Staff Profile

Dr Ben Dodds

Senior Lecturer in the Department of History

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 41058

Member of the Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Ben Dodds has worked mainly on English medieval economic and social history, researching in particular the way in which peasants responded to the dramatic demographic, commercial and social changes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He is also pursuing questions concerning the representation of traditional rural societies in Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current project is an examination of stories about bandits which circulated in modern Spain. The bandit became an ambiguous symbol of Spanish nationhood, at once the epitome of Spanish martial virtue and a national embarrassment. This meant he (and occasionally she) was used in very different ways by different writers, and stories about bandits can tell us a lot about how Spaniards thought about themselves and their country.

Areas of Postgraduate Supervision

Economic and social change in the middle ages, especially relating to the records of Durham Cathedral Priory

Research Interests

Medieval economic and social history

Publications

Books: authored

2007 Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536, Boydell Press, 205 pp.

Edited essays

2008 (co-edited with R.H. Britnell) Agriculture and Rural Society after the Black Death: Common Themes and Regional Variations, University of Hertfordshire Press, 320 pp.

Essays in edited volumes

2010 'La dîme: production et commercialisation en Angleterre au Moyen Âge', in R. Viader (ed.), La dîme dans l'Europe médiévale et moderne: Actes des XXXes Journées Internationales d'Histoire de l'Abbaye de Flaran 3 et 4 octubre 2008, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, pp. 89-99.
2008 'Output and productivity: common themes and regional variations', in B. Dodds & R.H. Britnell (eds.), Agriculture and Rural Society after the Black Death: Common Themes and Regional Variations, University of Hertfordshire Press, pp. 73-88
2008 'Patterns of decline: arable production in England, France and Castile, 1370-1450', in B. Dodds & R.H. Britnell (eds.), Agriculture and Rural Society after the Black Death: Common Themes and Regional Variations, University of Hertfordshire Press, pp. 113-31
2007 'Población y recursos: crisis de subsistencia y desarrollo económico en Inglaterra y Castilla durante la Edad Media', in H.R Oliva Herrer & P. Benito i Monclús (eds.), Crisis de Subsistencia y Crisis Agrarias en la Edad Media, Universidad de Sevilla: Secretariado de Publicaciones, pp. 111-124
2005 'Peasants and production between the Tyne and Tees', in C.D. Liddy & R.H. Britnell (eds.), North-east England in the Late Middle Ages, Boydell & Brewer, pp. 180-195

Journal papers: academic

2012 'Representations of bandits in mid-nineteenth-century Spain', Cultural and Social History 9, pp. 207-226
2011 'Jaime el Barbudo and Robin Hood: bandit narratives in comparative perspective', Social History 36, pp. 464-481
2010 (co-authored with Elizabeth Gemmill & Phillipp Schofield) 'Durham grain prices, 1278-1515', Archaeologia Aeliana 5th ser., 39, pp. 307-27
2008 'Demesne and tithe: peasant agriculture in the late middle ages', Agricultural History Review 56, pp. 123-41
2006 'Tithe income and management in southern England, 1280-1480', Monastic Research Bulletin 12, pp. 32-7
2005 'Managing tithes in the late middle ages', Agricultural History Review 53, pp. 125-140
2004 'Estimating arable output using Durham Priory tithe receipts, 1341-1450', Economic History Review 57, pp. 245-285
2003 'Ingresos diezmales y la produccion agricola en las parroquias de Durham Priory, Inglaterra, 1249-1450', Historia. Instituciones. Documentos 30, pp. 559-69
2002 'Durham Priory tithes and the Black Death between Tyne and Tees', Northern History 39, pp. 5-24
2000 'Workers on the Pittington demesne in the late middle ages', Archaeologia Aeliana 5th ser., 28, pp. 147-61

Teaching Areas

Medieval peasantry
Robin Hood
The Black Death