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Klappentext: "How were manorial lords in the twelfth and thirteenth century able to appropriate peasant labour? And what does this reveal about the changing attitudes and values of medieval England? Considering these questions from the perspective of the 'moral economy', the web of shared values within a society, Rosamond Faith offers a penetrating portrait of a changing world. Anglo-Saxon lords were powerful in many ways but their power did not stem directly from their ownership of land. The values of early medieval England - principally those of rank, reciprocity and worth - were shared across society. The Norman Conquest brought in new attitudes both to land and to the relationship between lords and peasants, and the Domesday Book conveyed the novel concept of 'tenure'. The new 'feudal thinking' permeated all relationships concerned with land: peasant farmers were now manorial tenants, owing labour and rent. Many people looked back to better days"--

Peasant producers are now recognized as having played an important part in the late medieval economy: this can also be said of peasant producers in eastern England before the Conquest. In the wake of the Viking invasions Scandinavian settlers from the second half of the ninth century entered a region that was already commercially active. Independent farmers raised sheep, possibly a newly introduced breed, on the Lincolnshire Wolds and marketed their wool. A network of Anglo‐Scandinavian shippers and traders, members of a merchant elite, controlled important places on river routes. That Lincolnshire was an area of light manorialization and many sokemen had an invigorating effect on its economy. Peasant producers had comparative freedom and by controlling markets and extracting cash from the inhabitants of their sokes Anglo‐Norman lords profited from an economy that had been invigorated by Scandinavian enterprise.