Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 127

This book represents a great achievement after years of preparation, and it offers opportunities for new work for decades to come. The first labour that made it possible was performed by officials of the English state, who compiled the original 9292 Inquisitions Post Mortem between 1300 and 1349. They summoned juries, questioned them, and recorded information about the lands, rents and other assets of royal tenants who had recently died. Campbell chose this half-century sample of IPMs for analysis because the surveys were more informative and reliable at this time, and especially in the years 1323–41. They provide a panorama of the English countryside before the Black Death, and during the first phases of the ‘crisis of the fourteenth century’. The second prodigious task was performed by Campbell and Bartley, and their many collaborators, who transcribed the IPMs, added other sources such as the lay subsidies of 1327–34, and subjected them to rigorous analysis. This generated numerous tables, and a Geographical Information System enabled the production of more than 150 maps. All of this was accompanied by many practical problems, as new techniques were being developed. The third and final major effort fell to the Manchester University Press, whose input is presumably reflected in the price. For this modest sum we should be grateful, as the volumes would be sold at more than £2000 each if the full cost of the research and analysis was to be covered.

The maps and the commentary on their contents cover such subjects as the administration of the Inquisitions, regional variety in landholding units, the landed estates, land use and agriculture on the demesnes, land values, tenants and rents, court revenues, mills and markets. The last chapter deals with the evidence of the lay subsidies. Maps appear at a number of sizes and use a variety of cartographic methods. They present the information sometimes as relatively simple densities, but also record complex ratios which indicate relationships between variables, such as the ratio of the value of free rents to the value of customary rents. Thirty are reproduced in colour. What new insights emerge from this picture of England on the eve of its great medieval disaster? Some of the distributions are familiar, either because they echo and reinforce maps already published in Campbell’s English Seigniorial Agriculture (2000), or because they confirm observations made by other researchers, such as Kosminsky’s findings about the prevalence of small, irregular and unconventional manors. Most of the maps are entirely new, and give us a series of valuable insights into the period. No-one has previously plotted the distribution of the conventional units of landholding, virgates and bovates, for example, nor have two-field and three-field systems been mapped over the whole country. They lead us to see farming systems in a new light, so that a map of common rights reveals (by their absence in the county) the especially individualistic agriculture of Kent. We will pore over the maps indicating the local variations in arable and pasture, and customary and free rents, or the varied land values and distribution of taxable wealth. The overall impression is of an agrarian world less dominated by communal institutions, and less thoroughly manorialized, than is conventionally supposed. There is new evidence for the fourteenth-century crisis, with impressive maps of demesnes suffering from infertile soils, lack of cultivation, or other problems and disadvantages, including Scots raids. The valuations put on land show a long-term decline from 1280 until the 1340s. The lay subsidies before their fossilization in 1334 provide a figure of 276,300 tax payers, with unknown numbers of those who evaded or were exempted, to fuel further arguments about the pre-plague population total.

We must all be grateful to Campbell and Bartley for making this material available to scholars, and for opening up yet further debate about the productive capacity of farming, the effectiveness of agricultural systems, regional variations in the rural economy, and the timing and character of the crisis. This book is absolutely scrupulous in defining the nature of the sources and their limitations. IPM extents were once regarded as very unreliable sources; and now they have been cautiously rehabilitated, but their many imperfections are acknowledged. We are told clearly that the IPMs provide a sample, based on the estates and manors of a section of the secular aristocracy. Nonetheless one fears misunderstandings arising from careless use of the maps, as not everyone will notice that the maps of markets or boroughs, for example, are telling us about the institutions mentioned in the IPMs over 50 years. Boroughs and markets on lay estates for which there is no IPM, and of course those on royal and church lands, do not appear.

The commentary is a useful indication of the conclusions that can be drawn from the maps, but there is only enough space to provide pointers of the significance of the evidence and its possible meanings. Dozens of future studies should be able to draw on this material. The authors, researchers and publishers have completed an important and authoritative piece of research, but they have also put into our hands a stimulating aid for new ventures.