"In this survey, Christopher Dyer reviews our thinking about the economy of Britain in the middle ages. By analysing economic development and change, he allows us to reconstruct, often vividly, the daily lives and experiences of people in the past.

The period covered here saw dramatic alterations in the state of the economy; and this account begins with the forming of villages, towns, networks of exchange and the social hierarchy in the ninth and tenth centuries, and ends with the inflation and population rise of the sixteenth century.".

"This is a book about ideas and attitudes as well as the material world, and Dyer shows how people regarded the economy and how they responded to economic change. We see the growth of towns, the clearance of woods and wastes, the Great Famine, the Black Death and the upheavals in the fifteenth century through the eyes of those who lived through these great events."--BOOK JACKET.