Triumph of the south: a regional economic history of early twentieth century Britain - By Peter Scott (original) (raw)

2008, The Economic History Review

Campbell's work in medieval agricultural history over the last 30 years is well known, with this very useful collection reprinting some papers from his jointly authored (with Mark Overton) Land, labour and livestock (1991) and (with Richard Britnell) A commercialising economy (1995). His sources are equally well known: estate-surveys, especially the 'extents' attached to many inquisitions post mortem (IPMs), the accounts of demesne-agriculture preserved for many thousands of manors, and the lay subsidies of 1327, 1332, and 1334. More could have been made of the 1279 Hundred Rolls, the returns to which are admittedly incomplete, since these also cover holdings of ecclesiastical estates and especially lay estates not held in chief and therefore unrepresented in the IPMs. One example from my own research must serve for all: that of the Willinton family, who were important landholders in Gloucestershire from the mid-twelfth century, expanding into other counties as a result of royal favour, marriage, and active purchasing. The size of their estate was first revealed by a grant of free warren in 1310 and records of contrariants' estates after 1321, but it was not until after John de Willinton I purchased Frampton Cotterell (Gloucestershire), a manor held in chief of the Crown, between 1311 and 1318, that this agglomeration appears in an IPM with extents in 1338. It is also the case that large estates are more likely to preserve records for posterity than small landholdings. Moreover, while the extents attached to IPMs, available in printed calendars down to the 1420s, are well known, the surveys in Miscellaneous Inquisitions, 1219-1485, are ignored and other series in the National Archive, being unlisted, are unexploited. Finally, tithe accounts, whose utility was revealed recently in Ben Dodds' Peasants and production in the medieval northeast (2007), have barely been touched by other British historians, though on the continent they are the main source for medieval agricultural history. Campbell's introduction points out the limitations of his work frankly and usefully: 'All of these essays relate primarily to the seigniorial sector whose large, surplus producing farms collectively comprised perhaps a quarter of all agricultural land', though as he admits, 'It remains to be seen whether these results are replicated when tested against the evidence of larger and more representative samples of demesnes' (p. xi). Nondemesne production by the peasantry on the remaining three-quarters of agricultural land also needs to be brought into consideration. Clearly, as he shows in 'Progressiveness and backwardness' (chapter 1), technological innovation was well underway before 1300, marked by windmills, the adoption of traction horses, and the introduction of rabbits and of legumes, and the influence of widespread markets has certainly been underestimated by many previous historians. What I think both Campbell and most previous historians have failed to appreciate is the progress of 'enclosure by agreement' which enabled the elimination of rotation-fallow: this was in progress on the Berkeley estates, aided by buying-out sub-tenants, from the thirteenth century onwards, and elsewhere in Gloucestershire and adjacent counties by the fourteenth century. As Ross Wordie has shown in this journal, nearly half of England had been enclosed by 1500. This largely explains why, as Campbell emphasizes rightly, it is not true that 'English agriculture lagged behind that of the Low Countries until the age of the so-called "Agricultural