Social Mobility As Resistance in Early Medieval England, c. 950 - c. 1150
Scholarship predominately defines non-nobles, and especially peasants, by the manorial world which they inhabited, portraying them as being bound to the land and paying their lords through labour. Attempts to transgress the narrow avenues of power are typically identified in activities such as foot-dragging, communal self-organisation, or violence directed “upwards”. Informed by frameworks which emphasise “slantwise” action—that is, behaviours which challenge power relations through oblique means (Campbell and Heyman 2007)—and previous applications of this model to early medieval gatherings in Dijon (Bobrycki 2018), this paper will formulate social mobility as an attempt to disruptively rewrite the social landscape rather than as merely an extension of lordly absence and/or probity. Thus, I contend that social mobility, if understood to have provided a mode resistance, aligns better with contemporaneous medieval literature which evidences social anxiety centred upon social movement and attempts to enact social closure.
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This page was last updated on 30 June 2024
