Chapter 1 sets out the project of the book: to understand how medieval lords came to be able to appropriate the labour of peasants, something that was not fully achieved until after the Norman Conquest. This chronology can partly be explained by the fact that the rural economy of Anglo-Saxon England, which produced little surplus, imposed restraints on the extent to which lords were able to exploit peasants. While those working on the ‘inlands’, the most highly exploited sectors of lordships, were virtual serfs, the peasantry of the ‘warland’ which owed public burdens, were free members of the polity. The book suggests that changes in this situation can be sought in the ‘moral economy’. This term, used by Edward Thompson and James Scott , stands for the structure of values which all members of a society believed should govern their dealings with one another. Rank, reciprocity and reputation are selected as particularly important values and the chapter outlines how they will be followed up. The concepts of ‘peasants’, ‘feudal’ and ‘feudal revolution’ are discussed with reference to the work of Susan Reynolds and Chris Wickham and the chapter ends with remarks on the cultural context of some of our most trusted works of reference: dictionaries.

This chapter suggests that while the landholding elite had developed a strong sense of itself as a distinct social group with interests in common, peasants were slower to do so. Part of the explanation for this may lie in the fact that there were some obvious distinctions between those who worked in exchange for holdings on manorial inlands and those with independent farms on the hidated land of the warland. Reasons why collective action employed in resistance to landlord demands took a long time to build in England at a time may have included Norman violence, or the threat of it. Pressure on peasants after the Conquest could well have taken some time to build up, as new lords took time to consolidate, let alone increase, what they expected their tenants to provide. Many peasants in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries would have had no reason to regard themselves as members of an inferior class: feudal tenure did not distinguish peasants from the rest of the free: it took the work of lawyers constructing the law of villeinage, case by case, to do that. Only when the manor became fully effective as an economic unit would peasants would become capable of acting as a ‘political’ community with a common interest.