Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 217

Yates’ study of western Berkshire in the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the transition from the medieval to the early modern periods on a regional level. The region chosen by Yates for her study consists of the distinct sub-regional geographies of the Vale of the White Horse, the Berkshire Downs and the valley of the River Kennet. The region also contains the cloth town of Newbury and Yates is much concerned to describe and analyse the relationship between town and country.

A number of descriptive and causal frameworks have been applied by historians to the transition between the medieval and the early modern periods. After describing these frameworks in her introduction, Yates takes them apart and tests them against her evidence. For example, she points to the prominence given to ‘early incidences of capitalistic production’ in discussions of the emergence of capitalism (p.81). Newbury could be regarded as one such example. Yates examines the centralized cloth production which developed in the town and was described in a late sixteenth-century poem:

Within one roome being large and long, There stood two hundred Loomes full strong: Two hundred men the truth is so, Wrought in these Loomes all in a row. (p.91)

However, manufacturers such as the Winchcombes, on whom the poem is based, were unusual. This form of centralized cloth production was transitory in Newbury and arose in large part as a result of ‘individual entrepreneurial activities’ (p.98). Throughout the book, Yates always seeks to examine problems from multiple perspectives and, although she acknowledges the predominance of cloth in the economy of Newbury, she also discusses other economic activities including the trades in fish, raisins and pottery.

Interesting though the discussion of western Berkshire is, Yates goes further than the study of one particular region: she explores the factors which defined a region and the sub-regions within it. In her chapter on ‘Landscapes, population and wealth’ she shows that one small region actually contained significantly different sub-regions. She uses records of taxation to demonstrate that, although in the fourteenth century the distribution of population and wealth remained fairly uniform at a sub-regional level, by the sixteenth century there had been significant changes, particularly in the distribution of wealthy rural inhabitants and wage labourers. Wider economic changes had varying effects on the vale, downland and wood-pasture areas and the prosperity of Newbury itself was significant. Yates is also sensitive to the unpredictable impact of exogenous changes such as the dissolution of the monasteries. Prior to the dissolution, the abbeys of Abingdon, Reading and Beaulieu were major landholders in the region. Despite stability in the patterns of landholding from the fourteenth into the sixteenth centuries, the dissolution represented an exogenous shock after which there appears to have been much more change in the landholding class. Another important aspect of Yates’ conceptualization of region and sub-region is the relationship between town and countryside. She uses investment and debt as indicators of relationships between different areas and finds the explanatory models of urban hierarchies inadequate. The case of Newbury is of particular interest because debts do not seem to have been contracted between townspeople and those in the immediate hinterland of the town but rather within the town itself and outside the region altogether.

One of the most troubling aspects of the fifteenth-century economy in particular is the question of the chronology of change. Historians have identified the existence of distinct sub-periods, which is confirmed by Yates. She is also able to establish the importance of regional and sub-regional differences in patterns of development. Newbury enjoyed relative economic buoyancy in the fifteenth century and a period of prosperity following the mid-century recession, a factor which had some impact on the surrounding area. The picture in the north of the region is different. The town of Wantage did not enjoy similar economic buoyancy, depriving the area of the benefits of nearby urban prosperity. As always, though, Yates is aware of the complexity of the impact of various factors on different groups in society. For example, she observes the prevalence of smallholdings and poorer tax payers in the Kennet region but points out the availability of different sources of income in the area, including employment in the finishing of cloth, which encouraged immigration and ensured the viability of the local economy.

Yates’ approach is driven by her questions rather than by the survival of particular collections of documents. This means she has to fill gaps in the available evidence from western Berkshire as best she can, drawing on a very wide range of sources including many different types of administrative documents, literature, and archaeology. Her technical expertise is shared with readers in four appendices containing substantial quantities of data and detailed discussions of the methodological issues arising. Those undertaking research projects on the economic and social history of the late medieval and early modern periods will find this discussion useful.

It is tempting for historians to remain in the comfort of their own periods, a tendency often reinforced by the arbitrary divisions of university curricula. Yates has courageously attempted to transcend these divisions and finds it is not possible to identify one ‘specific moment that constitutes a break with the past and the end of the middle ages’. Instead, she finds many of the processes of change underway in the fourteenth century and then a ‘discontinuous process which continues to this day’ (p.23). Nor can the process of change easily be attributed to any particular causal factor or group in society. Rather the impact of lords as well as that of ‘enterprising individuals’ must be set in the context of urban-rural relations, physical geography, unexpected exogenous factors and so on. In this book, Yates has not only given us a detailed picture of continuity and change in one region but has demonstrated the complexity of the chronology of change and its causation.