sophronisba 's review for:

Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 by R.H. Hilton

4.0

challenging informative slow-paced

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If Summer of Blood, Dan Jones's account of the Wat Tyler Riots, is all action and little context, Bond Men Made Free is the exact opposite: so much context, context that reaches back a couple of centuries and extends across Europe, but a scant seven pages devoted to the riots themselves. A lot of what Hilton has to say here is interesting -- he has a particular interest in social class, typical of a historian in the 1970s -- and I'm glad I read the book. But I'm really glad I read Summer of Blood first, because I might have been lost otherwise.