The Memory of the People

Did ordinary people in early modern England have any coherent sense of the past? Andy Wood''s pioneering new book charts how popular memory generated a kind of usable past that legitimated claims to rights space and resources. He explores the genesis of customary law in the medieval period; the politics of popular memory; local identities and traditions; gender and custom; literacy orality and memory; landscape space and memory; and the legacy of this cultural world for later generations. Drawing from a wealth of sources ranging from legal proceedings and parochial writings to proverbs and estate papers he shows how custom formed a body of ideas built up generation after generation from localized patterns of cooperation and conflict. This is a unique account of the intimate connection between landscape place and identity and of how the poorer and middling sort felt about the world around them.