Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists are accustomed to categorizing the inhabitants of the rural farming households of medieval England as peasants without questioning the disciplinary implications of imposing such a category on historical subjects. Foundational categories, such as the worker, the peasant, the woman, become so familiar that they appear natural and divert us from studying the historical and power-charged processes involved in their constructions, past and present. The century-old debate over views of medieval English peasants as bound statically by custom, on the one hand, or as dynamically diverse or mobile, on the other, perhaps expresses embedded disciplinary tensions in the historic division of labor between anthropology (including archaeology) and history. From their disciplinary formation in the early modern period, anthropology and history together have constructed and guarded an imaginary but nevertheless potent boundary between the historical and the primitive, a boundary that divided the European colonizer from the non-European colonized and that within Europe divided the historical past from the traditional past. Who gets an anthropology and who gets a history therefore becomes a question of historic and power-charged disciplinary practices. As a foundational category, “peasant” straddles both disciplines and both divisions of the past, historical and traditional.

In this essay, I wish to examine the powerful yet unacknowledged ways in which these disciplinary practices inform medieval peasant studies. I shall focus especially on the study of the material culture of the medieval English peasantry. Both history and archaeology claim the medieval English peasant to justify disciplinary narratives.

There is no question that the plantation of Ulster during the reign of James I had a profound effect on the course of British history. However, the nature of that plantation has been either misrepresented or misunderstood. In order to overcome this problem, we must address two provocative questions: (1) Were the Scots-Irish, the largest group of settlers, predominantly Celtic or non-Celtic ethnically and culturally? and (2) If they were mainly Celtic, why were they better able than non-Celts to establish viable settlements in Ulster, a predominantly Celtic area? A reexamination of the origins of the pre-1625 Scottish settlers and their methods of settlement indeed casts the problem of the Ulster Plantation in a new light.

For the last two decades, historians have begun to question the portrayal of the Scots-Irish, or Ulster Scots, as frugal, hardworking, anglicized Presbyterian Lowlanders who brought the light of civilization to a benighted Celtic backwater. For example, Nicholas Canny correctly dismisses the “myth” of Ulster's material transformation by pointing out that the province, unlike Leinster and Munster, was settled by British planters from less economically advanced areas of the archipelago. But, again, he does not adequately examine the cultural and ethnic background of the dominant Scots-Irish. Traditionally, they have been classed as “Lowland,” non-Celts rather than as “Highland,” Celtic Scots. These designations are misleading because they oversimplify Scotland's historical and cultural divisions that had been in place as early as the Norman invasion.

The recent historiographical revolution in our understanding of the eighteenth-century state has broad implications, analytical as well as empirical, that are only beginning to be plumbed. Due largely to the work of Patrick O'Brien and John Brewer, the old picture—of a small, amateurish, corrupt central apparatus largely maintained (between sporadic wars) to dignify the crown and assist gentlemanly (i.e., parliamentary) plunder—has been pretty completely effaced. We now see that by the end of the French wars the British state was one of the largest and most efficient in Europe; certainly it engorged the largest proportion of national product by means of a ruthlessly regressive tax system. The French wars were the climax, not the sole begetters of this system, which had been spawned by a chain of wars mounting in scope and sophistication since the late seventeenth century and requiring commensurate improvements in fiscal policy: thus Brewer's memorable naming of the system as the “fiscal-military state.”

For historians of the early nineteenth century, this revision raises a host of questions about the relationship of social change and social class to government growth. Particularly, it casts doubt on the customary association made between growth in the size or scope of government and the rise in the Industrial Revolution of new social and economic questions and a bourgeoisie to answer them; that is, it casts doubt on the implicit “modernization” model that hitches together economic growth, government growth, bureaucracy, professionalism, and embourgeoisement.