Christopher Dyer

One of the charming things about Christopher Dyer is that many of his articles and all his major books – including a new 400-page volume just published – have ‘life’ and ‘living’ in their titles. Thus, Dyer writes about getting a living, about standards of living and everyday life; about what people in medieval England ate, what they did with their work and leisure time, and how peasants emerged from serfdom to achieve a degree of independence. He is not a subscriber to the old-fashioned ‘Merrie England’ school of medievalists and is not comfortable with sweeping generalisations. On the contrary, Dyer’s careful writing is exhaustively documented and impeccably balanced, constantly returning to the individual instance evinced by the evidence. Yet, within the constraints imposed by the requirements of scholarship, he might be said to document ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’ avant la lettre.