scholars should pay further attention to the manorial court records which, as well as occasional inventories, contain thousands of references to objects lost, stolen, seized, granted and borrowed. The authors are aware of probate inventories, but do not fully engage with them here. Only an incomplete range of material possessions is considered in this study. The predominant items of expenditure for the rural population, as for everyone else, were food and drink, clothing and housing. The escheators’ and coroners’ inventories contain some flitches of bacon, and a scatter of gowns and coats, and almost nothing about houses. The archaeological contributions to this study demonstrate a very welcome tendency towards interdisciplinary work. The finds extend the range of the study to include copper alloy dress accessories (such as buckles), knives and whetstones, which do not feature in the written sources, but pottery, by far the largest quantity of archaeological material, receives rather little attention.

The contributors to this project should be encouraged to launch another research programme to complete the work on which they have embarked. The next stage might include a full range of sources for food history, though much is known already. In assessing changes in clothing, more needs to be done on the impact and development of the new styles in the late fourteenth century, and the home market for English cloth and garments deserves to be properly investigated. The cloth found in excavations, and that preserved in museum collections, can be integrated more closely with the documentary evidence. We know that the house-building programme reached a peak in the mid- to late fifteenth century from archaeological and architectural evidence, but not enough is known about materials and building workers. The study of pottery is entirely dependent on the material evidence, and while this book makes something of the adoption of ceramic cups, the important changes sometimes described as the ‘ceramic revolution’ deserve a much fuller discussion, and to be given a historical context.