Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 321

The idea of a later medieval crisis that followed several centuries of economic and demographic expansion is deeply embedded in writing on European economic history. Accounts of the timing and nature of the crisis vary; some discussions emphasize the problems of the early fourteenth century, while others focus on the Black Death of 1346–51 and its effects. The crisis was clearly a complex, multi-phase and long-lasting event, so it is not surprising that debate about its causes has raged. These essays further this debate, providing surveys of the state of knowledge relating to eight European regions. Many previous essay collections have addressed trends in these centuries, but this one is novel since it engages unusually directly with the concept of crisis and offers a relatively wide geographical perspective.

There are chapters on England (Kitsikopoulos), France (George Grantham), Italy (Paolo Malanima), Byzantium (Kostis Smyrlis), Spain (Ana Rodríguez), Scandinavia (Janken Myrdal), Central Europe (Grzegorz Myśliwski), and Russia (Janet Martin). The editor provides an overview in a substantial introduction and epilogue. Although the geographical coverage is impressively broad, there are also (as the editor concedes) important gaps owing to the lack of chapters on the Low Countries and Germany. In the epilogue Kitsikopoulos brings in material on the former region, but a specialist’s account of the crisis in the Low Countries would have added an interesting further dimension to this book.

Some of the contributors are based in economics departments, while the majority are historians. This mixture of backgrounds does not prevent a welcome evenness of approach. Virtually every chapter consists of a review of empirical findings under a number of common headings followed by an interpretative section on the character and causes of crisis. The only real exception to this pattern is Malanima’s chapter, which provides a macroeconomic analysis of the Italian economy as a whole and gives less attention than the others to social structures.

The detailed conclusions of the different chapters are rather diverse. An underlying diversity among the regions is exacerbated by some striking variations both in the availability of relevant primary sources, and in the development of a secondary literature on the crisis. But some clear themes do emerge. One is the trend for economically damaging warfare to increase in its frequency in regions right across fourteenth-century Europe, from Macedonia to Sweden. Another general point is that there is a division between those regions which already faced the threat of a crisis caused by overpopulation at the start of the fourteenth century (England, France, Byzantium, Italy), and those which did not (Spain, Central Europe, Russia, most of Scandinavia). In the epilogue, the editor labels the former set of countries ‘Group A’ and the latter ‘Group B’. For Group B regions, the crisis was instead associated mainly with plague and other factors like warfare, though Central Europe appears hardly to have experienced crisis at all.

Kitsikopoulos draws on the regional chapters to present his own distinctive general interpretation. He divides Group A further into ‘progressive’ and ‘laggard’ regions. The ‘progressives’ (for example, eastern England, Flanders) demonstrated a ‘greater ability to cope with the spectre of the Malthusian trap’ than the ‘laggards’ (for example, the rest of England, southern France, most of Italy), which in the early fourteenth century were at risk of ‘imminent systemic implosion’ (pp. 343–4). For Kitsikopoulos, the key difference between the groups was the institutional environment, which here largely means seigneurial institutions. Favourable seigneurial institutions were an essential precondition for successful economic expansion through the growth of markets, specialization, and improvements in agrarian techniques and productivity. Kitsikopoulos argues similarly in his England chapter, suggesting that the English agrarian economy of c.1300 was a ‘train bound for derailment, sooner or later’ (p. 42). In emphasizing the determining effects of the strong ‘feudal institutions’ that characterized much of England, Kitsikopoulos rejects a view of the fourteenth century as a series of autonomous natural catastrophes which struck a population largely capable of being supported from the available resources. Here, of course, Kitsikpoulos is explicitly attacking the work of Bruce Campbell, though his fire is concentrated mainly on the latter’s English Seigniorial Agriculture (2000), and it is less clear that he has absorbed the implications of Campbell’s 2005 article on the early fourteenth-century crisis (Past and Present, 188).

This book is unlikely to find universal favour. As already noted, it gives relatively short shrift to arguments about deteriorating environmental conditions that are currently gaining momentum in discussions of the later Middle Ages. It also has little to say about monetary factors. Yet on the whole it is a useful and rich volume which deserves a wide readership.