All agrarian-based economies, such as that of pre-industrial England, had to contend with five long-enduring dilemmas, each of which was capable of thwarting progress and precipitating crisis. The first of these dilemmas was a ‘tenurial dilemma’ of how most effectively to occupy the land and on what terms. It was landlords who by controlling tenure regulated access to land. The terms upon which land was granted to those who worked it determined the number, size and layout of the units of production and, accordingly, the nature of the labour process (servile, hired, familial). Tenure likewise determined the ‘rent’ paid for the land and the form that this took, typically labour, kind or cash. Efficient forms of tenure were those which delivered the best returns to land and the labour and capital invested in it. Tenure, however, was institutionally determined and characteristically slower to reform than economic circumstances were to change. Not unusually, it was tenurial inertia that frustrated fuller and more efficient use of the land.
Medieval tenures were rooted in local custom and manorial jurisdictions and could vary with dramatic effect from manor to manor, with far-reaching demographic and economic consequences. Some manors boasted substantial demesnes which might be managed on behalf of the lord or leased to tenants, others lacked them; on some manors the bulk of tenants held by customary tenures of one sort or another, on others free tenure prevailed; some tenants were burdened with rent and owed heavy labour services to their lords, many others owed fixed money rents that no longer reflected the full economic value of the land; on some manors lords insisted on the immutability of holdings and opposed any attempts to subdivide or engross, on others a lively peasant land market prevailed and holdings were constantly changing in number, size and composition. By 1300, on the evidence of the inquisitiones post mortem, more tenants held by free than by unfree tenure, more paid a sub-economic than a full rack rent, and there were many more small holdings than large. These traits were more pronounced on small manors than large, on lesser estates rather than greater, and on estates in lay hands rather than those in episcopal and Benedictine ownership. Such diverse tenurial arrangements were the source of much economic inefficiency but were neither quick nor easy to change. They were also the stuff of much agrarian discontent, which occasionally flared up in direct conflict between tenants and landlords. Tenurial reform was a major challenge, especially at times of acute population pressure. Legal impediments could retard progress and there were often political and humanitarian obstacles to be overcome. Change was generally most easily implemented when land was in relative abundance, as was the case throughout the fifteenth century.
Second, there was an ‘ecological dilemma’ of how to maintain and raise output without jeopardizing the productivity of the soil by overcropping and overgrazing. Medieval agriculture was organic and although there was much sound experience and lore on how best to work the land there was no scientific knowledge per se. Medieval agricultural treatises stressed best-practice financial and management arrangements and only at the very close of the middle ages was there a renewal of scientific interest in plants and animals, stimulated by the writings of Columella, Pier de’ Crescenzi and Palladius. Then, as now, the key to sustaining output lay in maintaining the nutrient balance within the soil, especially the three essential nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Scarcity in any one of these would inhibit plant growth. The nutrients removed in harvested crops consequently needed constant replenishment. The techniques available to medieval husbandmen in order to achieve this included crop rotation, sowing nitrifying courses of legumes (peas, beans and vetches), fallowing, alternating land between arable and grass (ley husbandry), dunging, manuring and marling. All required effort and organization, which were most likely to be applied wherever land was scarce and labour abundant.
Paradoxically, it was cheap land and dear labour that were most likely to lead to a ‘slash and burn’ approach to the soil. The same circumstances could also result in the kind of ‘tragedy of the commons’ that arose from poorly policed common property rights, whereby individuals pursued self-interest to the detriment of the common good. The hypothesis that arable soils tended to become exhausted has appealed to a number of medieval historians, although there is as yet little unequivocal evidence to support the hypothesis. There are certainly several well-documented cases of falling yields, but whether this was because of depleted soil fertility, less favourable weather, increased plant disease (especially rust infestation), reduced labour and capital inputs or a change in husbandry methods has proved hard to establish. Moreover, noneconomic factors - especially war and the heavy taxation and purveyancing that went with it - could destabilize agro-systems by draining them of the capital inputs - manpower, seed, draught animals - required for their maintenance. There are also several clear examples of very intensive and demanding systems of cropping that successfully delivered a sustained high level of yield. Rather, if the land suffered it is more likely to have been the pasture than the arable. There was a natural temptation to overstock - to the detriment of animals as well as pastures - and systems of sheep-corn husbandry widely used to maintain arable fertility effectively did so by systematically robbing pastures of their nutrients. Much grassland may thereby have degenerated into heath, which in lowland England is rarely a natural climax vegetation. Maintaining the ecological status quo therefore tended to be selective and required both vigilance and skill.
Productivity also lay at the root of the third dilemma, namely the ‘Ricardian dilemma’ of how to raise output without incurring diminishing returns to land and labour. The diminishing returns to land came from bringing inferior land into production as the population rose. The diminishing returns to labour arose once the incremental application of labour to land began to drive down first the marginal then the average productivity of labour. Such diminishing returns, once initiated, proved difficult to reverse. Excess population became entrapped on the land, depressing rural incomes and thereby investment, and frustrating further growth of the non-agricultural sector to the detriment of the economy at large. This scenario could only be postponed or avoided by maximizing the productivity gains that accrued from the division of labour (itself a function of the size of the market), adopting more efficient forms of labour process which raised output per worker in agriculture (e. g. replacing servile labour with hired labour and family farms with capitalist farms), and by investing in labour-saving technologies. A necessary corollary was the occupational and geographical migration of labour out of agriculture and off the land, to which there could be considerable resistance by those most directly affected. Maintaining or changing the economic status quo incurred high social costs; the only difference was the nature of the costs.
Closely related to this Ricardian dilemma was a fourth dilemma - the ‘Malthusian dilemma’ - of how to prevent the growth of population from outpacing the growth of agricultural output. Pre-industrial populations were capable of growing at up to
1.5 per cent per annum, but agricultural output and national income rarely sustained growth rates in excess of 0.5 per cent. Large-scale emigration was one solution to this dilemma, but it was contingent upon the availability of suitable destinations and the means of reaching them. The middle ages were not without such opportunities and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries south Wales, the lordship of Ireland, the royal burghs of Scotland, and north Wales successively attracted significant numbers of English settlers. This exodus from England is likely to have been disproportionately male and, to judge from its impact upon the Celtic lands of the west, probably numbered some tens of thousands of migrants. As with later episodes of mass emigration, female marriage rates may have fallen in England for want of sufficient male partners. Any reduction in marriage and the formation of new households will have helped curb fertility and thereby slow or even halt the continued growth of population. In the early modern period fertility rates would vary quite significantly with economic opportunities in a process of homoeostatic adjustment but, for want of hard evidence, whether such preventive measures formed part of the medieval demographic regime can only be conjectured.
Mortality rates, in contrast, plainly varied a good deal and were certainly capable of acting as a positive check on population growth. Background mortality, for instance, was likely to rise whenever a general deterioration in living standards resulted in reduced standards of nutrition and hygiene. It could also rise and fall independently of living standards according to the incidence and morbidity of disease. Thus the thirteenth century seems to have been a relatively healthy period for all its falling living standards, whereas the fifteenth century was comparatively unhealthy notwithstanding greatly improved living standards. Migration could also redistribute population from low - to high-mortality locations, such as malaria-infected marshland and congested and insanitary towns, both of which recruited significant numbers of in-migrants during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Most dramatic of all, harvest failure could trigger a major subsistence crisis, resulting in a surge of deaths from starvation and famine fevers. The Great European Famine of 1315-22 rates as the most severe such crisis in recorded English history and although some communities subsequently made good their demographic losses it is unlikely that the medieval population as a whole ever recovered to its pre-famine maximum. For Postan, the Great Famine rather than the Black Death was the key watershed demographic event.
Any failure of subsistence highlighted the fifth dilemma - an ‘entitlements dilemma’ - of who shared in the fruits of production and on what terms. There were, of course, several different ways of securing the means of subsistence, notably through direct production, gift exchange and market purchase. Individuals were, however, far from equally endowed in their access to these means and any deficiency was bound to be highlighted at times of acute scarcity. Typically, the bulk of famine victims comprise those with the weakest economic entitlement to obtain food and those who, by dint of the crisis, have forfeited whatever entitlement they once had. Such victimization could only be prevented or mitigated by the adoption of welfare measures designed either to protect the entitlement of the most vulnerable or compensate for that loss of entitlement for as long as the crisis lasted. Historically, that has meant evolving appropriate institutions and strategies and distinguishing between those deserving and undeserving of assistance. In the middle ages there was as yet no concept that these were the responsibilities of government. Rather, trust was placed in family support, Christian charity and guild organizations, inadequate though these invariably proved when times were hard. Not until the close of the period, at a time when the entitlements dilemma was at its least acute, were the foundations laid for the emergence of a more community-based system of welfare support administered through the parish.
The acuteness of these dilemmas and the measures adopted to cope with them varied across space and over time. Over the course of the middle ages the waxing and then waning of population, development of commodity and factor markets (in land, labour and capital), expansion and contraction of towns and cities, growth of proto-industrialization and progressive redefinition of socio-property rights and associated transformation of labour processes all made a material difference to the severity of the challenge to be met and the precise nature of the response. Liberation from these dilemmas was beyond the capacity of pre-industrial societies; only the transformation of the entire socio-economic system through an ‘industrial revolution’ could achieve that. Rather, it was a case of developing strategies for coping and preventing the ‘worst-case’ scenarios from happening. The measure of success is not, therefore, whether these dilemmas were resolved but how effectively they were contained given the levels of knowledge and technology prevailing at the time. Because all five of these dilemmas were closely interconnected, that required progress across a broad front. The ‘solutions’ did not lie within agriculture alone. Moreover, the scale of the challenge could be greatly magnified by environmental instability, both physical and biological.
The exogenous risks of harvest failure and disease - both of animals and humans - were not constant over time and need to be separated from the endogenous risks inherent to the socio-economic system as a whole. Environmental shocks were autonomous, although the socio-economic context within which they occurred shaped both their impact and the response. Thus, dendrochronology identifies two major episodes of severe climatic abnormality as having taken place during the middle ages. The first - from 1163 to 1189 - occurred at the threshold of a century or more of demographic and economic expansion, whereas the second - from 1315 to 1353 - marks the onset of a century and a half of contraction and stagnation. Plainly, the context within which these shocks occurred was all-important in determining whether subsequent demographic and economic developments were positive or negative. That they should have happened is not necessarily an indictment of the socio-economic system they affected, for few such systems could have withstood them. Whatever their effects, the environmental disasters that wrought such havoc in the fourteenth century cannot in themselves be explained by the theories of Malthus, Marx or Ricardo. To all intents and purposes they were accidents. Disentangling non-economic causes from economic effects is in fact a dilemma for historians of this period, all the more so because environmental factors clearly exercised a profound influence.
World History
