As this review is written it is just over thirty years since Sir Keith Thomas delivered his thought-provoking Creighton Lecture entitled “The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England.” Popular perceptions of the past and related subjects remained underexplored for a while, but three decades on the situation has changed to a great degree. The last ten years have been especially fecund, producing such major works as Alexandra Walsham’s magisterial study of the relations between landscape and perceptions of the religious past, and Nicola Whyte’s recent book on landscape and memory.

Andy Wood provides the latest entry into the field. Field, in fact, is an appropriate metaphor: Wood begins his lengthy study with a brief examination of the customs, perceptions, and rights of gleaners, the poorer sort of men and women who scoured lands just harvested for stray corn left behind by the reapers. Gleaning was a customary practice that was seen by many as an act of Christian charity by landowners to the poor (the book of Ruth often being cited as the scriptural paradigm); as the seventeenth century turned to the eighteenth, attitudes hardened toward this and other customary entitlements.

The set piece on gleaning provides a striking and humanizing opening to Wood’s book, which is always sympathetic to the plight of the downtrodden, poorer sort. But this is no romantic longing for a “world we have lost” (even if some of Wood’s subjects had such a longing), nor does it support the notion that custom and oral tradition were tools of the poor invariably set in opposition to a more literate, textually oriented gentry and yeomanry. To the contrary, one of Wood’s key arguments is that custom was of use to all parties in economic and social transactions, lord as much as laborer. “It would … be wrong,” Wood writes in an especially insightful section of the book, “to insist on the uniform hostility of elite groups to custom” (128). Another point, perhaps even more important, is that custom itself was not a single thing, a stable point of reference, but a protean site of argument or negotiation, constantly evolving to fit changed circumstances; it was, to repeat a phrase Wood deploys several times, a “discursive field” (which is obviously different from a cornfield but no less contestable).

The book recognizes social difference, stratification, and conflict but it also acknowledges the common spaces and interactions between rich and poor, owner and tenant. Moreover, the processes of remembering used by common people, grounded in annual repetition of events such as Rogationtide perambulations of parishes, were similar for their educated masters. Many of these masters, resident local or village gentry engaged of necessity with custom and popular culture to a degree that placed them halfway between the grounded world of the laborer, husbandman, and artisan, and the Olympian heights of more remote absentee landlords, the greater gentry and peerage. Custom was barterable, especially at a time of considerable change in land tenures, volatile prices, and rising literacy; Wood offers several examples of tenants making strategic deals with landlords to guarantee certain customary rights (for instance, “mast and pannage,” the right to feed one’s pigs in the lord’s woods) by dealing away others of less value. And just as the landowners were not a single, undifferentiated social group, so too were the inferiors quite heterogeneous: more prosperous tenants often fell in with landowners to the exclusion of their poorer neighbors.

As documents became more important to the proof at law of certain customary rights, access to them became itself a matter of dispute. The Elizabethan Earl of Shrewsbury, in a heated dispute with the burgesses of Chesterfield, was infuriated by their refusal to produce writings for his inspection (which they had not unreasonably withheld given his past failure to return others). Wood has had no such difficulty finding documents to sustain his own case: his book is very wide-ranging and based on a rich set of materials in the National Archives (especially Star Chamber, Duchy of Lancaster, and Exchequer depositions) and other repositories. He combines a systematic analysis of disputes from various Norfolk parishes, towns, and manors, supplemented by a less systematic but geographically broader study of cases elsewhere in England. As with any such ambitious undertaking, there are stronger and weaker sections. I would have welcomed much more attention to the issue of gender differences in perceptions of the past (Wood slightly misconstrues my own argument on women and oral tradition); and sometimes the theoretical jargon is laid on with a shovel rather than a trowel. The quick survey of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aftermath creates perhaps too simplistic a picture and too sharp a contrast with the richly textured and highly complex social world of the previous quarter-millennium — here Wood appears to slip into precisely the nostalgic tone he rightly deplores elsewhere in the book. And there are a few too many typos or misspellings (Nehemiah Wallington’s name [79] and Dudley Digges’s name [94]). These are all minor caveats. The study of popular perceptions of the past has taken a dramatic step forward with this splendid book. But if Wood has thoroughly reaped the sources in this field, there are still plenty left for gleaning and perhaps even another harvest or two to be had.