1 - The Agrarian Problem, 1440–1520

Summary

R. H. Tawney's Agrarian Problem was an extraordinary achievement: it dealt with so many dimensions of the subject, identifying the key issues and presenting them with clarity and vigour. It is hard to appreciate that a hundred years have passed since its publication, and there are few books which retain their value after such a long passage of time. We tend to read a work of this period in the expectation that it will seem quaint and naïve. Instead, Tawney's treatment of his subject is not so different from our own. Often in planning and writing this chapter, I supposed that he would have omitted some part of our analysis of the period which I imagined to be relatively new, only to find that the thought had already occurred to him. The ‘modernity’ of his research and presentation is apparent in his awareness of regional differences, for example. He practised empathy, imagining how countrymen of the sixteenth century saw the changes of their own lifetime. He grasped points intuitively, as when he said that there was no great general advance in agricultural productivity between the later Middle Ages and the seventeenth century, which has been confirmed after painstaking archival research. He used a wide range of sources, which included not just the manorial and state records, and pamphlets and sermons, but also estate maps which mark an early venture into ‘landscape history’ before that term was invented.