Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 2 (2016), p. 272

In a real sense this book announces the arrival of a new generation of economic and agricultural historians. The work of a number of younger historians – the two editors, Tom Johnson, Simon Sandall, Alex Sapoznik – is placed alongside that of a couple of older figures marking their mark on the profession in a second career – John Gaisford, Bill Shannon – and some old hands – John Broad, Chris Dyer, David Rollison, Sheila Sweetinburgh and Andy Wood. Bowen and Brown, who coincided as research fellows at the Institute of Historical Research and held a conference there in 2013 out of which this book has evolved, have brought together a team which has produced consistently good work although inevitably some of it wanders from the book’s theme.

The two editors begin with an interesting introduction musing on custom and commercialization. It was custom that allowed commercialization to take place, at least in the form that it took in early modern England – itself a suggestion to think through. I would go a little further and suggest that custom is actually about the allocation of profits of agriculture. The form that custom took in the sixteenth century and later ensured that profits remained with the people who generated them rather than all sliding into the pockets of landowners. In this way custom in England is fundamentally different in its implications to the operation of custom at other times and in other places where its benefits were much less marked. Custom also allowed, as the editors note, tenants to accumulate land. By depriving lords of the ability to manage their land, they could not take advantage of growing demand for land in the sixteenth century to split tenements or build cottages: for this reason any tendency towards the immiseration of the whole population was defeated, and instead society became polarized.

In a useful essay Dyer writes about Tawney and Postan, and unpicks their intellectual formation and contribution to economic history. I had never quite appreciated that they were colleagues at LSE and, come to that, both admirers of Eileen Power (whom Postan married). One assumes from what Dyer says that they collaborated in the Economic History Society and on Economic History Review, but we never have a piece of correspondence between them cited, nor any comment of what one thought of the other: one is left wondering what survives. He ends with some comments on their service to the profession, with some asides on how the service commitment they exhibited is largely lacking today.

Sapoznik gives a good overview of our state of knowledge of the iron industry in medieval England and the closely related charcoal trade, which acknowledges the importance of archaeology and landscape history in making up for the considerable lacunae in the historical record. Her arguments for the importance of iron in agriculture are well made, and the presence of smiths is most villages can be taken as further proof that villagers needed iron on a regular basis for horseshoes, ploughshares and a range of other tools. (Nails and nail making deserve more attention than they get here.) But, as she shows all too well, the very ubiquity of iron makes it elusive in the historical sources. Perhaps the next place to look is in the records of the debt jurisdictions for people trading in iron and iron goods.

Next comes an ambitious paper by Broad. His initial contention is that visitors to eighteenth-century England, who were so impressed by capitalist agriculture and who took home notions of the tripartite division between landowners, farmers and labourers, misunderstood what they saw. The processes which saw the emergence of capitalist farms were driven by farmers not landlords, and often involved farmers renting land from more than one owner. Enclosure, Broad argues, was not an important factor in the creation of large farms. The essay covers a lot of ground, perhaps too much, and embedded within it there is a study of the Wiltshire village of Wylie that really needs expounding at greater length. Custom is one of the foundations of the essay: that it was the existence in England of peasant ownership guaranteed by custom that formed the basis of the rise of the farmer. I can accept this so far but have to note that in a large part of England customary forms of ownership did not take root, and it is arguable whether copyhold for lives should really be treated as a form of custom in the sense Broad means. But this is a challenging essay, which continues the tendency of other recent years to give more weight to the farmer and less to the landlord. It deserves careful reading.

The next few essays are empirically rich but perhaps less ambitious than the first three. Sweetinburgh offers a solidly documented essay about the Kentish marshlands in the later middle ages. Bowen ranges widely over commons, cottagers and enclosure in Shropshire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries very much in the terms laid down by Tawney. In an essay which sits a little oddly amongst the others, Johnson looks at the ‘economics of shipwreck in late medieval Suffolk’, including an account of the capture of porpoises, an exotic commodity never previously mentioned in the Review. This was all subject to customary rules though, which justifies its place in the book. Shannon offers an excellent review of the tensions over woodland in Furness (Lancashire) where the Duchy of Lancaster seems to have been hamstrung between its desire to profit from the woodland and its willingness to accept the customary claims of the tenants. There are implications here for the history of tenant right: the tenants come over as well-organized and persuasive, if only through weight of numbers, and able to defeat the managerial aspirations of the Duchy. Many of the same themes are taken up in Sandall’s account of the Forest of Dean in the early seventeenth century. Sir John Winter was able to exploit ill-defined customs to secure wood for his iron works; but here the Exchequer was finally able to move against Winter for his destruction of wood. And yet this essay begs more questions than it answers: the reason for the slow speed with which the Exchequer operated, the apparent impotence of the local forest courts and the Exchequer’s surveyor to stop (or restrain) Winter, whether Winter ever paid the fines levied on him, even whether he was put out of business.

Brown follows with a dense essay (which repays some perseverance) on the supply of victuals and coal to Durham Cathedral and Durham Priory, the survival of rents paid in food but also the discovery that some rents, apparently paid in money, were actually supplied in grain and animals. The interest of the essay lies in its discussion of rents paid in provisions. The suggestion that there were coin shortages in this part of the North makes sense, and helps explain fears about coin being drained out of the North by the Dissolution of the Monasteries. I can readily accept Brown’s point that payments in grain and other commodities made good sense to both landlords and tenants and their introduction should not be read as being a backward step. This could have been usefully developed. Brown seems unaware that Felicity Heal wrote about Elizabethan bishops maintaining their corn rents (in her Of prelates and princes, 1980) and he might usefully have referred to the Corn Rent Act of 1576, which laid down that a proportion of rents on future leases granted by Oxford and Cambridge, Eton and Winchester colleges were to be paid either in kind or in cash at current prices.

By comparison Gaisford offers a crisp essay on a small group of Elizabethan Wiltshire clothiers, delineating the activities and networks of figures who have hitherto been obscure and suggesting that they were every bit as wealthy as their Henrician predecessors. At his death in 1603, Edward Horton had nearly £18,000 out on loan – a fantastic amount. One would have liked a fuller analysis of his money lending: was he still active as a clothier at this time? The overall conclusions – that these clothiers were substantial figures and that the Wiltshire clothing industry remained in good health late in the sixteenth century – seem unarguable. Rollison continues the West County theme with an account of conflicts in Cirencester between the abbey and the townsfolk, and the continuation of the same disputes into the eighteenth century. I was puzzled by a couple of points, notably the question of who owned the manor of Cirencester after the Dissolution and why the townspeople made no attempt to purchase it: perhaps they did. The account Rollison gives is rather inward-looking, but there is a question of how the town related to the county JPs, for whom it was surely a problem to be managed. A comparison with another town with a similar history, Bury St Edmunds, might have been rewarding.

Finally, Wood supplies an ‘afterword’ which seems to have strayed in from another book. It makes little mention of the essays presented here, and virtually no reference to either Tawney or Postan, commends a number of recent historians of whom he approves and offers a wish list (not always a practical wish list one has to say) of areas where Wood thinks more research is needed. Interesting, but inappropriate here.

So whilst the book’s themes get lost at some points, these are individually strong essays, all of which have something interesting to say. Some of them ought to make a rapid appearance on undergraduate reading lists, and the book is to be recommended to anyone who wants to see for themselves the vitality and range of early modern rural history. One reflection on the book as a whole might well be that Tawney still has the capacity to stimulate, even if only as a jumping-off point, where the intellectual contribution of Postan seems less enduring. I might add that it is an inexpensive book which maintains the established standards of the University of Hertfordshire Press. But am I the only reader to dislike their practice of putting the body text in a sans-serif text (perhaps Arial) and the running heads and footnotes in a serif text (perhaps Times Roman?) Possibly I am old-fashioned to object to the mixing of fonts in this way, but if so, old-fashioned is what I’ll have to be.