It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. They also fail to explain why institutions are influenced by the past, why it is that they can sometimes change, why they differ so much from society to society, and why it is hard to study them empirically and devise a policy aimed at altering them. This 2006 book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration. It presents a multi-disciplinary perspective to study endogenous institutions and their dynamics.

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Institutions and the path to the modern economy

Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation

(The place of publication is London and the date 2006 unless otherwise stated.)

List of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in 2006

List of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in 2019

This book is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation. It takes as its subject not the conversion of English subjects to a new religion but rather their political responses to a Reformation perceived as an act of state and hence, like all early modern acts of state, negotiated between government and people. These responses included not only resistance but also significant levels of accommodation, co-operation and collaboration as people attempted to co-opt state power for their own purposes. This study argues, then, that the English Reformation was not done to people, it was done with them in a dynamic process of engagement between government and people. As such, it answers the twenty-year-old scholarly dilemma of how the English Reformation could have succeeded despite the inherent conservatism of the English people, and it presents a genuinely post-revisionist account of one of the central events of English history.

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Popular politics and the English Reformation

1. The Risings of 1536-7: Retrospect and Prospect 2. A Northern Panorama 3. 1536: The Year of the Three Queens 4. Lincolnshire 5. The Dynamics of the Lincolnshire Rising 6. Fever Days: The Reaction to Lincolnshire 7. The Rising in the East Riding 8. The 'Captain Poverty' Revolts 9. Misunderstanding Darcy 10. The Confrontation at Doncaster 11. The Benignity of the Prince 12. Winding up the Pilgrimage 13. The King's Love for the North 14. The Return of the Duke of Norfolk 15. The Rebellions as Commons' Revolts Epilogue: 'to knit up this tragedy' Select Documents Bibliography of Printed Sources Index

The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s

This article offers the thesis that petitioning by collective groups, whether occupational, regionally constituted, or simply the body of people called the commons, was an important form of political communication in the early sixteenth century which, although poorly documented and consequently overlooked by historians, allows us an entry into the world of popular politics. The article offers illustrations of the way in which petitions were employed within the city of York, by groups such as weavers or by the commons of East Anglia in 1549 and 1553. The right to petition could not be denied, but mass petitioning was viewed with apprehension by government. Nonetheless, petitioning may be seen as a conservative form of behaviour when compared to calls for insurrection.

Petitioning as popular politics in early sixteenth–century England

Earls Colne first came to the notice of historians through Macfarlane's study of its seventeenth-century vicar, Ralph Josselin, and then Macfarlane's use of evidence from the village in his 'The origins of English individualism (1978)'. This article presents preliminary results drawn from a computer-based reconstruction of the copyhold land market, 1546-1750, to contest Macfarlane's reading of the family-land bond in the manor. The familial possession of land over long periods is shown to be normal, and consistent with an active land market predominantly in smaller parcels. Little consolidation took place in the manor although some growth in holding size was achieved through subtenancy. Finally, the article asks whether the experience of copyholders is typical of the general.

English Individualism Refuted - and Reasserted: The Land Market of Earls Colne (Essex), 1550-1750

This article argues that historians have paid insufficient attention to the agrarian roots of early modern English famines. While not dismissing the insights arising from entitlements theory, the article takes issue with recent writings that have explained the famine of 1622–3 in north-west England as an entitlements crisis. It offers new empirical evidence from an estate in east Lancashire to demonstrate the scale of the crisis in the early 1620s, using estate accounts to produce new price data and estimates of productivity. On the basis of oat tithe data, the scale of the shortfall in foodstuffs in the harvest of 1621 is demonstrated as being probably in the region of a third; that of the following year has to be inferred from price data. The evidence shows that the crisis was not limited to the arable economy, but was followed by an extensive restocking of the pastoral economy. The article therefore makes a contribution to the growing interest in weather as an exogenous factor.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=1690752

Famine as agricultural catastrophe: the crisis of 1622-4 in east Lancashire.

Earls Colne first came to the notice of historians through Macfarlane's study of its seventeenth-century vicar, Ralph Josselin, and then Macfarlane's use of evidence from the village in his The origins of English individualism (1978). This article presents preliminary results drawn from a computer-based reconstruction of the copyhold land market, 1546-1750, to contest Macfarlane's reading of the family-land bond in the manor. The familial possession of land over long periods is shown to be normal, and consistent with an active land market predominantly in smaller parcels. Little consolidation took place in the manor although some growth in holding size was achieved through subtenancy. Finally, the article asks whether the experience of copyholders is typical of the general.

/pdf/english-individualism-refuted-and-reasserted-the-land-market-1hkpgpvxkd.pdf

Richard W. Hoyle

Papers

The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s

Petitioning as popular politics in early sixteenth–century England

English Individualism Refuted - and Reasserted: The Land Market of Earls Colne (Essex), 1550-1750

Famine as agricultural catastrophe: the crisis of 1622-4 in east Lancashire.

English individualism refuted — and reasserted: the land market of Earls Colne (Essex), 1550–1750