Releasing the genie: English manorial records and their (huge) potential for interdisciplinary studies

Abstract

The present article stresses the unmatched quality of late-medieval English manorial documents, both in quantity and quality, and their importance for both economic and environmental history. The corpus of manorial documents is used here as a case study to reinvigorate interest in late-medieval agricultural history of England. To do so, the paper suggests to integrate manorial documents with methods and data from other palaeo-scientific disciplines: palaeoclimatology, palaeoecology, a DNA analysis, stable isotope analysis, palaeo-epigenetics, and molecular analysis of parchments. The paper argues that involving scientists from these fields in collaborative work and integrating the novel analysis of manorial documents and palaeo-scientific data will both help resolve various outstanding controversies and reshape the discipline. But beyond that, such interdisciplinary interdisciplinary framework has a strong potential to ask and answer new questions, create new data knowledge, and take our knowledge to new heights.