Exploring The Material Culture of English Rural Households: CardiffUP’s Tenth OA Book

Cardiff University Press was established in 2014, and is an open access, Diamond model publisher of journals and books. The press launched its Monograph Publishing Programme in 2019 during Open Access Week, with the initial aim of publishing 2–3 books per year. The programme has been highly successful, and last year the press published its tenth monograph, entitled The Material Culture of English Rural Households c.1250–1600. Authored by Ben Jervis (formerly Cardiff University, now University of Leicester), Chris Briggs (University of Cambridge), Alice Forward (University of Leicester), Tomasz Gromelski (University of Oxford), and Matthew Tompkins (University of Leicester), the book draws on the results of the Leverhulme funded project of the same name. It constitutes the first national-scale interdisciplinary analysis of non-elite consumption in the later Middle Ages.

Research concerning the lives and habits of the people of the past has long been limited to the elite, ignoring the majority of the population. When it comes to the study of material culture in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period in England, there has been considerable research on the possessions of elite households and people living in larger towns. This is often attributed to the lack of extant sources for non-elite households and those living in smaller, rural towns and communities. The Material Culture of English Rural Households c.1250–1600 addresses this gap in the field, using an interdisciplinary approach to bring together archaeological evidence and archival documentation.

The Material Culture of English Rural Households c.1250–1600 sheds new light on the rise in living standards in England following the Black Death, the commercialisation of the English economy, and the birth of modern conceptions of consumerism. The study combines three sources of data to address two key questions: what goods did medieval households own, and what influenced their consumption habits? The first source is archaeological evidence, comprising over 14,000 objects recovered from archaeological excavations. The book brings together this data, much of which is unpublished and therefore inaccessible to researchers. The second dataset comes from lists of the seized goods of felons, outlaws, and suicides collated by the Escheator, a royal official, in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Escheator’s work is poorly understood, but these lists, relating to some of the poorest people in medieval society (for whom traditional sources such as wills and probate inventories simply don’t exist), provide new insights into the living standards of rural households. The final dataset comes from equivalent lists compiled by the Coroner for the 16th century.

The publication of The Material Culture of English Rural Households c.1250–1600 in open access is a great achievement for the field of material culture studies, and for the advancement of open scholarship in the humanities more broadly. Titles such as this one demonstrate the value of university press publishing in producing groundbreaking, important research that addresses big gaps in research fields.

You can read or download The Material Culture of English Rural Households c.1250–1600 in full now, from Cardiff University Press.

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