This article examines metal dress accessories from a range of late medieval English rural settlement sites. It is argued at the outset that medieval archaeology has been very slow to consider the concept of resistance when interrogating the material culture of the peasantry and that items of dress are particularly amenable to such consideration given the close relationship between personal appearance and social power in this period. The dress accessories from seven excavated sites are investigated and interpreted as revealing the use of `infra-political' power by members of the medieval peasantry as they deployed this aspect of their material lives in re-fashioning and resisting the identities imposed on them by the medieval elite.

This article sets out to develop an approach to the archaeology of the late medieval peasantry that allows questions pertaining to the experience of power and resistance to be addressed by practitioners in this field. It is identified at the outset that the aims of the majority of late medieval rural archaeology studies are those to do with longterm issues of settlement development and determinations of the chronology and function of material culture types. This article puts an alternative interpretive emphasis on the material culture of the period and -focusing on the most comprehensively investigated medieval village in England -comes to conclusions about the experience and tempo of the deployment of social power in the village as well as the nature of resistant practices that occurred therein.

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