Susan Kilby
My work focuses on the complexity of peasants’ relationships with local landscape, ranging from their economic interests through to more culturally informed ideas, including conceptual notions of the landscape adopted by different community groups, the survival of cultural memory, and the landscape as a repository for local cultural capital. I am especially concerned with disentangling peasants’ views of their local environment from those of elites, which have tended to prevail within the historical record. I am also interested in medieval science, and the extent to which the lower orders understood some of the key principles of science, such as elemental and humoral theory.
My PhD was completed at the University of Leicester, and so my research is, unsurprisingly, greatly influenced by the approach of the Centre for English Local History and its emphasis on comparative history, the longue durée, interdisciplinarity and the study of the lower orders and the landscape.
As a committed medievalist, I am also interested in late medieval manorial documents and palaeography. I am the current Hon. Secretary of the Medieval Settlement Research Group.
My PhD was completed at the University of Leicester, and so my research is, unsurprisingly, greatly influenced by the approach of the Centre for English Local History and its emphasis on comparative history, the longue durée, interdisciplinarity and the study of the lower orders and the landscape.
As a committed medievalist, I am also interested in late medieval manorial documents and palaeography. I am the current Hon. Secretary of the Medieval Settlement Research Group.
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Books by Susan Kilby
By re-evaluating the source material from the perspective of the peasant worldview, it is possible to build a far more detailed representation of rural peasant experience. Susan Kilby seeks to reconstruct the physical and socio-cultural environment of three contrasting English villages – Lakenheath in Suffolk, Castor in Northamptonshire and Elton in Huntingdonshire – between c.1086 and c.1348 and to use this as the basis for determining how peasants perceived their natural surroundings. Her research draws upon a vast array of sources including documents, material culture, place- and family names, and the landscape itself. She explores the approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology and historical geography. This interdisciplinary process reveals exciting insights into peasant mentalities. For example, cultural geographers’ understanding of the ways in which different groups ‘read’ their local landscape has implications for how we might interpret evidence left to us by medieval rural communities, while anthropological approaches to place-naming suggest similarities between the naming practices of First Nations people and medieval society. Topographical precision in naming, alongside the landscape’s significance as a repository for communal history were important to both groups. . The study also reveals that, although uneducated in the formal sense, peasants understood aspects of contemporary scientific thought.
In addition to enhancing our understanding of the lived experience, this new approach augments our comprehension of subjects such as social status, peasant agency, peasants’ economic experiences and the construction of communal and individual memory. Susan Kilby’s groundbreaking study enables us to reclaim significant elements of the environment inhabited and traversed by English people over 700 years ago.
Chapters in Edited Volumes by Susan Kilby
Papers by Susan Kilby
The paper begins with a brief outline of the role of local communities and volunteers over the last hundred years, before examining the Place-Names of Shropshire project as an example of the extent to which community engagement is now an embedded element of publicly-funded research projects. Finally, we introduce some of the most recent community engagement work to come out of the Shropshire project.
landscape archaeologist to uncover and analyse the physical
terrain of the late medieval manor. This has provided
much material for the examination of ideas of rural
power, control and social organisation. Considering the
morphology of the settlement and adjacent fieldscape, it is
rare, however, to reflect upon the views of the peasantry,
who would after all have made up the majority of the
population of rural communities. Using evidence gathered
from fourteenth-century manorial court rolls, this study
examines peasant attitudes to the rural landscape from an
historical perspective through the analysis of incidences of
trespass on demesne and peasant land in the Suffolk vill
of Walsham-le-Willows. Unusually, these documentary
sources frequently make reference to the specific location of
peasant trespass allowing for a quantitative investigation
that reveals something of the motivation behind these
seemingly petty and notionally accidental incidents.
Traditionally, cases of trespassing on neighbouring land
have been considered only fleetingly by historians, since it
is generally believed that many incidents were the result of
accidental damage by wandering livestock, or that manorial
officials used court fines as a means of licensing access. This
study shows that the reality was far more complex, and that
there was a range of motivational stimuli for these acts.
Landscape History, 36:2 (2015)
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RpKH2CK3EtHeaPqMaTnu/full
http://www.tandfonline.com.ezproxy3.lib.le.ac.uk/toc/rlsh20/36/2
By re-evaluating the source material from the perspective of the peasant worldview, it is possible to build a far more detailed representation of rural peasant experience. Susan Kilby seeks to reconstruct the physical and socio-cultural environment of three contrasting English villages – Lakenheath in Suffolk, Castor in Northamptonshire and Elton in Huntingdonshire – between c.1086 and c.1348 and to use this as the basis for determining how peasants perceived their natural surroundings. Her research draws upon a vast array of sources including documents, material culture, place- and family names, and the landscape itself. She explores the approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology and historical geography. This interdisciplinary process reveals exciting insights into peasant mentalities. For example, cultural geographers’ understanding of the ways in which different groups ‘read’ their local landscape has implications for how we might interpret evidence left to us by medieval rural communities, while anthropological approaches to place-naming suggest similarities between the naming practices of First Nations people and medieval society. Topographical precision in naming, alongside the landscape’s significance as a repository for communal history were important to both groups. . The study also reveals that, although uneducated in the formal sense, peasants understood aspects of contemporary scientific thought.
In addition to enhancing our understanding of the lived experience, this new approach augments our comprehension of subjects such as social status, peasant agency, peasants’ economic experiences and the construction of communal and individual memory. Susan Kilby’s groundbreaking study enables us to reclaim significant elements of the environment inhabited and traversed by English people over 700 years ago.
The paper begins with a brief outline of the role of local communities and volunteers over the last hundred years, before examining the Place-Names of Shropshire project as an example of the extent to which community engagement is now an embedded element of publicly-funded research projects. Finally, we introduce some of the most recent community engagement work to come out of the Shropshire project.
landscape archaeologist to uncover and analyse the physical
terrain of the late medieval manor. This has provided
much material for the examination of ideas of rural
power, control and social organisation. Considering the
morphology of the settlement and adjacent fieldscape, it is
rare, however, to reflect upon the views of the peasantry,
who would after all have made up the majority of the
population of rural communities. Using evidence gathered
from fourteenth-century manorial court rolls, this study
examines peasant attitudes to the rural landscape from an
historical perspective through the analysis of incidences of
trespass on demesne and peasant land in the Suffolk vill
of Walsham-le-Willows. Unusually, these documentary
sources frequently make reference to the specific location of
peasant trespass allowing for a quantitative investigation
that reveals something of the motivation behind these
seemingly petty and notionally accidental incidents.
Traditionally, cases of trespassing on neighbouring land
have been considered only fleetingly by historians, since it
is generally believed that many incidents were the result of
accidental damage by wandering livestock, or that manorial
officials used court fines as a means of licensing access. This
study shows that the reality was far more complex, and that
there was a range of motivational stimuli for these acts.
Landscape History, 36:2 (2015)
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RpKH2CK3EtHeaPqMaTnu/full
http://www.tandfonline.com.ezproxy3.lib.le.ac.uk/toc/rlsh20/36/2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=555VYvW3HTg