Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), p. 171

There is nothing that demonstrates the forces that shaped the late medieval economy quite so clearly as the provision of food. En route from production to market and consumption, the persistent pressures – labour supply, wages, prices, and repeated troughs in climatic and disease cycles – are sharply exposed; yet it is often here that we also have first sight of the sources of constructive change, such as shifting patterns of land use, developing transport infrastructure, the rise of lively extra-urban markets, and seigniorial and – increasingly – civic measures to manage their communities’ needs. The records of England’s monasteries are simply unrivalled for the completeness of the data they offer. No other domestic setting matched the scale or scope of their consumption, nor their remarkable resilience; indeed, given the peculiarities of England’s Reformation, uniquely, the cathedral monasteries – and Westminster Abbey, a cathedral for a time – can provide perspectives on production and consumption that reach across the conventional medieval and early modern divide.

For the Canadian author, Philip Slavin, they – naturally – represent a ‘Klondike’ (p. 191) crying out to be panned. Of course, he is by no means the first to open a claim in this territory: the pioneers – R. A. L. Smith, F. R. H. Du Boulay, Barbara Harvey – were followed into the archives (particularly the cathedral archives) by their own generation and the following one, and the interdependence of tenantry, demesne and domus has now been drawn out across southern and south-eastern England (Bath, Winchester and especially Canterbury), the east and west midlands (Peterborough, Worcester) as well as through the very different territory of the Durham palatinate. Slavin’s mining of the Norwich Cathedral Priory estate records benefits from these now well-defined points of comparison and, to a degree, the enduring value of his researches lies in its complement to the existing corpus. Yet the distinctive character of this conventual domus, and the agricultural and commercial environment mapped in its compotus rolls should not be overlooked. Above all, perhaps, the breadth and depth of the surviving accounts allow us to follow the response of whole enterprise from before the Famine to long after the Plague and from the sloping desk of the cellarer’s clerk to the common table of the brethren, which, by the turn of the fifteenth century, could support fewer than half the intended number with limited quantities of the unusually weak ale.

The early orthodoxy held that in the later Middle Ages the great estates were commercialized both in the management of their estates and in meeting their subsistence needs. Recent studies – notably Miranda Threlfall-Holmes’s reading of the Durham records – have enhanced their reputation for market nous, but also counselled against any simple polarity, still less a sustained trend that led every estate all the way from the Black Death to the break with Rome. In the same way, Slavin discovers at Norwich an approach to estate management that was notably undogmatic, marked by the determination to respond to the challenges, and, when they arose, the opportunities, of the prevailing conditions. If there was a principle maintained in such an unpredictable climate, it was the pragmatic benefits of self-sufficiency. When conditions dictated the letting of estates, they were locked into the provisioning of the convent with grain rents. In the 250 years of Slavin’s survey, Norwich achieved 80 per cent self-sufficiency, treating the increasingly vigorous food markets of the immediate environs only as a supplement; even as the house entered its final half-century their typical rents were still in cash and kind. Such determined avoidance of market-dependency might be seen as self-defeating, given the recurrence of catastrophic harvests and conditions close to famine, but Slavin finds the responsive recasting of tenurial terms during the deepest troughs in arable production in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, when the usual grain rents were turned to cash.

Not only did the priory managers evince a nuanced understanding of the market but also, Slavin suggests, they also demonstrated a profound knowledge of the productive capacity and topography of the diverse portfolio of estates. More than two thirds were assigned to spring crops, a choice which Slavin considers shows an awareness both of local climate and commercial limitations of the Norfolk market, whose cash-poor consumers were more likely to be secured for the long term with cheaper barley bread. Meanwhile, wheat, for the convent, certainly, but, it would seem, with little market scope, was confined to the far distant estates.

Slavin presents the priory as equally proactive in the development of transport and storage, again not as a marker of a growing commercial ambition but as a determination to assure a food supply sufficient to always meet the needs of the domus. Early investment in barns bequeathed only maintenance costs (which were remarkably stable) to the convent in the century before 1540. By contrast, transport placed rising demands on their annual expenditure. Such is the scope of the compotus rolls that Slavin can conjure for us the ‘great boat’ (magna batella), comprising 219 planks, constructed in 1320–21. While still tied to rents in kind, the tenantry sought commercial opportunity in the carriage of their produce, and the rolls record rising expenditure for the priory, which was compelled to engage carters across its domain.

For Slavin, the profits of the policy of self-sufficiency were to be found not in agricultural innovations, annual yields or any demonstrable commercial advantage, but in the riches of the priory’s common table. Here, apparently, there was not just sufficiency but abundance: ‘the brethren ate and drank in truly heroic quantities’ (p. 190), he suggests, with 50 per cent of their daily diet being bread, and 2 per cent, ale (which was notably weak), generated from the sustained, and sometimes hoarded, supply of demesne grains. A significant fall in the size of the professed community (from 60 to 38) between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries gives some credence to Slavin’s claims for prodigality and the impression he draws from the rolls is not out of step with dietary trends documented at houses of varying size, wealth and market position, such as Durham, Ely and Westminster. However, his calculations of numbers of consumers within the purview of the convent at times appear hasty, if not unsafe, and he does seem to accept the fallacy that qualitative judgments can be drawn from quantitative data. There is a taste for raw totals and rough means that are not nearly as meaningful as Slavin believes.

Perhaps of greater interest to those currently working in this field are the fresh insights offered into the convent’s provision of food for those subsisting outside the gilded world of its own enclosure, some 6000 or so annually, including as much as 20 per cent of the inhabitants of the city. The quantity and variety of relief available in the precinct of the priory – including what Slavin archly calls the almoner’s ‘soup kitchen’ – is especially striking; old obligations in the city itself, such as a donation of grain to the prisoners of the castle also continued to be observed.

Given the significance of such social commitments to representations of pre-Reformation monasticism, it is disappointing that Slavin, despite his stated chronological boundaries, devotes such scant attention to the last decades before the Dissolution. In fact there is a general detachment from recent discussions of later monasticism, which may explain, if not excuse some of his lazier assertions, such as ‘monks … led a passive and contemplative life’ (p. 172). The primary interest is the patterns of economic management in the years either side of the Black Death. Still, his ready enthusiasm should remind students in this field of the empirical riches of the rolls.