The village of Stanton, some nine miles north-east of Bury St Edmunds, is in many ways a typical Suffolk village. What is not so typical is the survival of a considerable and largely coherent collection of charters and similar texts, which together provide a rich and detailed picture of aspects of life in this village from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Most of the documents were written for, or involved, local peasants and farmers, and illustrate their own dealings with each other, with their lords (most importantly the nearby abbey of Bury), together with the involvement of...