In 1520, as in 1086, agriculture still occupied a majority position in the national economy. Three-quarters of the population of approximately 2 million continued to derive its living from the land and three-quarters of the remainder lived on or close to the land while making its living from essentially non-agricultural activities. Only 6 per cent of the population lived in towns with 5,000 or more inhabitants, almost half of them in London. The economy as a whole remained pre-industrial and underdeveloped. Nevertheless, progress there had certainly been. The population had undergone significant geographical redistribution. London, although smaller than in 1300, was of enhanced political and economic importance and on the threshold of renewed vigorous growth. English merchants were handling a greater share of overseas trade and thereby accumulating mercantile capital. The growth of proto - industry was generating employment, transforming local and regional economies and adding value to English exports. Commercial exchange had become more sophisticated and the commercial infrastructure more mature, with fewer more developed central places. Facilitated by changes in property rights, factor markets in land, labour and capital had grown up alongside the older established commodity markets, thereby offering the possibility of a more efficient allocation of economic resources. With the recent discovery of the Americas and opening up of the Atlantic and the maritime routes to the East, England’s relative location was also significantly improved. Oceangoing ships were larger, more manoeuvrable, could carry more, sail further and be navigated with greater precision. England was poised to gain from a significant growth in maritime trade and commerce.
Against these achievements the advances which had been made in the techniques and tools of agriculture seem modest. Introduction of the rabbit in the twelfth century had helped turn poor soils to profit, until by the fifteenth century it had so acclimatized itself as to become a pest. Windmills, a technological breakthrough of the late twelfth century, harnessed more inanimate power to the processing of foodstuffs, especially in areas deficient in water power, and by the first half of the fourteenth century accounted for approximately a quarter of all milling capacity. Likewise, from the twelfth century progressive substitution of horses for oxen enhanced the application of animate power to haulage and traction. By 1300 road carriage was dominated by horses and they were almost universally, if very selectively, used in farm-work, especially on peasant holdings. In particular, horses were a key component of the new integrated and intensive mixed-farming systems that were evolving in the most progressive and populous areas. Meanwhile, the first post-classical treatises on agriculture offered advice to landlords on estate management at the very time that the advent of written accounting was providing a more effective way of monitoring costs and estimating profits. to significantly improved methods of construction introduced and developed during the thirteenth century, the fixed capital stock of agriculture in the form of barns and other farm buildings was also greatly enhanced. In a related development in the fifteenth century, importation of stud animals initiated a slow improvement of livestock breeds. The principal field crops nevertheless remained much as before: systematic seed selection and the introduction of root crops, ley grasses and a whole range of new horticultural crops all lay in the future.
In the sixteenth century both the crops grown and animals stocked and the techniques of their cultivation and management were much the same as those that had prevailed in the thirteenth century. Nor did Elizabethan yeomen achieve significantly better results than their medieval forebears. Within Norfolk, a county in the vanguard of change, early seventeenth-century crop yields were much the same as those of the early fourteenth century. The medieval best standard of excellence was not decisively bettered until the early eighteenth century. Nationally, by 1640 a slightly larger population may have been fed from a slightly smaller arable area than in 1300, but the differences were not great. There had been no fundamental transformation in the agricultural resources of the country. Worse, as the renewal of population growth in the sixteenth century revealed, the old dilemmas had not been overcome.
Raising agricultural output without jeopardizing the fragile productivity of the soil would continue to present problems until the advent of clover and root crops in the late seventeenth century helped guarantee the effective recycling of nutrients. Even then, it took time to adapt the new crops and associated systems of cultivation to the specific site requirements of individual farms. Earlier the much vaunted convertible husbandry may have delivered an initial productivity boost, but these gains proved difficult to sustain once the initial store of nitrogen had become depleted. In the sixteenth century, as before, producing more from the land required effort, vigilance and lavish inputs of labour and/or capital. When early modern farmers managed to raise yields they did so with essentially medieval methods. The results came slowly and they were hard won. There was a very real risk, therefore, that the Ricardian dilemma would resurface and diminishing returns would once more be incurred. Brian Outhwaite believes that re-expansion of the tillage area resulted in precisely this. From the late sixteenth century, falling real wage rates and mounting rural underemployment imply that there was similar downward pressure upon labour productivity. Once again living standards fell as they had done during the second half of the thirteenth century. In fact, by the early seventeenth century the purchasing power of a building craftsman in southern England was worse than it had been in the darkest days of the early fourteenth century. Once more, inefficient systems of land tenure were trapping excess population on the land and as land values again rose ahead of rents so in some parts of the country there was an irresistible temptation to subdivide holdings into ever smaller and more fragmented units. For as long as these inefficiencies persisted in the allocation of land there would be disincentives to specialization and investment and the structural shortcomings of the economy would persist. In direct contrast to the earlier situation, however, the historiographic verdict passed on sixteenth - and seventeenth-century agriculture has been more positive than negative. Indeed, for some this was a time of agricultural revolution. Such a view is hard to reconcile with the re-emergence of an entitlements problem.
The last subsistence crisis of the middle ages had occurred in 1438. Thereafter England was more or less free of famine for over a hundred years. But the spectre of famine had not been banished. From the late sixteenth century dearth and famine became recurrent, especially in proto-industrial areas in the north dependent upon grain purchases. Without a curtailment of fertility and large-scale emigration to Ireland and North America the problem would have been much worse. As in the half-century or so before the Black Death, the Malthusian dilemma remained as real as ever. On this occasion it was contained by a combination of preventive and positive checks, although the latter were again in large part autonomous. Mass poverty, too, had resurfaced, fed by the proletarianization of labour, growth of protoindustrialization and inflation of urban populations. Destitution had been relocated socially and geographically, it had not gone away. The establishment of a national poor law and emergence of a concept of moral economy merely represented new ways of dealing with the entitlements dilemma, which in certain respects had grown more, not less, intractable. In so far as there was progress it was in the creation of an infrastructure to cope with the problem.
The ending of the middle ages therefore brought no clean break with the past. The dilemmas which had dogged the agrarian economy persisted, and many of the same strategies were employed to deal with them. Nor were the outcomes in terms of living standards and entitlements very much different. Population growth drove down living standards in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as it had done in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and would do again in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth (spectacularly so in Ireland). Ostensibly, there is little here to justify the Whiggish and Marxist disposition to stress the ‘backwardness’ of all things medieval and ‘progressiveness’ of subsequent periods. Nor do recent reassessments of medieval technological change support such a view. For Joel Mokyr medieval technology ‘eventually transformed daily existence. It produced more and better food, transportation, clothes, gadgets, and shelter. It was the stuff of Schumpeterian growth’ (Mokyr, 1990, p. 56). Pessimistic accounts likewise represent the disasters of the early fourteenth century as an indictment of the period as a whole, as though the achievements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries count for nought. Yet given the magnitude of the problems with which all pre-industrial agrarian economies had to contend, what is remarkable is that medieval agriculture coped so well for so long, rather than so badly. Dilemmas may not have been resolved but they were contained.
Great resourcefulness was shown in rising to the challenges of demographic, commercial and urban growth. By 1300 English agriculture was feeding a national population of at least 4.5 million and supplying it with fuel and raw materials. Without apparent strain it was provisioning a metropolis of approximately 70,000 inhabitants together with at least a dozen other urban centres with populations of
10,000 or more. Had there been stronger demand-side incentives more might have been achieved; that there were not was for structural reasons not exclusive to agriculture. At this climax of economic and demographic expansion as much as 10 per cent of agricultural production may have been exported, amounting to between 6.5 and 8 per cent of GDP. Via trade, English wool and other commodities were exchanged for a range of more land-extensive imports - Welsh and Scottish cattle, Baltic fur, wax and timber, and Gascon wine - which effectively served as land substitutes. In due course such a strategy would come increasingly to the fore. Similarly, the basic strategies for raising agricultural output during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries - expanding the agricultural area, intensifying land-use and changing the product mix - would be re-employed in later centuries. Naturally, knowledge improved and technology advanced with the passage of time, but progress was evolutionary rather than revolutionary and the middle ages was a formative first stage in that long and difficult process.
That it was subsequently possible to achieve so much was because there were firm foundations to build upon. It was during the middle ages that a fully fledged commercialized economy was brought into being. By the period’s close commercial values and commercial knowledge permeated the countryside. The contribution of the pre-plague period was to create an infrastructure of trade and exchange, the contribution of the post-plague period to rationalize and reconfigure it. Regional and inter-regional mercantile networks were strengthened at the expense of more localized patterns of exchange. The number of central places declined but the functions and influence of many of those that survived were enhanced. In the aftermath of the Black Death proto-industry took root and started to deliver significant economic gains by converting primary raw materials into manufactures: all of England’s principal textile-producing districts can trace their origins back to the fifteenth century, as can the midland metal industries. Perhaps most critical of all, the legal redefinition of property rights opened the door to significant changes in the ownership and occupation of land and the separation of personal status from tenure.
Gone for good by the close of the middle ages were the old servile customary tenures and, with them, much of the jurisdictional authority of lords (to the further advantage of royal justice and the state). Thenceforth, landlord-tenant relations became more contractual and less customary and leasehold began to become the landlords’ favoured tenure. From the fifteenth century landlords themselves became active as both engrossers and enclosers and employed these processes to create fewer, larger and more capitalized farms. More importantly, peasants themselves exploited the markets in copyhold and freehold land to build up their holdings. This ‘peasant route’ to agrarian capitalism - initiated during the later middle ages when it was easy to accumulate land - was propelled by changed attitudes to family, land and worldly possessions which ensured that the processes of engrossment and consolidation mostly continued unchecked despite the resumption of population growth and renewal of pressures to subdivide in the sixteenth century. In direct contrast to the thirteenth century, population growth was now translated into the creation of virtually landless cottage subtenures rather than the fragmentation of direct manorial tenures. Herein lay the origins of a new agrarian socio-economic order characterized by substantial copyhold and yeoman farmers who worked their capitalized holdings with a combination of family labour, live-in hired servants and casual waged labour. This type of labour process when applied to relatively substantial holdings seems to have been capable of delivering levels of labour productivity superior to those obtaining on either the large seigniorial demesnes or small peasant holdings of the middle ages. Indeed, comparing 1520 with 1086, it is the production units that changed most, in their size, their layout, the terms upon which they were held and the values and aspirations of those who held them. Once initiated, these contrasts would become increasingly marked.
Nevertheless, there was more to agricultural progress than tenurial reform alone. As the middle ages demonstrate, the entire economic, social, institutional and cultural context within which agriculture operated also needed to change. Because the process was so complex and contingent upon developments taking place simultaneously on so many fronts and at a variety of different scales, from the individual holding to the state and the wider commercial world beyond, it is small wonder that progress was so drawn out and uneven. There were many different constraints and obstacles to be overcome. What these were and how adequately they were resolved await further enquiry. Institutional factors - lordship, manors, field systems, the law - were clearly important. So, too, was how the market operated, what it did, and how it reallocated risks and entitlements. In a hazard-prone and market-dependent world the setbacks could be dramatic. Within the limits set by available knowledge and technology, much was nevertheless achieved during the demographic and economic upswing of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the long run, reversals, both relative and absolute, were unavoidable. Indeed, the latter were themselves crucial to the initiation of those processes of rationalization and restructuring which ultimately allowed the establishment of that new and potentially more productive relationship between land and people from which so much subsequent agricultural development would stem. The middle ages thus constitute a formative first stage in the protracted and fitful process by which England eventually achieved agrarian and economic transformation.
World History
