7 - Agriculture: Divergence, Development, Disappointment

Summary

During the long sixteenth century, the increased agricultural commercialization and specialization, differentiation among the rural population, and concentration of land ownership that marked late medieval agrarian Europe had become more pronounced. Novel trends had also gotten underway: tenurial reorganization, a “little divergence” between Eastern and Western European agrarian structures and farming practices, the supplanting of Mediterranean by northwestern lands, the appearance of areas marked by change even within regions typified by stability. Old or new, all had encountered headwinds even before the crisis decades in the seventeenth century.