Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial europe

The Rise of the British Coal Industry.

The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War.

ReviewWrightson Keith, Levine David, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling 1525–1700, Academic Press, New York, San Francisco, London (1979), Pp. xii + 200. £11·20

In this compact volume, Carlo Cipolla offers a long view of economic change. In rich detail, he shows how people lived through centuries that had dynamism but lacked the structural change that could come only with the Industrial Revolution. In the first half of the book, Cipolla draws a \"static approximation\" of the pre-industrial European economy, focussing on demand, supply, productivity, and production. Food took up 60 to 80 per cent of consumer demand, which in turn vastly exceeded government spending, private investment, and the foreign sector in final demand. Outside of England, public authorities rarely gave money to the poor, making charity vital in the transfer of income. Because so many people had so little money, pre-industrial economies supplied mostly the essentials: food, textiles, and shelter. Living a preindustrial life also meant preparing desperately for catastrophe. Poor weather, unreliable transportation, wars, and epidemics easily cut off the flow of supplies. In response to such insecurity, both consumers and producers built inventories, when possible, making working capital much more important than fixed capital. In the second half of the book, Cipolla discusses forces that produced economic change if not industrial revolution, such as population growth, technological and business innovation, and geographical power shift. Population grew from the eleventh century to the mid-fourteenth, when the Black Plague destroyed one-quarter of the 80 million Europeans. That level was not reached again for 150 years; then, population surged to 105 million in the sixteenth century and edged up to 115 million in the turbulent seventeenth century. Urban growth fostered a class of middle-income professionals, who formed a new market and a new political force. Pre-industrial Europe made great advances in mechanical technology: water and wind mills, clocks, firearms, full-rigged ships with iron guns, navigational tools, and many other artifacts. Sophisticated business institutions also emerged. Well before the great ocean explorations of the sixteenth century, the Italians had devised new credit instruments. Afterwards, the English and Dutch took the lead with their trading and joint stock companies. In political and military affairs, Europe remained a junior to Byzantium and the Arab Empire from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, despite growing economic parity. By 1500 Europe had developed wellarmed ocean vessels that the rest of the world simply could not match.

Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700. By Carlo M. Cipolla. New York, W. W. Norton, 1976. Pp. xiv + 326. $12.95.

This thesis explores how rural society adapted to the fifteenth-century recession, and how this affected the ability of their sixteenth-century counterparts to respond to inflation. It does so through three primary sections: the first explores how the Bishops of Durham and the monks of Durham Cathedral Priory responded differently to the fifteenth-century recession and analyses the subsequently divergent development of their estates. By the seventeenth century, all of the Dean and Chapter’s lands were consolidated holdings on 21-year leases, whereas a confused mixture of copyhold and leasehold land had developed on the bishops’ estate. The second section explores the balance of landed power in the Palatinate of Durham from the late-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century amongst the laity. This further explores whether the ‘crisis of the aristocracy’ and the ‘rise of the gentry’ are misnomers more adequately phrased in terms of land usage as the ‘rise of agricultural producers’ and the ‘crisis of rentier landlords’. The final section explores how the tenantry of the above estates survived this period, with the gradual stratification of landed society and the emergence of the yeomanry as a social group. It especially focuses upon how the divergent development of the two ecclesiastical estates impacted upon the opportunities and challenges facing the tenants of Durham. The overall conclusion reached by this thesis is that estate management and institutional constraints were often crucial factors in the transformation of the English countryside: these two neighbouring ecclesiastical estates faced broadly the same problems and yet the composition of their estates diverged significantly across this period. Institutional constraints had a profound effect not only on levels of rent, but also the tenure of holdings and ultimately their relative size; three of the most important factors in the formation of agrarian capitalism.

Alexander Thomas Brown

Papers

Recession and recovery : the economic history of rural society in Durham, c.1400-1640