ABSTRACT
In pre-industrial western Europe, country people made up the vast majority of the population and most of these were peasants, varying in status from slavery to independence. The third ordo is difficult to document despite the compelling evidence of non-literary sources. Visual sources proliferate for country life even if they betray the bias of a condescending non-peasant source; the early fourteenth-century English Luttrell Psalter, which is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, prepared for a Lincolnshire knight, shows many country activities but, as has been wryly remarked before, it shows peasants in their proper role: at work. Archaeological evidence in the form of field patterns, houses and villages (which retain their medieval pattern with church and alehouse at their centre) provide valuable evidence of everyday life. The study of place names has provided much information concerning the development of the medieval countryside that witnessed the gradual increase of cultivated land and the clearance of the primeval forest. In England, where place names from the sixth to the eleventh century predominate, they show how many places owe their origin to a lord (whose name is attracted to a place) and how many were new settlements. By the middle of the eleventh century, in England at least, a framework had been established which was to remain largely intact until the Industrial Revolution. By the end of the twelfth century many scattered households began to congregate in small villages with adjoining open fields.
