Identity Politics and the English Peasantry in the Late Middle Ages

So-called “yeoman farmers” have occupied a central position within English economic history for over a century, as the lynchpin group whose commercialization and rampant land acquisition paved the way for agrarian capitalism. At the same time, scholars have long acknowledged that the paradigmatic “yeoman farmer” invoked in these Marxist teleologies does not clearly map onto the usage of “yeoman” as a contemporary medieval status term. Through prosopographical study of thousands of self-described medieval “yeomen”, in my current project I argue that yeoman farmers were actually an agrarian identity group whose defining characteristic was their degree of honour. By accumulating traditional markers of respectable masculinity, yeomen effaced their class associations with the peasantry and justified their exercises of power over lesser men and women. Performing yeoman identity was expensive, however, and so membership of the group changed rapidly as families rose and fell in wealth and esteem during the tumultuous fifteenth century. Far from rational and self-interested capitalists, yeomen were trapped within an identity performance that worked against both their individual financial stability and their collective interests as members of the peasantry. When brought into conversation with labour histories of more modern eras, the yeomen emerge as an early example of the repeating tendency for identity politics to undermine class solidarities.