Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 121

This collection of nine essays arises from a symposium held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Forestry and Agriculture in November 2000. The disciplines represented include ethnology, human geography, economic history, art history and history. All but one of the essays are regional case studies relating to parts of Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Germany (2), Denmark, or Sweden (2). The remaining essay is an art historian’s discussion of farm work as seen in pictorial sources of the late medieval and early modern periods across a wide area of continental Europe. Ten of the illustrations are to be found in the latter essay, but the book as a whole is well provided with a variety of tables, maps, pictures and other figures such as graphs.

The text is wholly in English, apart from some technical terms for which exact English equivalents are difficult to find. However, these will not prove troublesome to the British reader without specialist knowledge of continental rural history. For example, the term corvée is frequently used to indicate various forms of semi-feudal work services or labour rent, still in use in several areas as late as 1900. On pages 165–6 there are useful definitions and discussion of Grundherrschaft and Gutsherrschaft.

A feature of the region and period is the large number of international boundary changes, e.g., Scania fromDenmark to Sweden, Estonia from Sweden to Russia. These brought many institutional changes down to the level of individual manors, sometimes involving a change in the language of record-keeping, sometimes areimposition of work services where paid labour had become commonplace.

There were considerable variations in the sizes of manors both between study areas and within them, and consequently in the levels of sophistication in their management. In some areas, the nobility were non-resident for substantial parts of the year, but they had officials administering many aspects of rural life well outside farming, e.g., oversight of the local legal system, or imposition of rules relating to church-going. Yet there were also areas in which manors were smaller than the typical English parish, and the gentry or officer class were resident for much of the year, therefore much closer to their manorial populations.

A theme running through several studies is the extent to which farms were held in return for work services, the levels of such services, and the various ways in which they were performed. For example, it was not unusual for these services to be imposed only on the larger (but still relatively small) farms, yet the work was carried out by crofters (men with holdings too small for complete subsistence) and landless labourers paid by the larger farmers to work on their behalf. This kept family labour on family farms and sheltered them from the arbitrary way in which estate stewards would summon men to work on demesne lands. Traditional and market-based relationships were therefore simultaneously involved in demesne-farming, which most landlords maintained in preference to the British alternative of letting to tenant farmers paying a straightforward cash rent.

Other topics studied vary considerably from one essay to another, depending on the sources available (remarkably detailed in some cases) and the interests of authors: types of husbandry, marketing conditions, levels of technology, population increases, migration and emigration, enclosure and the dispersal of farmsteads, serfdom, life in a ducal household, architectural matters, the class composition of landowners (nobles, bourgeois, gentle-men, service officers, higher civil servants, the church, municipalities), and so on.

Students of continental farming will fully appreciate the regional detail in this volume, but non-specialists would find it a valuable amplification of the contrast so frequently drawn between Britain, especially lowland England, and the continent. After reading this book, it is not so easy to regard as ‘normal’ the distinctive features of the English estate system of the period.