The detailed nature of the Walsham court rolls, alongside the reconstruction of the local landscape undertaken by West and McLaughlin, has enabled a comprehensive examination of the spatial patterns of peasant trespass and damage in the medieval period to be undertaken for the first time. Through the combined study of modern peasant societies alongside the manorial records of fourteenth-century England and its landscape, it is possible to construct a clearer understanding of medieval peasant mentalities concerning land, territory, identity and resistance. As this study shows, an emphasis on the more prosaic peasant actions, hitherto considered problematic and ambiguous by many historians, offers insights into the motivation for deliberate damage of both demesne land and peasant holdings. This is especially significant considering peasants’ strong association and identification with land itself, from both legal and socio-economic perspectives. Notwithstanding the obvious accidental nature of some peasant trespass and damage, it is possible to detect evidence for more deliberate acts. The court rolls reveal a long history of intentional intra-peasant damage, which analysis has shown to be evident elsewhere. This demonstrates that deliberate damage to both arable and pastoral land was used as part of a range of peasant responses to conflict and resentment. The high incidence of trespass on, and damage to, demesne arable land, frequently perpetrated by peasants rather than livestock, and occasionally using carts and creating paths, is at best suspicious. The dates
of the court rolls assessed here confirm that trespassers frequently made their way through standing crops. It seems most unlikely that lords would licence access at times when these crops would be most vulnerable to damage. Analysis of incidents of this nature in Lakenheath (Suffolk), Elton (Huntingdonshire) and Castor (Northamptonshire) show a similar pattern, whereby in a number of instances the possibility of licencing access can be discounted (Kilby 2013, pp. 264–79). When the Walsham incidents are assessed alongside local and national events correlative effects cannot be discounted, and it seems likely that a great deal can be classified as intentional. The idea that ‘place’ has symbolic meaning is well known. By firmly associating deliberate trespass and damage with particular places, were Walsham’s peasant community making a collective coded statement about passive resistance that was not easily read by the lords of the manor?