Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy

311 Pages·1973·6.57 MB·English

by  M. M. Postan

ESSAYS ON MEDIEVAL
AGRICULTURE AND GENERAL PROBLEMS
OF THE MEDIEVAL ECONOMY
ESSAYS
ON MEDIEVAL
AGRICULTURE AND
GENERAL PROBLEMS
OF THE MEDIEVAL
ECONOMY
M. M. POSTAN
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1978
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A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 72-93135
ISBN9 78-0-521-08h7a4r4d-b5a ck
ISBN9 78-0-521-08p8a4p6e-r6b ack
CONTENTS
Preface pagev
Acknowledgements
VI
I GENERAL
1. The economic foundations of medieval economy
2. The rise of a money economy
3. The fifteenth century
4. Some social consequences of the Hundred Years War
5. The costs of the Hundred Years War
6. Why was science backward in the Middle Ages?
II AGRARIAN
7. The chronology of labour seivices 89
8. The charters of the villeins 107
9. Heriots and prices on Winchester manors with statistical
notes on Winchester heriots by J. Longden 150
(Graphs appear between pp. 174 and 175)
1 o. Some agrarian evidence of a declining population in the
later Middle Ages. 186
11 . Village livestock in the thirteenth century 214
12. Glastonbury estates in the twelfth century 249
13. Legal status and economic condition in medieval villages 278
Index 291
PREFACE
The present volume brings together a number of my papers and articles
on various topics of medieval economic and social history, mainly devoted
to the problems of English agriculture and rural society. The purpose of
this collection, like that of most other collections of the kind, is not only
to salvage from oblivion some treasured monuments of one's past en­
deavours, but to bring together in a convenient form essays and articles
which I believe are still being read or should be read by scholars and
students. The immodest assumption that these essays in fact deserve to
be read and are in fact read led me to exclude from the collection a few
articles, papers and reviews which have in my opinion lost (if they ever
possessed) their usefulness to latter-day readers.
I hope the essays in this volume may still find their readers. This does
not however imply that every fact and idea in the essays has stood the test
of time. I believe that the main propositions which they have helped to
establish and the historical argument behind them, still stand fully
established; but on a number of detailed points I have changed my mind
or improved my information and can no longer subscribe to their precise
rendering in the original text. Thus the essay which has been cited and
debated more than any other in this collection -that on the Chronology
of Labour Services - contains statements on, for example, the relation
between the size of demesne and the demand for labour services, or the
extent and duration of the manorial boom of the thirteenth century,
which I would have phrased differently had I been writing the essay now,
and have in fact phrased differently in my more recent publications.
For this and other reasons I was sorely tempted to bring the essays
up-to-date in both fact and opinion, but except in one instance I have
resisted the temptation and chosen to present the essays in their original
form. The only exception is my paper on the Economic Foundations of
Medieval Society. This paper was read to the International Historical
Congress in Paris in 1950, but· was rewritten and expanded a year later
for publication in the Jahrbucher fur Nationalokonomie. The German
version is the one I have chosen to reproduce here, but it was necessary
for me to alter several important passages which, rendered literally from
the German, would have been somewhat inaccessible to English readers.
Preface
The persons and institutions who in various ways helped me to assemble
and to prepare for publication this collection of essays are too many
to be listed here by name but I must single out for special thanks the
various members of the editorial staff of the Cambridge University
Press, more particularly Mrs Patricia Skinner, Mrs Christine Linehan
and Miss Anne Boyd for the efficiency and patience with which they
handled this collection and treated their author.
'January 1973 M.P.
Acknowledgements
The author and the publisher are most grateful to publishers and learned
societies for their co-operation while this volume was under preparation.
They are further grateful to the Past and Present Society for permission
to reproduce copyright material. Cambridge University Press has made
every effort to trace copyright holders and it is regretted if any copy­
right has been unwittingly infringed.

PART I
GENERAL

1
THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS
OF MEDIEVAL SOCIETY*
1
The subject is the economic base of medieval society. Thus entitled it
carries with it a certain early-marxist implication. Yet its conventional
meaning is fairly clear - population and land settlement, technique of
production and the general trends of economic activity: in short, all those
economic facts which can be discussed without concentrating on the
working of legal and social institutions and upon relations of class to class.
These topics will be treated in what follows as a single theme. To have
to separate them from other phenomena more obviously institutional and
social, indeed to separate them from the whole fl.ow of history, is bad
enough. But to separate population from settlement, settlement from
technique, and all the three from the general trend of prices and produc­
tion would be a crippling act of mutilation. I therefore propose to deal
with these topics more or less in combination.
What makes it necessary and possible to deal with this group of subjects
together and yet apart from other topics of medieval history is that they
have all been recently drawn into the discussion of general trends of
economic activity, or, to use a more fashionable term, into the 'long-term
movements' of social income. Historians need no reminding that the main
debate in the last ten to twelve years has been concerned with the direc­
tion and speed of economic evolution in the Middle Ages. Did economic
activity continue to expand through the centuries? Whether it expanded
or contracted, what influenced the direction and the scale of the move­
ment? Indeed the whole system of historical development has been ques­
tioned. For even if it can be shown that medieval development passed
through distinct and even contrasting phases, it is still necessary to see
whether the phases were all long enough to qualify as 'long-term trends'.
* This essay is a restatement of the author's paper to the IX• Congres Inter­
national des Sciences Historiques in Paris from 28 August to 3 September 1950,
which was published in the Rapports, Librarie Armand Colin (Paris, 1950),
Section m, Histoire economique, sub-section, moyen ll.ge, pp. 225-41. An
expanded and revised version was subsequently published in the Jahrbucher fur
Nationalokonomie, 161, 1951.