Agricultural History Review, Volume 63 Part 2 (2015), p. 324

This splendid collection originated in a conference to celebrate the career of Professor Richard Smith, and it highlights some fascinating and important recent research broadly within his own diverse interests. The focus is on demographic history and the history of poverty and poor relief. English history is at the fore, but the wider perspective is never far away.

Much of the collection is given to high-quality empirical studies, but there is also room for a number of wider-ranging, discursive chapters. Wrigley, for example, revisits John Hajnal’s classic article on the north-west European marriage pattern and thinks about some of its demographic and economic implications. Late marriage, he suggests, must have increased the contribution of women to the market economy, given how marriage tended to bring partial withdrawal from wage earning. This not only meant women enjoyed a stronger economic position in north-west Europe, but it also created greater potential for wealth-generation overall. The strength of the preventative check, meanwhile, meant that the region managed to maintain an equilibrium of population at a higher level of real wages than other regimes, especially once the late-sixteenth-century peak had passed. Both factors helped north-west Europe develop unusual levels of wealth and consumerism: marriage patterns aided development. Nonetheless, as Wrigley emphasizes, the availability of land remained as a brake on economic growth: it was only when England in particular began to harness the banks of energy contained in coal that the economy achieved take-off. Similarly wide-ranging in scope, Dennison offers some very interesting thoughts on the similarities and differences between Medieval English serfdom and that found in nineteenth-century Russia. She suggests that one of the most important contrasts lay in the nature of community: in Russia, the commune was a collective and formally corporate institution; in England, peasants were part of overlapping communities, including the manor and the parish, and had tenurial and customary rights that were not collectivized. This meant that the power of the village elites to regulate the behaviour of their neighbours was much greater in Russia. Another difference was the existence of manorial courts in medieval England, providing cheap and accessible dispute resolution – even to women and the relatively poor – on an individual basis. English medieval communities, meanwhile, were in close contact with the state, through their engagement with royal law, again in sharp contrast to Russia, where public law had little or no influence on serf estates. Also taking a broad view, Ogilvie tackles the balance of ‘choice’ and ‘constraint’ amongst pre-modern peasants. She points out that recent scholarship has found – from eighth-century Italy right through to nineteenth-century Russia – even the most marginalized peasants making choices. But at the same time she cautions strongly against ignoring institutions: rules, even if lightly enforced, made an important difference to the choices made by peasants.

These excellent and thought-provoking chapters all provide useful opportunities for reflection, but it is the closer, empirical case studies which really stand out. Oakes, for example, looks at the demography of scholars at Winchester College, finding that those who came from urban areas were less likely to die while at the school, presumably because they were used to the disease environment they would encounter in the confines of the town. Once scholars were followed through to New College, Oxford, however, there were no significant differences in life chances based on origin. Campbell and Barry’s important chapter compiles population data for England, Wales, and Scotland for c.1290 and uses GIS to map the distribution of population at the time. As is to be expected, there was great variety, from 60+ people per square kilometre in parts of East Anglia to less than 5 in the most remote parts of the Scottish Highlands. Generally speaking the greatest densities were found in the fertile band through the middle of England roughly running from Portland Bill to the Wash. This ‘rural congestion’ had dramatically lifted by the time of the 1801 census, at which point the pastoral regions of the north and west and achieved considerably greater densities. Between the two dates, then, population had evolved to fit the resource geography of Britain better.

A series of articles deals with poverty and its relief. Marfany offers a useful corrective to any assumption that there was little or no formal poor relief in early modern southern Europe. She shows the diversity and complexity of provision in Catalonia which is only just being recovered by historians. Boulton looks at the relationship between indoor and outdoor paupers in eighteenth-century St-Martin-in-the-Fields, highlighting the need to be sensitive to the existence of paupers both in and out of the workhouse. He finds that, despite the parish enthusiastically endorsing the ‘Workhouse Test’ in 1725, the proportion of indoor paupers fluctuated and many were still relieved regularly outdoors. Williams, meanwhile, shows that in the Bedfordshire parishes of Campton and Shefford there was a sustained commitment to the support of the elderly in the ‘crisis’ years of the old poor law. There were, however, an increasing number of elderly couples on relief after 1815, as employment conditions in the countryside worsened and employers appear to have prioritized young male labourers over old.

In a particularly important contribution, Thompson then looks at the relationship between population growth and the foundation of corporations for the poor in the long eighteenth century. He has identified a total of 141 general and 299 local acts of parliament relating to the poor, mostly dating to 1760 onwards. In London, these seem to have followed suburban expansion, whilst in Suffolk corporations for the poor tended to be created in areas experiencing high or growing population. This suggests, to put it bluntly, that Malthus was wrong when he argued that poor relief encouraged population growth – if anything the relationship went the other way. Finally, Goose and Yates describe the seventeenth and eighteenth-century history of the Raymond almshouses in Berkshire. This was a county that was well-endowed with institutional charities, with its connections to London suggested as a plausible reason for this. As the chapter points out, the Raymond houses demonstrate the strength of the charitable impulse and the flexibility of voluntary provision within a mixed economy of welfare.

The collection is then rounded off by an article by Hoyle, which takes ‘English individualism’ as its cue. Hoyle points out that early modern businesses were almost always legally vested in a single person, thus the concern was technically wound up when they died, and though they might try to ensure the survival of a dynasty, demographic circumstances usually made this difficult. As marriage ages lowered, and lives lengthened in the eighteenth century, the true family firm might have enjoyed greater chances, but until then the death of a major employer could spell disaster for local employment.