This is a history of peasant society in Europe from around 900 to the mid-fourteenth century. Robert Fossier, one of Europe's leading historians of the subject, provides a vivid and detailed picture of the daily life of the peasants, discussing, for example, the food they cultivated and ate, the houses and villages in which they lived, their taboos and customs. In particular, he considers the peasants' relationship to the rural landscape, which they grazed and tilled, and to their lords, who controlled the land. He describes the critical role women played in the medieval economy and society. Professor Fossier focuses, to, on the peasant as an individual within the rural community, exploring changes in their legal and economic status, family relationships and structures, and inheritance customs.

Combining traditional historical methods with insights drawn from archaeology and anthropology, this is an important and innovative work on a topic central to our understanding of the Middle Ages. Also includes information on trends in agrarian history, agriculture, Auvergne, Black Death, Brittany, Burgundy, castle building, cemeteries, Champagne, childhood, Christianity, monastery of Cluny, communal identity, craftsmen, crop rotation, daughters, Domesday Book, ecological balance, England, family, famine, Flanders, France, Gascony, Germany, hermit, household, Italy, land clearance, Languedoc, literature, livestock, Lombards, Lombardy, Lorraine, estate management by monasteries, mortality, Normandy, Picardy, Poitou, population, primogeniture, Provence, Rhineland, Rougiers, seigneurial justice, share-cropping, slavery, social unrest, soil types, superstition, towns, villages, visual arts, waste, Wharram Percy role of women, woodland, etc.