Culturally, socially, politically and, above all, economically, medieval England was rooted in the land. In 1086 probably three-quarters or more of all income came directly from the land and four centuries later, at the close of the middle ages, the equivalent proportion undoubtedly remained well over 60 per cent. Nevertheless, land was more than a simple factor of production; title to land conferred status, power, wealth and obligations. Feudal lords, whether lay or ecclesiastical, were land lords in a very real sense and they valued their estates for the standing and influence these bestowed and for the recreational amenity they provided as well as for the incomes that they generated. Yet for no one, bar the monarch, was proprietorship absolute. Under the system of land tenure introduced by William the Conqueror, all land was ultimately held from the king in return for homage, service and payment. Tenants who held in chief from the crown in turn subinfeudated land on similar terms to lesser lords, who might further subinfeudate their estates to others. The complex hierarchy of proprietorship thereby created was mapped onto the land via the manorial system. Manors comprised land, tenants and jurisdictional rights in an almost infinite variety of forms and combinations. Many of the tenantry, who actually occupied and worked the land and paid rent to do so, were servile as well as subordinate. Status and tenure were inextricably interlinked. Labour, like land, therefore, was not yet freely owned as a factor of production. For the medieval peasantry, whether free or unfree, the significance of land lay primarily in the livelihood to be derived from it and the security against want that it provided in an age without institutionalized welfare. Relatively few were wholly landless and within the countryside those who were generally ranked amongst the most vulnerable in society.
Agriculture was the very foundation of the national economy and throughout the medieval centuries, and long after, performed a trilogy of key functions. First, and most obviously, agriculture fed the population, both urban and rural, non-agricultural and agricultural. Second, it reproduced and sustained the animate sources of draught power - the horses and oxen - employed throughout the economy. Third, it supplied the manufacturing sector with organic raw materials: timber, wood and charcoal; textile fibres from both plants and animals; dye plants and other industrial crops; furs, pelts, skins and hides; fat and tallow; wax; grain (for brewing) and straw for thatching and a host of other humble purposes. For agriculture to fulfil this trilogy of functions required most of the land, the bulk of the labour force, much of the capital and a great deal of the management talent available within the national economy. How efficiently these were exploited depended upon many factors, institutional as well as environmental, cultural as well as economic, and exogenous as well as endogenous.
No closed economy could develop beyond the limits imposed by the output and productivity of its agricultural sector. Yet for small countries like England agricultural development was itself contingent upon the wider market opportunities bestowed by the economy becoming more open. Of course, England had never been a completely closed economy and it became less so as the middle ages advanced and a greater international division of labour became established through the growth of trade and commerce. Until late in the fourteenth century England’s principal comparative advantage lay in the export of unprocessed primary products - wool above all, plus hides, grain, firewood, tin, lead and coal. These were exchanged for other primary products (timber, wax, hides and fish), certain industrial raw materials, such luxuries as wine and furs, and manufactured goods. This pattern of trade, with its pronounced agricultural bias, reflects the relatively undeveloped state of the European economy at that time. The core of that economy remained located in the Mediterranean whence it was linked by overland trade routes east to Asia and north to Flanders and thence England. England, especially outside of the extreme south-east, thus occupied a relatively peripheral location within the wider European economy and consequently was less urbanized and supported a smaller manufacturing sector than more advantageously located economies such as Flanders and Italy.
By the close of the middle ages, in contrast, England was adding value to its agricultural exports by processing much of its wool into cloth, inanimate power was being harnessed more fully to industrial processes, and a growing share of the profits of trade were accruing to denizen merchants. Advances in geographical and scientific knowledge were also transforming the country’s location, as the Atlantic was opened up as a commercial alternative to the Mediterranean and a direct maritime link was at last established with the East. From these developments much would subsequently stem. Expanding international trade and commerce coupled with fuller utilization of inanimate power sources and greater usage of imported and inorganic raw materials would release England from too exclusive and narrow a self-sufficiency. Ultimately this would lead to industrial revolution. Nevertheless, in the more geographically circumscribed and economically and technologically less sophisticated world of the middle ages, the growth of non-agricultural populations and activities remained contingent upon the sustained expansion and diversification of national agricultural output. Never again would the country be so wholly dependent for food, raw materials, fuel, draught power and exports upon its own agricultural sector. Verdicts upon the overall performance of the medieval economy therefore tend to hinge upon how adequately that sector stood up to the considerable demands placed upon it. Hitherto, those verdicts have been predominantly negative.
For M. M. Postan, and those who have subscribed to his ‘population-resources’ account of economic developments, long-term demographic and economic expansion were not indefinitely sustainable on an agrarian base without higher rates of investment and more developed forms of technology than those attainable under feudal socio-property relations. According to this view the acute land-hunger, depressed living standards and heavy famine mortality of the early fourteenth century were the price paid for a century or more of headlong population growth. Moreover, the crisis was rendered all the more profound by a failure of agricultural productivity, both of land and labour. For the alternative Marxist school of thought, articulated most forcibly by Robert Brenner, the failure of agricultural productivity was more fundamental than the growth of population and was an inevitable consequence of the exploitative nature of feudal socio-property relations, which deterred both investment and innovation. For both Postan and Brenner nemesis was the price paid for expansion; they differ primarily in their diagnoses of the root cause.
More recently, however, there has been a fuller appreciation of the international dimensions of the early fourteenth-century crisis and with it a shift towards explanations that are less narrowly agrarian. Nor were feudal socio-property relations exclusively malign. Lords were rarely as rapacious and serfs as oppressed and exploited as has often been represented. Rather, it was the territorial and dynastic ambitions of militaristic kings and nobles that proved most damaging by fuelling the explosion of warfare that characterized the fourteenth century. War, by increasing risks and driving up costs, helped induce the trade-based economic recession that is now recognized as an important component of the period. Taxation and purveyance depleted capital resources and siphoned off potential investment capital. Commodity markets and capital markets were both disrupted. As market demand contracted so employment opportunities withered and population was forced back upon the land. Given this deteriorating economic situation it is easy to see why historians have relegated the climatic and biological catastrophes of famine, murrain and plague to essentially secondary roles. Yet this fails to do justice to the magnitude and uniqueness of this sequence of environmental events. By any standard these were major exogenous shocks which through their impact transformed the status quo and thereby altered the course of development. Indeed, a mounting body of archaeological evidence suggests that the climatic and biological disasters of the period were themselves interconnected in ways that have yet to be unravelled. The exogenous dimensions of the crisis are thus ripe for reassessment. This rethinking of the period is likely to continue as more evidence is assembled and developments in England are interpreted within a broader geographical framework and wider historical context.
World History
