Peter L. Larson. Rethinking the Great Transition: Community and Economic Growth in County Durham, 1349–1660.

The market town of Sedgefield in northeast England has a prominent place in recent political history. The constituency of the former British prime minister Tony Blair was one of forty-eight seats in the so-called “red wall” to fall to the Conservatives in the 2019 election, and Boris Johnson, then newly appointed as prime minister, headed to Sedgefield to proclaim a new dawn in British politics. Social and economic historians of the distant past such as Peter L. Larson pay less attention to the froth of such political developments, focusing instead on the deep undercurrents that shaped the lives of villagers and townsfolk. Sedgefield was around long before Blair or Johnson set foot in it, and, alongside the neighboring parish of Bishop Middleham, lies at the heart of this important analysis of agricultural, commercial, demographic, and material change in northeast England between the Black Death and the British Civil Wars, the findings of which Larson places within the context of regional, national, and European developments.