Great young adults book about a medieval village . ( )

This book tells of life in the medieval village of Elton, in the Midlands of central England. The authors draw extensively from court records and the Doomsday Book. There is a plethora of trivia contained within, such as how much a certain noble paid for a meal at a certain inn on a certain date and time. I felt I was being fed facts for facts sake. I did learn some new vocabulary such as hamsoken and frankpledge. A lot of the book concerned itself with agriculture and labor and not enough time was spent on the Church and plague and its ramifications, imho. This book is standard reading for college freshmen in Western Civ classes. 272 pages ( )

Very informative on the subject. ( )

An interesting topic with an engaging narrative and numerous illustrations. ( )

Although I am getting to like these authors more, I confess I did not like this book as much as their other book 'Life in a Medieval Castle' which I read last year.

The main reason was that the first part of the book seemed to me very dull, tedious and rather slow. As a history student I shoud be more used to dry academic writing, but this was not a textbook and I found the dry recounting of facts and figures rather off putting in work of popular history.

Thankfully though, the book becomes a little more lively after the first 60 pages or so and the authors were back on form with thier informative and engaging historical narrative.

The chapters on Law and Order in the village, and 'The Parish' were particularly good, and the latter I especially enjoyed, and also liked the way that it made the subject seem far less complicated.

The only other objection that I had was that some of the attitides and interpretations of the authors did seem a little outdated (or else I simply did not agree with some of them), but since the book was first published in the 1970s this is probably to be expected.

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