Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 158

About few periods of British agricultural history has thinking changed more in recent years than the middle ages. Comparison of the final chapter of David Stone’s Decision-making in medieval agriculture with M. M. Postan’s classic essay in the second edition of Volume I of the Cambridge economic history of Europe (1966) highlights how far this revisionism has now progressed. No longer are medieval husbandmen portrayed as handicapped by inadequate technology, hamstrung by communal regulations, careless and ignorant in their utilization of resources, indifferent to market opportunities, and incapable of obtaining and sustaining satisfactory returns from the land. Instead, they look remarkably similar to their enterprising and commercialized early-modern successors and under the right circumstances appear to have been capable of obtaining productivity results that were by no means inferior. On this reinterpretation it is the continuities rather than the contrasts between medieval and early modern agriculture that are most striking. Seemingly, since at least the thirteenth century, market-determined prices, costs, and rents influenced how the land was occupied, used, and worked; likewise, the decisions made by agricultural producers shaped economic outcomes. Thus, as Stone is at pains to demonstrate in this fresh and meticulously crafted book, it was because medieval owners and managers of seigniorial demesnes were efficiency maximisers that they often opted to produce less than the maximum attainable using existing technology. On this analysis, if crop yields per acre were not high it was usually because it did not pay to raise them; if they fell it was because it paid to invest less in production. In his view demesne managers should therefore be judged by their ability to maintain profits rather than physical productivity, especially when, as over the course of the fourteenth century, environmental and economic conditions were both becoming less favourable. He clearly thinks that much of the time they did a remarkably good job.

At the core of the book, and comprising five of its eight chapters, is a detailed analysis of the wealthy bishop of Ely’s huge demesne at Wisbech Barton situated deep in the Cambridgeshire fens, in one of the most economically advantaged and dynamic of agricultural regions but one also unusually susceptible to tempest and flood. Its heroes are the servile tenants who served as reeve and supervised the day-to-day and year-by-year running of the demesne and the bailiffs who oversaw them. In Stone’s judgement they maintained operation of this demesne at a remarkably high pitch of efficiency for the better part of a century and successfully surmounted some of the greatest environmental set-backs and economic challenges ever faced by English farmers. It is a story rich in detail and well worth the telling and offers many rewarding insights, both particular and general.

The crucial first and longest episode in this saga – the ‘springtide of success’ – when the demesne and dependent tenant holdings were reclaimed from the fens, the manor of Wisbech Barton created as an operational unit, and rising prices and falling wages guaranteed easy profits to those who managed the demesne, is largely undocumented. In fact, Wisbech Barton’s impressive run of manorial accounts does not start until 1313, which obliges Stone to commence his narrative after the economic tide had turned and with the crisis-ridden period from the agrarian crisis of 1315–22 to the Black Death of 1348–9. He then considers the changing fortunes of this demesne during, successively, the so-called ‘Indian summer’ for demesne producers that followed the plague; the period of deepening agricultural depression to which this gave way after c. 1375, when producers were squeezed by lower prices and higher wages; and, last, the twilight of direct cultivation between c. 1410 and 1429, when, after almost two hundred years of direct management and unable any longer to recruit loyal and able men as reeves, the bishops finally resorted to a policy of leasing. Each episode is scrutinized and discussed in its own terms while a common framework of analysis (‘the sale and consumption of produce’, ‘cereal-cropping strategies’, ‘crop rotation and field management’, ‘agrarian techniques and the maintenance of soil fertility’, and ‘livestock husbandry’) makes it possible to track developments over time. What unfolds is a story in which yields of crops and, to some extent, of animals and their products, were positively related to product prices but inversely related to the cost of labour. It is a story, too, in which initiative was able to counteract adversity for as long as it was possible to maintain the quality of labour and, above all, the quality of management. When the latter eventually failed, direct management ceased to be tenable.

Three further chapters frame and contextualize the case-study of Wisbech Barton and elaborate upon the role of the market in shaping the decisions made by medieval agricultural producers. Decision-making, it is shown, was typically tightened as profits were squeezed and was often tightest of all when and where profits were narrowest. Almost everywhere, the colder economic climate that set in from the 1290s was followed by managerial reform and retrenchment. Nevertheless, efficient as demesne management necessarily became, Stone believes that land productivity was consistently higher by a margin of at least 10 to 25 per cent on peasant holdings, since how else could a national population at peak of five to six million have been fed from domestic agriculture? This runs counter to the received view of a generation of influential Cambridge historians and challenges the pessimistic Marxist verdict advanced by Robert Brenner and others that peasant yields were inferior to demesne yields because proportionally more of the land cultivated by peasants was of inferior quality and for various reasons many peasants were deficient in capital. Certainly, it would be surprising if the highest medieval yields were not obtained on peasant holdings but it will require more than the handful of examples assembled by Stone to establish that mean yields across the entire peasant sector of more than half a million holdings were better than those obtained on demesnes. Indeed, if such a productivity differential existed why did managerially-efficient lords not prefer to lease their demesnes? In more ways than one Decision-making in medieval agriculture consequently looks set to stoke renewed debate of this most critical and controversial of issues.