Aims
This course aims to:
• establish the main forms of social inequality in medieval England
• assess the extent to which medieval social inequality generated social conflict and analyse the role of such conflict in creating social change
• discuss whether a knowledge of modern sociological theory helps us to understand
medieval society
Content
For medieval social theorists, it was a commonplace that social inequality was inevitable, having been divinely ordained as part of God’s plan for the cosmos. But what were the main forms of social inequality in medieval England? This course will examine the medieval social hierarchy in terms of a number of different types of inequality. These include relations between different classes, between orders and estates, between genders, and between status groups. The course will thus set out the social relations which existed between lords and peasants, employers and employees, merchants and artisans, nobles and commoners, clerics and laypeople, men and women and Christians and Jews. Is it possible to establish some principal form of inequality which generated people’s social identity or was any one individual positioned at the meeting point of a number of different types of inequality? To what extent did these social relations change in the period 1200 to 1500 and what were the main causes of such change? Did social inequality generate conflict or did social conflict, such as the Great Revolt of 1381, have more immediate, short-term causes? Was such conflict a cause of long-term social change? The course will also explore the ways in which modern social theorists have attempted to characterise the nature of social structure and will ask whether such modern theory can help us to understand the forms of social exclusion which characterised medieval English society.
Presentation of the course
The course will focus on debates amongst social theorists and historians about the nature of pre-industrial social inequality and will encourage students to develop their own views about the medieval social hierarchy and the ways in which it changed over the centuries between 1200 and 1500. The first class will set out competing sociological accounts of social inequality and the four following sessions will ask how useful these modern approaches are in relation to the particular forms of inequality which made up English medieval society.
Course sessions
1. Thinking about Social Structure
This session will set out three competing modern sociological accounts of social structure and will ask which, if any, is the most useful for understanding how medieval social inequalities persisted and changed.
2. Classes in Town and Country
This session will set out the nature of class relations in the town and countryside and will ask to what extent these relations changed in the period before 1200 to 1500. What were the main causes of such change? Did class inequalities generate class conflict?
3. Orders and Estates
This session will look at the social privileges which were derived from noble and clerical status. It will ask whether such inequalities underwent change over the medieval period and to what extent such privileges were challenged by those who did not share in them.
4. Gender
As medieval social theorists themselves emphasised, the inequality of men and women was a fundamental aspect of contemporary social structure. This session will examine how such gender inequalities intersected with those of class and order and will discuss the extent to which such inequalities lessened in the course of the later Middle Ages.
5. Status: The Jews
A final form of social inequality is that arising from membership of a ‘status-group’. A classic example is the status of the Jews in medieval England, a group whose members were defined as outsiders and inferiors on the basis of their religion. This session will ask why the position of the Jews deteriorated so dramatically in the century leading up to their eventual expulsion from England in 1290.
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• a knowledge of the main forms of social inequality in medieval England
• an understanding of the extent of medieval social conflict and social change
• an appreciation of the ways in which modern social theory can help us analyse medieval
social structure
