Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 146

This latest book in the CORN series of volumes brings together papers from a range of scholars who have worked on the history of land tenure in north-west Europe. Leaseholding remains one of the least studied forms of tenure, although its prevalence has been a major theme in explanations of agrarian change and development in late medieval and early modern times. This is of course in part explained by the difficulty in identifying leaseholding directly: its rise is generally viewed as concomitant to the decline of customary tenure, and the latter has been easier to trace. Yet leaseholding is not simply what we find when custom disappears: in many places and centuries there was potential for freehold land to be leased, as well as the half-glimpsed world of sub-letting that may have operated across many forms of tenure.

The authors’ attempts to grapple explicitly with leaseholding are thus very welcome. The volume encompasses an introduction by the editors, followed by chapters on Flanders, Liège, northern France, two Danish regions – the peninsula and Scania (annexed by Sweden in the seventeenth century) – and two chapters on England, one a general survey and one a case study of west Norfolk. A final chapter on the Low Countries, with a focus on the modern Netherlands, also acts as a summing-up of issues addressed throughout the book. In fact, the period covered by each chapter is highly variable and often stretches far beyond the core late medieval focus of the editors. ‘Modern’ commercial leaseholding did not for example exist in southern Scandinavia before the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

Or did it? Very soon we run into one of the reasons why studies of leaseholding are few and the idea itself elusive. There can be many forms of leaseholding, and they can occur between many different actors: leasing of manors by the Crown, leases of individual rights and streams of income, leases between lords and tenants, and sub-letting of all kinds. It is clear that the editors are really interested in quite a specific kind of lease: a more ‘modern’ kind that involved a clear voluntary contract between landlord and tenant farmer on identifiably commercial terms (preferably for cash rent) and for a relatively short duration. It is this form of lease which is reckoned, in relatively linear fashion, to have provided the scope for agricultural improvement, commercialization and the emergence of capitalist farming.

Yet given that this kind of lease was rare or nonexistent in many regions, or may even have diminished in use over time, the chapters in this book have a rather disjointed feel. They are not all rowing in the same direction, just as the agrarian worlds they studied were not. The chapters on Denmark and Scania suggest that forms of leasehold and freehold tenure were very widespread before pressures from Crown taxation and a feudal reaction spread manorialism in the late medieval period, with leaseholds only re-emerging in the liberal age much later. This story is entirely ignored in the more synthetic chapters that focus on explaining the perhaps more comfortable territory of the Netherlands and south-east England. Similarly, the wide prevalence of leaseholding identified by Whittle in England is dismissed from van Bavel’s analysis, because so much land was held by ‘beneficial lease’ – not the right kind of lease to bring about capitalist advance.

One cannot do justice to all of the divergent and detailed chapters. This reviewer found especially valuable the itemization of possible causes of the spread of commercial leasing provided in the introductory discussion. The suggestion that leasing could work to the advantage of tenants by reducing risk and direct dependence on lords is a useful corrective to the notion that such tenures were always imposed by exploitative landlords seeking rack rents or discipline from a tenantry inclined to custom. Tim Soens and Erik Thoen have produced a thoughtful and nuanced discussion of how local ecological and market conditions generated radically different property relations in adjacent parts of Flanders. Christer Lundh and Matt Olsson’s survey of property law and rights from medieval times until the nineteenth century in Scania – a region less familiar to most anglophone historians – is clear and useful, even though little of the discussion pertains to commercial leasing. Jane Whittle provides tentative but judicious moves towards quantification of the distribution of tenures in England, usefully straddling the late medieval and early modern divide. There is, in sum, much of value in this volume although it delivers more than the title promises, in terms of chronological scope, and, at the same time, rather less in terms of coherent collection and analysis than it might have. Rather more stringent copy-editing would also have been welcome.