Dyer's study is not perhaps a book for the nonspecialist to read cover-to-cover, but it provides a wealth of detail on peasant life in England in the later middle ages arranged by topic.

Kathleen Thompson, BGAS

Often derided as inherently conservative, servile and unimaginative, the peasants of the English middle ages are given centre stage in this significant work by one of the foremost authorities on the social and economic history of the medieval period. [...] It is Dyer's deep familiarity with the documents of his study area that give the everyday people of the medieval period a voice. In this work we agree with Dyer that peasants helped create the modern world, and that their contributions deserve much wider recognition.

Andrew Margetts, Agricultural History Review

Piers Plowman's constant negotiations between multiple discourses and communities present conflicting and probably self-conflicted perspectives, but scholars of Piers Plowman, like those concerned with any aspect of medievalEnglish culture, as well as those studying peasant culture of any period, can learn much of value from Dyer's wide and penetrating examination of west-midland medieval peasants' lives, which merged into and helped create wider culturalspheres with which the records and literature allow us to be so much more familiar.

Andrew Galloway, The Yearbook of LanglandStudies