Medieval England and Modern Syria
Talk by Rodney Hilton , Lecturer in History at Birmingham University and author of a recent book on the economy of the fourteenth-century estates in Leicestershire
A Virgate was a peasant holding in medieval England; a Feddan is a peasant holding in twentieth-century Syria and the Lebanon. Rodney Hilton compares his experiences as a soldier in the war among the peasant cultivators of modern Syria with his researches into the villeins, or peasant cultivators, of fourteenth-century Leicestershire