Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 107

This volume arises out of a conference held at Winchester in 1999 to present new research based on Winchester pipe rolls. It celebrates the earliest known series of surviving English manorial accounts, beginning in 1208–9 and arguably the first of their kind to be ated, which have since 1959 been in the custody of Hampshire Record Office following a seventy-year sojourn in the Public Record Office. Taking the change from rolls to registers in 1455 as its terminus, the volume includes an up-to-date hand-list of the rolls, giving their former and current references, and an excellent account by the editor of their archival history and custody with a historiographical introduction to the use made them. Bruce Campbell emphasizes the uniqueness atypicality of the rolls themselves and the estate produced them, deploying a vast amount of information about other manorial sources and other estates in England to put them into context. He concludes with valuable section on the methodological challenge which this presents to historians. Nicholas Vincent rounds the volume by examining the extensive information give on the political history of church and state, with many sidelights on the careers of the bishops themselves and other important men like the legist Henry Bracton. The other contributors make detailed use of the rolls examine particular issues in the economic history of Winchester estates. Katherine Stocks considers the viving evidence of payments into manorial courts before 1250, the Winchester rolls providing by far the earliest and the most numerous examples. They give information about the timing, business and administration these courts in their earliest years, also showing a rapid increase in the proportion of people making payments into court and the overall volume of business.

There follow four major articles of the greatest interest to agricultural historians. Mark Page writes about peasant land market before the Black Death, emphasizing the primacy of inheritance as a means of transferring

Reviews villein land, sharp differences in the pattern of land transfers between different manors, some of them stable

and and others susceptible to rapid tenurial change, and the x + existence of a cycle of expansion and contraction on

peasant holdings in some manors. He points out that a more complex reality can sometimes be shown to lie

the behind simple and uniform entries about holdings,

which were often more fragmented than they appear because of the need to provide for non-inheriting chil-

cre- dren, servants or others. John Mullan deals with the the transfer of customary estates between the plagues of 1349

and 1361, and confirms that, as suggested by earlier studies elsewhere, there was a clear and steady fall in the volume of transfers between the two outbreaks. A lower proportion of these were transactions between members of the family of the previous tenant. At the same time, however, despite attempts by the bishop and his estate of managers to maintain the status quo by raising entry

and fines back to their pre-plague level, there were innovathat tive practices, such as the registration of life-tenancies

and recoveries, which gave the market potential for greater vitality subsequently. Christopher Thornton a writes about levels of productivity between 1283 and 1348 on the huge manor of Taunton, where five sub-manors off may be compared with each other as well as other

they manors elsewhere. He uses the Weighted Aggregate

Crop Yields (WACY) method of measurement developed by Bruce Campbell. The peak levels of cultivated acreage were reached in the first half of the thirteenth to century, before falling off sharply after the 1270s to less

the than half the earlier levels by the 1330s. This he attributes sur- to a managerial reassessment of profits from assarts on

former pasture, not to a decline in fertility. The standard cropping regime was a three-course rotation of wheat, oats and fallow, minor variants being explained by local of conditions. The contribution of stock to the arable regime is given due weight, but he concludes that the estate managers failed to integrate corn and stock effectively, with resulting low crop yields characteristic of the Taunton manors. These remained acceptable only

the because of low demand, mainly local rather than from

more distant markets. The quality of marginal land was initially enhanced by large-scale marling, which later

108 the agricultural declined as the demesne contracted. Despite this, Taunton contributed heavily to the bishop’s cash income, mainly through sources other than the marketing of arable production. The rolls also give information about the employment of the customary labourers, on whose work the estate was overwhelmingly dependent. Another essay on building investment in the early fourteenth century by John Langdon, Jill Walker and John Falconer uses records of the costs of new buildings from 1297 to 1348 to test a hypothesis that there was a reduction in expenditure on construction which contributed to the economic distress of that period. The pattern proved rather to be one of a series of alternate peaks and troughs. Periods of downturn included the famine of 1315–22, with booms in 1310–15 and early in the war with France in 1337–43, although some of this reflected the desire of a new bishop to make his mark after a period of crown custody of the estate.

This wide-ranging book will henceforth provide an invaluable point of reference for further work on this magnificent series of documents.