The academic and author on the lessons we can learn from those who work the land, acquiring a second career in his 70s – and how he ‘dialogues’ with the spirit of Seamus Heaney
Patrick Joyce is emeritus professor of history at the University of Manchester and one of the leading social historians of his generation. The illustrious referees for his first academic job in the 1970s were Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson. In his 70s, Joyce has found a new non-academic audience combining memoir and history. His new book, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, follows in the footsteps of Going to My Father’s House, which looked at themes of emigration, home and war. Joyce lives in Broadbottom, a former mill village on the edge of the Peak District.
In your book, you describe the world of European peasants as one that is disappearing. In France, which you write was “once the greatest peasant country in Europe”, only about 3% of the population now work in agriculture. What made you embark on this project of remembrance and commemoration?
It came partly out of the sense of respect for one’s own – my grandparents lived this life, and my parents were born into this world before emigrating from Ireland to England. But also out of a recognition that the history of peasants is one of their silence or being silenced. People speak on their behalf; they very seldom speak on their own. These people have been misunderstood and degraded in so many historical accounts. And they’ve also been falsely glorified by 20th-century communism, fascism and nationalism as some kind of elemental force in the universe. I was an insider to the peasant world. I knew something about it.
