Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 215

Mark Bailey’s authoritative study of the economic and social history of medieval Suffolk is the first volume to appear in a multi-volume history of Suffolk. With the publication of Bailey’s volume the series is off to more than a solid start. Bailey is well known as a historian of medieval Suffolk and has published extensively on the county’s economy in the middle ages; he brings his earlier research and a strong foundation in the primary material for the county to bear on this study. His work is broadly chronological and divides between the high and late middle ages, the first chapters dealing with his main themes before the mid-fourteenth century; in the final chapters Bailey examines the key events in the county from the period of the Black Death and their social and economic consequences. There is no absolute replication of chapters across both periods; instead, Bailey’s chosen emphases shift, sometimes only by small degrees, often to reflect changes in the county’s economy and social organization, the available material and the historiographical trends.

His aim, as he makes clear, is to illustrate the variety within the county and its subtleties, which challenge any simple models of longer-term economic change. This last point he explores in a conclusion to the volume in which he, developing at the empirical level ideas already discussed by Bailey and John Hatcher in an earlier publication (Modelling the Middle Ages (OUP, 2001)), rejects a notion of historical prime movers in favour of the accumulation of individual pieces of the historical jigsaw. As such, the volume is also a paean for local historians and for local history, a recognition that the local study is vital to the historian whose interests reside in the investigation of broader economic and social trends.

There is certainly a great deal of benefit in this volume for both the general and ‘specialist’ reader. One of its clear strengths is that, allied to clear and compelling prose, Bailey is careful to locate his discussion within the more general secondary literature. Although, of course, the focus and the emphasis of the discussion is wholly directed at the condition of medieval Suffolk, this volume will appeal to those keen for an introduction to the economic and social history of medieval England. That said, readers of the volume eager to discover the particularities of medieval Suffolk will not be disappointed. Throughout, Bailey is determined to stress the discrete features of the county’s economy and in this respect draws attention, on more than one occasion, to the high incidence of personal and tenurial freedom, the density of population, and the considerable volume of commercial activity. He contrasts those characteristics with other, almost paradoxical features of the economy, including well-established lordships, most obviously the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, with traditional expectations of their local economy.

The experience of high and late medieval Suffolk provides Bailey with the opportunity to engage with a number of ongoing historical debates, not the least of which concerns the significance of lordship and serfdom as determinative factors in the development of the medieval economy. In his discussion, and quite appropriately, Bailey’s own interests are strongly evident, though they certainly cannot be said to dominate. Thus, for instance, there is a good deal of close information on agrarian production and demesne management, as well as careful dissection of the range of produce across the county and change over time in relation to the same. There is relatively less on aspects of the more overtly social and institutional frameworks, though the volume contains, for example, considered discussions of the land market and of the nature of villeinage within the county. In terms of the latter, and operating from his perspective on Suffolk, Bailey questions the overall significance of serfdom for that county, though accepting a local significance.

In his concluding discussion Bailey also offers some useful comparison with recent work on neighbouring counties, and especially on Norfolk, for which a great deal of research on its economy and society has been undertaken in the last quarter century. The subtle regional and sub-regional distinctions, which help to explain, though not fully, the difference experiences of the two counties and areas within them, are grist to Bailey’s mill, as his final discussion of the textile industry in the region illustrates. The lack of consistency in its history, he points out, defies simple explanatory models.

Bailey recognizes that an economic and social history defined by county risks imposing too rigid an administrative boundary on historical developments not so easily confined. Compared, though, to the large number of estate and manorial studies, as well as research on individual towns, there are, notwithstanding a long- and well-established commitment to county histories per se, relatively few histories of the medieval economy and society conceived at the level of the county. The focus upon the county is useful here as it opens up, as it did in Larry Poos’ study of later medieval Essex and Jane Whittle’s work on Norfolk, avenues for investigation which would not always coincide in studies with a different focus. Thus, we see the exercise of lordship beyond the great estates, for instance, and we look both at rural and urban economic activity. In this respect, as in others mentioned above, the volume is a welcome and valuable addition to the study of the medieval English economy and society. The volume is well supported by a full bibliography and an effective index, as well as intelligently employed figures, maps and plates.