Medieval English Peasants and Market Involvement

The Journal of Economic History

Volumn 45, Issue 4, 1985, Pages 823-831

  Biddick, Kathleen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0022193773     PISSN: 00220507     EISSN: 14716372     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700035117     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Debate over the market is central to the essays collected in the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1978).
2. For a comprehensive review see Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present, 97 (1982), pp. 16–113.
3. Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (New York, 1973), p. 59.
4. For an overview and further bibliography consult Richard Hodges, Dark Age Economics: The Origins of Towns and Trade AD 600–1000 (London, 1982).
5. Richard H. Britnell, “The Proliferation of Markets in England, 1200–1349,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 34 (May 1981), pp. 209–21.
6. Richard H. Britnell, “Production for the Market on a Small Fourteenth Century Estate,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 19, no. 2 (1966), pp. 380–87.
7. Elaine Clark, “Debt Litigation in a Late Medieval Vill,” in J. Ambrose Raftis, ed., Pathways to Medieval Peasants, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Papers in Mediaeval Studies, 2 (Toronto, 1980), pp. 249–79;
8. Richard M. Smith, “Kin and Neighbors in a 13th century Suffolk Community,” Journal of Family History, 4, no. 3 (1979), pp. 219–51.
9. For a study of geographical mobility consult J. Ambrose Raftis, A Small Town in Late Medieval England: Godmanchester, 1278–1400, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts, 53 (Toronto, 1982), pp. 135–43;
10. and Raftis, “Geographical Mobility in Lay Subsidy Rolls,” Mediaeval Studies, 38 (1976), pp. 385–403;
11. Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540 (London, 1980), pp. 107–9.
12. The production of different demographic characteristics among economic groups in medieval villages and the greater vulnerability of poorer groups to harvest failure could be explored further in light of the differential risk of cash cropping between larger and smaller landholders: Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 92–98.
13. Studies of contemporary subsistence farmers drawn into cash cropping prompt the historian to look for change in field and village with the advent of cash cropping: Margaret Rodman, “Masters of Tradition: Customary Tenure and New Forms of Social Inequality in a Vanuatu Peasantry,” American Ethnologist, 11, no. 1 (1984), pp. 61–80.
14. Alexander V. Chayanov, The Theory of the Peasant Economy. Daniel Thomer, Basile Kerblay, R. E. F. Smith, (trans.) (Homewood, Ill., 1966).
15. Both Postan and Hilton have objected to the use of the Chayanovian model in interpreting the subsistence economy of medieval English peasants: Michael M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages (Harmonds worth, 1975), p. 135;
16. Rodney H. Hilton, “The Peasantry as a Class,” in his The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1973), pp. 6–7.
17. For a more recent critique consult Richard M. Smith, “Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England, 1250–1800,” in Richard M. Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 6–38.
18. According to anthropologists, location in a regional marketing system explains stratification in peasant wealth better than other factors, such as population density and size of holding: Carol A. Smith, “Examining Stratification Systems through Peasant Marketing Arrangements: An Application of Some Models from Economic Geography,” Man, n.s. 10 (March 1975), pp. 95–112.
19. For further examples of regional analysis in economic anthropology consult her edited volumes: Regional Analysis, vol. 1, Economic Systems
20. and vol. 2, Social Systems (New York, 1976).
21. For an overview of taxation see Sydney Knox Mitchell, Taxation in Medieval England, Yale Historical Publications: Studies, 14 (New Haven, 1951).
22. The lay subsidies are best introduced by James F. Willard, Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property, 1290–1334: A Study in Medieval Financial Administration (Cambridge, Mass., 1934);
23. and by Robin Glasscock, The Lay Subsidy of 1334, The British Academy: Records of Social and Economic History, n.s. 2 (Oxford, 1975).
24. Alexander T. Gaydon, ed., The Taxation of 1297, Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 39 (1959).
25. The medieval taxable wealth of the county may be compared by consulting E. J. Buckatzsch, “The Geographical Distribution of Wealth in England, 1086–1483: An Experimental Study of Certain Tax Assessments,” Economic History Review, 2nd 3, no. 2 (1950), pp. 180–202.
26. Lay subsidies present the historian with certain problems as sources. Assessment of taxable wealth involved a deductible. Goods considered necessary for subsistence were not to be taxed. Not enough is known, however, about local attitudes towards subsistence to comment on the extent of the deductible; however, it is generally considered that assessments on grain and livestock, the principle movables listed in returns, were taxes on surplus that could be marketed: Willard, Parliamentary Taxes, p. 85.
27. The extent of exemption and evasion is very difficult to measure, too. Each subsidy had its own eligibility minimum. Peasants whose assessed taxable wealth was less than the minimum, which in 1297 was set at nine shillings, would not appear on the rolls. In a study of the Lay Subsidies of 1327 and 1332 for the village of Broughton, Huntingdonshire, the roster of village taxpayers was crosslinked with the names of individuals and family groupings identified from the contemporary series of manorial court rolls. Of the 105 resident families reconstructed from the Broughton court rolls, only 40 percent appear on the tax rolls: Edmund Britton, The Community of the Vill: A Study in the History of the Family and Village life in Fourteenth Century England (Toronto, 1977), pp. 70–76.
28. Nevertheless, J. F. Hadwin concluded in a recent review article on the subsidies as sources that they “may constructively supplement information from other sources, form the basis for an interesting hypothesis which may be checked against whatever data exist.”
29. J. F. Hadwin, “The Medieval Lay Subsidies and Economic History,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 36 (May 1983), p. 214. Gaydon, the editor of the Bedfordshire rolls, noted (p. xii) that the corrections and notes on this roll suggest that the assessment was carried out with care.
30. Peasant taxpayers as a social group are discussed by Britton, The Community of the Vill, pp. 70–76;
31. see also James A. Raftis and Mary P. Hogan, eds., Early Huntingdonshire Lay Subsidy Rolls, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Subsidia Mediaevalia, no. 8 (Toronto, 1976).
32. The term “kulak” is from Michael Postan, Medieval Economy and Society, pp. 70–76.
33. I consulted the following volumes of the Victoria County History: for the county of Bedfordshire, vols. 2, 3, William Page, ed. (London, 1908; 1913); Huntingdonshire: vols. 2, 3, William Page et al., eds. (London, 1932; 1936); Hertfordshire: vols. 3, 4, William Page, ed. (London, 1912; 1914); Cambridgeshire: vol. 5, C. R. Elrington, ed. (London, 1973).
34. Maurice Beresford and H. P. R. Finberg, English Medieval Boroughs: A Handlist (Totowa, N.J., 1973).
35. I am grateful to Maryanne Kowaleski for drawing my attention to the Public Record Office index. Information about medieval roadways, fording points, and bridges in the Victoria County History is unusually full and well documented for Bedfordshire. N. S. B. Gras recognized London's regional market pull, and we know that grain from the Midlands was transported to Cambridge which served as a major transport center for linking the Midlands with East Anglian ports: Norman S. B. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market (Cambridge, 1915);
36. Helen Maud Cam, “The City of Cambridge,” in J. P. C. Roach, ed., The Victoria County History: Cambridgeshire, vol. III (London, 1959), pp. 86–94;
37. Eleanora Carus-Wilson, “The medieval trade of the ports of the Wash,” Medieval Archaeology, 6–7 (1962–1963), pp. 182–201.
38. My remarks apply to the thirteenth century. Regional marketing systems underwent reconfiguration in the later Middle Ages: Alan Everitt, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500–1640 vol. IV: (London, 1967), pp. 466–592;
39. The study of farmers as part-time traders in periodic markets has been neglected by anthropologists and geographers. A call for such studies has been raised by Robert H. T. Smith in a two-part review article entitled “Periodic market-places and periodic marketing: review and prospect,” Progress in Human Geography, 3, no. 3 (1979), pp. 471–505, and 4, no. 1 (1980), pp. 1–31.
40. See also Alan Hay, “Some Alternatives in the Economic Analysis of Periodic Marketing,” Geographical Analysis, 9 (Jan. 1977), pp. 72–79.
41. Based on a study of the spatial and temporal distancing of markets in medieval Nottinghamshire, Tim Unwin concluded too that the medieval peasants must have been part-time traders: “Rural marketing in medieval Nottinghamshire,” Journal of Historical Geography, 7, no. 3 (1981), pp. 231–51.
42. Wheat was certainly a main cash crop on the manor of the Earl of Cornwall at Sundon in Flitt Hundred, Beds. The accounts rolls for the manor in the year 1297 inform us that the Earl planted 189.5 out of 212 acres with wheat and dredge (a malting grain). He sold 43.4 percent and 49.1 percent of the yields of these crops respectively: Laura M. Midgley, Minister's Accounts of the Earldom of Cornwall, Camden Society, 3rd ser., 66 (1942), pp. 6–12.
43. The need of English peasants to pay taxes and rents, to make nest eggs for settling children and supporting retirement, or to supplement insufficient subsistence income could induce them to intensify household production and choose cash crop rotations. Extending output through more intensive labor input can heighten the vulnerability of the household economy: Subrata Ghatak, Development Economics (London, 1978), pp. 107–13;
44. Howard Kunreuther and Gavin Wright, “Safety first, gambling, and the subsistence farmer,” in James A. Roumasset, Jean-Marc Boussard, and Inderjit Singh, eds., Risk, Uncertainty and Agricultural Development (New York, 1982), pp. 213–30.
45. Such conditions can lay the groundwork for immiseration. Historically, the growing demands of the English crown on the peasantry certainly produced immiserating conditions: John Robert Maddicott, The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294–1341, Past and Present Supplement, no. 1 (1975).
46. Donald McCloskey, “English Open Fields as Behavior Towards Risk,” in Paul J. Uselding, ed., Research in Economic History, 1 (1976), pp. 154–62.
47. A point made for modern marketing systems as well: Carol A. Smith, “Local History in a Global Context: Social and Economic Transitions in Western Guatemala,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26 (April 1984), pp. 193–228.
48. John Langdon, “The Economics of Horses and Oxen in Medieval England,” The Agricultural History Review, 30, Part 1 (1982), pp. 31–40.