Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 264

This volume is the fifth in the series of collaborative publications resulting from the regular CORN (Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area) conferences. It explores the themes of land ownership, tenancy arrangements and relationships, the extent of land transfer and the operation of land markets, and their economic and social consequences in northern France, Belgium, the North Sea coast extending from the Netherlands to Denmark, and in England. This is a subject that will be familiar to many from the Brenner debate of the 1980s, but the approach taken in this collection is the antithesis of those adopted by the combatants on that occasion. Here, essays provide a series of geographically-restricted and closely-defined agrarian case studies, which explain themselves in theirown terms, without launching into dramatic spatial or temporal generalizations. This collection of thematically and geographically contiguous studies stimulates comparative interpretation of the causes and trends in land markets and holdings, without ignoring the influence of regional legal codes, seigneurial regimes or governmental activity.

These essays highlight several important common themes. The first is the long-term impact of different legal and customary systems of land tenure. In many western and central regions within the Netherlands, and the Friesian coast ‘feudal’ tenures disappeared in the population expansion and land reclamation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the Paris basin, the development of land markets was retarded by the absence of clear legal title, and the persistence of rights to rent-charges (fieffes) levied on lands. In Denmark and coastal Germany, absolute property rights were established in law only in the late eighteenth century, yet markets existed in shorter-term lease-rights. In each case, the structures of law and custom seem to account for these significant variations.

A second theme is related to this, and echoes Brenner – the power relations that accompanied property rights. In England, Hoyle demonstrates that while customary tenures were relatively secure, they continued to be burdened by intrusive seigneurial rights and levies at least until the seventeenth century. Knottnerus, meanwhile, sketches out a Brenner-like distinction in the coastal regions from Groningen to Friesland, between regions in which the political authorities sought popular support by bolstering the rights of the freeholders and long leaseholders against the local nobility, and areas where local landlords and political authorities worked together. However, he deviates from Brenner in suggesting that security of tenure, market conditions, ecology and economies of scale fostered the creation of ‘capitalist farmer-entrepreneurs’, rather than financial exactions by landlords. Hybel sketches the process of refeudalization of the Danish peasantry, a process that cost them much of their legal identity and land ownership, but never resulted in the imposition of labour-services of the kind found east of the Elbe. Beckett and Turner emphasize that despite the extensive development of ‘capitalist’ farming in England in the eighteenth century, it took place alongside the persistence of customary tenures, and long-term leases for lives, rather than occurring as a result of their extinction, as Marx suggested.

These studies also offer other qualifications to existing hypotheses. They tend to support the broad outline of Brenner’s thesis about the importance of landlords. Where landlords were strong, and bolstered by the state, leaseholds emerged, and farm sizes grew. By contrast, in areas where small proprietors were sanctioned by local or central authorities, subdivision occurred. In the latter case, as is suggested by Vanhaute’s study of Flanders, tenancy and market-oriented agriculture might also emerge, but also with exploitative rents and highly labour-intensive cultivation. However, all these studies differ from Brenner in emphasizing the importance of regional and sub-regional variation, particularly in the Low Countries. Here, areas of big estates, large tenant farms, and a non-landed labour force could exist next toareas thickly populated by owner-occupying smallholders. Both could be attuned to their respective forms of market opportunity, ecology and agronomy.

These variations emphasize the significance of a further theme implicit within this research. In common with other studies of landholding, these essays emphasize the significance, and perhaps the increasing significance, of sub-tenancy and land leasing. The contributions of Thoen, Vanhaute, van Bavel, Knottnerus, Whittle, and Beckett and Turner all touch on this practice. In some respects, sub-tenancy may have to be included alongside market development, systems of tenure, or monetary exaction by landlords and the state, as one of the mechanisms that amplified agrarian capitalism. It is difficult to study, because such arrangements were either not recorded in existing records of tenure, or (often) expressly forbidden by them. Even so, the fact that a leasehold land market can be seen emerging in a number of disparate regions through this period suggests that this phenomenon may be worthy of its own CORN volume in the future.

If these essays generally skirt around the potential impediment of the Brenner debate, they also steer clear of another problematic hypothesis of the 1970s and ’80s, ‘proto-industrialization’. This is of greatest relevance to the studies of Flanders and the Netherlands, where there is a clear implication that the persistence and sub-division of small holdings was due, in part, to thesupport from industrial by-employments, the impactof urban, manufacturing capital, and the food demands from urban populations. Obviously, the debate about the effects of ‘proto-industry’ has been well rehearsed, particularly in Flanders, but these studies provide hints of intriguing divergences. In Flanders, Thoen suggests that the effect of townspeople buying land in the late middle ages was to split estates and entrench small leaseholds, while in southern Holland, van Bavel suggests that urban capital was used to amalgamate smallholdings and buy out the peasantry. Once again, the comparisons offered by these contiguous studies hint at the inadequacy of existing interpretations and generalizations.

These essays are thought provoking, because they illustrate how such divergent patterns of agrarian development could occur between states and regions, and even within regions. While in general their authors and the editors are content simply to emphasize this diversity, rather than to formulate elaborate new hypotheses, these essays stimulate the reader to think comparatively about the patterns of agrarian development in northern Europe. They provide a series of important examples that will enrich national debates, and hopefully form the basis of new research into landholding in under-studied parts of coastal Germany and Denmark. If the comparative dimension of these essays is illuminating, so are the recurrent themes, notably the continuing importance of ‘feudal’ tenures across the region, and the significance of sub-tenures in oiling the wheels of many tenurial and transfer mechanisms. In these respects, if this collection is more likely to begin debates rather than to finish them, in doing so it continues admirably to fulfil the original objectives of the CORN network.