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The Rise and Fall of A Theoretical Model: The Manorial System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Stefano Fenoaltea
Stefano Fenoaltea
Affiliation:
Amherst College
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Extract

Douglass North and Robert Thomas recently proposed a model of the rise and fall of the manorial system. There is much to be admired in this work, which explores an unusually broad historical vision with great analytical acumen; but my purpose here is to examine some of its less compelling features. In section II, I consider the nature of feudalism, and develop empirical arguments against the wholly voluntaristic and non-exploitative interpretation proposed by North and Thomas. Section III examines their analysis of the “classic” manor, which I believe errs both in limiting the feasible contracts to forms of direct barter and in attributing the lowest transaction costs to labor dues even within that restricted set. Section IV reviews the proposed explanation of the later evolution of the manorial system, disputing both the continued use of the transaction costs model and the extensions of it that consider custom as an institutional barrier to efficiency, and population growth and inflation as the exogenous motors of change. Section V provides a brief concluding summary and evaluation.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , June 1975 , pp. 386 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1975

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References

1 North, Douglass,Thomas, Robert, “The Rise and Fall of the Manorial System: A Theoretical Model,” Journal of Economic History, XXXI (December 1971), 777–803CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The nature of feudalism is discussed on pp. 778–783, but the a priori argument appears most explicitly somewhat later, at the point of transition to the transactioncost argument for labor dues. The argument that “the lord was necessary to the peasant”—as protector (“against raiders, or against thieves”) of the growing crops— may also be found in Hicks, John R., A Theory of Economic History (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 102Google Scholar.

3 Note that the criterion- of “exploitation” is here the difference between the actual welfare of the serfs and their hypothetical welfare as free peasants (on all the land of the village, demesne included). I shall also use the term in this sense, which is closer to common usage than the less interesting neoclassical definition (to which North and Thomas occasionally revert, e.g.; p. 788 n).

4 See most recently Postan, M. M., The Medieval Economy and Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), p. 111 ffGoogle Scholar. None of this is new, of course: see for instance Maitland, F. W., Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Preses, 1897), pp. 114, 129 ff.Google Scholar; also Hilton, R. H., A Medieval Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 143Google Scholar.

5 Nor, a fortiori, the growing crops; see note 2 above.

6 Postan, Medieval Economy, p. 111 ff.; Maitland, Domesday Book, pp. 80 ff., 258 ff., and esp. pp. 101–102.

7 Unless the peasants are protected by their very poverty: the freedom of mountain peasants may thus be as readily explained by the lack of expropriate surplus as by the inaccessibility of their crops. Contrast Hicks, Theory, pp. 102–103.

8 Thus Alexander Gerschenkron in “Mercator Gloriosus,” a review of Hicks, in Economic History Review, XXIV (1971), 655Google Scholar. See also for instance Bloch, M., Feudal Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), esp. ch. XVIIICrossRefGoogle Scholar. Documented cases of seigneurial gangsterism as late as the early fourteenth century are reported by Hilton in A Medieval Society, pp. 42, 223.

9 I am ignoring here the need for supervision to ensure that the owner's capital is adequately maintained; this enforcement cost is common to. all contracts, and is in fact minimal in very long-term rental arrangements. Note that the present issue of rents versus labor dues concerns the organization of labor and production within the manor: whether production should be carried out exclusively in petty tenancies, or in demesne farms as well; whether the surplus should be appropriated in goods or in labor; whether labor should be “independent” or “dependent.” It must not be confused with the quite separate issue of rents (“farms”) versus direct exploitation of entire manors, which does not concern workers' incentives at all.

10 Both, of these devices illustrate the partial substitutability of negotiation and enforcement costs. The detailed specification of the worker's obligations makes enforcement easier, as their effective content is no longer disputable; but it does so at the cost of added negotiation costs due to the greatly increased complexity of the, share contract. The threat of punishment operated in the opposite direction: rather than dismissing the lazy worker, and then renegotiating his payment (perhaps increasing the extent of his labor obligations to reflect his lower productivity), it was simpler to retain the contract and adjust (judicially) ex post.

11 The root problem is thus that of internalizing, for the individual worker, penalties and rewards that would otherwise be largely external. Even collective responsibility, though it might allow a somewhat greater scope for peer pressure and “moral incentives,” in the main simply transfers (without eliminating, and perhaps without “shifting”) the burden of enforcement. The experience of contemporary Socialist systems provides a rich body of evidence on the stubbornness of these problems.

12 The statement that labor dues are the contractual form with the highest enforcement costs (North and Thomas, p. 790) does not appear warranted, however, as in a wage system the production of all income is heir to the intemalization problems labor-sharing encounters in the production of the surplus alone. (The term of the contract is not at issue, as all contractual forms admit of short and long terms, dismissal for cause, etc.)

13 See Kula, W., Théorie économique du système féodal (Paris: Mouton, 1970), p. 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Data on the temporal distribution of work in a system of traditional (twoor three-course, naked fallow) agriculture may be found in Chayanov, A. V., The Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood: Irwin, 1966), esp. pp. 74 ff., 107 ffGoogle Scholar.

14 The argument is not that leisure has a lower marginal utility than labor; it is, rather, that while these two marginal utilities are indeed equalized at any point in time (excluding “corner solutions”), they need not be constant over time, since we cannot transfer days from one season to another.

15 The financial year of manorial accounts and agreements thus began at Michaelmas, close after the harvest; see for instance Titow, J. Z., English Rural Society, 1200–1350 (London: George Allen and Nnwin, 1969), p. 27 ffGoogle Scholar.

16 See my “Risk, Transaction Costs, and the Organization of Medieval Agriculture” (forthcoming).

17 In point of fact, standard coins are a comparative novelty, and it takes no little expertise to measure the metal content of a coin whose weight and fineness are uncertain. In the agricultural society of early medieval Europe such perfectly familiar, widely used, relatively homogeneous, and readily divisible commodities as grain or salt might well have been more saleable than gold or silver (even though die latter would of course have remained better stores of value, particularly with burial as the common form of safe-keeping). One thus finds in Smith, R. A. L., Canterbury Cathedral Priory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), p. 143Google Scholar, a tantalizing reference to a “very ancient wheat market”: but to what extent was wheat at first the commodity rattier than the means of exchange? Much more indirect barter may thus have taken place than has been recognized by modern observers in whose experience money is only paper or metal, and households acquire (other) goods only to consume them themselves; see however that traced by Heckscher, Eli F., An Economic History of Sweden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 33 ffGoogle Scholar.

18 To the extent that expectations are not realized, all contractual arrangements, labor dues included, could witness the opportunity for mutually beneficial exchange after the harvest had been brought in; but this is here of secondary importance.

19 The position of the lord—party to every labor-sharing or rental contract, and empowered not only to create markets but to compel their use—suggests that the manor would not be locked into systems in kind even if markets were “absent” and a quantum change was necessary to reach the superior solution represented by (widespread) indirect barter.

20 See Duby, G., Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 25–27, 44–46, 361 ff.Google Scholar; note that seed may nave represented over half of total output. Even if markets were thin, moreover, moral incentives could substitute for market opportunities as a means of reducing “haggling” and transaction costs, as the imperative of custom facilitated agreement at the customary, “just” price. This argument applies to contingent contracts as well: one wonders, in fact, whether relative “just” price scorresponded to expected marginal rates of transformation.

21 Thus Wolf, E. R. on Dopsch, A., in “The Inheritance of Land among Bavarian and Tyrolese Peasants,” Anthropologica (1970), 106Google Scholar.

22 Rents in kind were thus widespread throughout the Middle Ages; not surprisingly, they appear to have been most durable where life was most carefully ordered—on the monastic estates. See Duby, Rural Economy, pp. 178 ff., 376 ff.; Vinogradoff, P., English Society in the Eleventh Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), pp. 327 ff., 384 ff.Google Scholar; Raftis, J. A., The Estates of Ramsey Abbey (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Studies and Texts, 3, 1957), pp. 10 ff., 61 ff.Google Scholar; Harvey, P. D. A., A Medieval Oxfordshire Village: Cuxham, 1240 to 1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 119Google Scholar. Nowadays also universities, for instance, do not pay their faculty entirely in money, and then sell them library privileges and office space; part of the faculty's services are bartered directly, “in kind,” for an assortment of perks. Some of these (e.g., access to athletic facilities) are of course so obtained as a means of reducing income tax payments, but payments for office space, library privileges, and the like would represent tax-deductible expenses.

23 Transaction costs also appear to account for the scattering of peasants' plots; see my “Risk, Transaction Costs.”

24 North and Thomas themselves suggest a possible candidate, as they claim for labor-sharing “the possible advantage of spreading the risk between parties according to their relative shares” (p. 789, and see p. 784); the validity of this argument is examined in my “Risk, Transaction Costs.” I find it more plausible to argue that labor dues were valued as a means of exercising authority over the labor force for the sake of implementing a superior technique, or of reinforcing social roles. See my “Authority, Efficiency, and Agricultural Organization in Medieval England and Beyond: A Hypothesis” (forthcoming).

25 Postan, M. M., “The Chronology of Labour Services,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, XX (1937), 169–193CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see North and Thomas, p. 782 n.

26 In fact, it is difficult to believe that the interaction of lord and peasant did not eliminate inefficiency, and thus that local variations were in fact random; see my “Authority, Efficiency.”

27 Thus for instance Duby, Rural Economy, pp. 113–114; the freedom of the frontier is there taken to explain the decline of labor dues in the older settled areas as well.

28 Postan, “Chronology,” p. 171; see also pp. 192–193.

29 The Eastern half of the Hanseatic trade route might be considered an exception; but even the German migration to the East appears to have done little more than displace an alternative ethnic group—and what difference would it have made if the Baltic trade had been rather less intra-German and more international than it actually was? As North and Thomas suggested earlier (p. 782), of course, the relative lack of trade appears best attributed not to a lack of possible gains from it (assuming free transport) but to the high cost of transporting goods in the troubled anarchy most of Europe had lapsed into.

30 See for instance, Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1955), I, p. 56. In the absence of a coalition, of course, such behavior may have been perfectly rational from the perspective of the individuals concerned. A Cournot solution in which eachtakes the tolls set by the others as given, for instance, is analogous to the usual oligopoly case, but with the axes reversed—i.e., assuming a linear “demand” (surplus) curve, and taking n as the number of “firms” (lords levying a toll), the volume of trade will tend to l / (n + 1) of the volume unrestricted by tolls, and die total toll to n/(n + 1) of the toll that would just eliminate trade; with “free entry,” trade would virtually disappear as n grew.

31 See for instance, Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 422 ff. The term “accident” is used advisedly: at the level of the sovereign state, only small numbers of individuals are involved, and the corresponding analysis cannot draw on the statistical predictability of mass behavior.

32 See for instance Heckscher, Mercantilism, I, p. 78 ff.

33 “When the fundamental institutional arrangements are not those of private property rights, the possible new contractual responses to changing parameters may not be ‘ideal’: that is, a more efficient contractual arrangement could be envisioned by an economist, given the existence of private property. The response of the manorial economy to the inflation of the thirteenth century is an example” (North and Thomas, p. 799).

34 Thus, by mid-century, some of Ely's villein land was “held ‘de anno in annum ad voluntatem domini’ for money rents”: see Miller, E., The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. 109–110Google Scholar, also pp. 107–108, 136.

35 And often it did not even do that: see for instance Bloch, M., French Rural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 70Google Scholar. As to the thirteenth century in particular, Postan, “Chronology,” p. 192, roundly contradicts the claim (North and Thomas, p. 797) that the lord could not violate existing agreements.

36 In abstract terms, the lord had his choice of two endowment points in moneylabor space, one point defining a bundle (mostly) of labor and the other a bundle (mostly) of money. The prevailing wage (explicit, or implicit in marginal productivity and goods prices) would expand each point into a line of a given slope; normally, one endowment point would wholly dominate the other, the money-basket being preferable at low money wages, the labor-basket at high ones. Inflation could thus redefine the obligations (the endowment) the lord chose to claim; but what needs to be explained is the shift in the composition not of the endowment point but of the preferred “consumption” basket, i.e. of the observed equilibrium. Of the commutability of those labor services for (increased) rents there can be no doubt: see Miller, Ely, p. 102; also Postan in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. I, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 606–607Google Scholar.

37 North and Thomas, p. 795; also Postan, Cambridge Economic History, p. 611.

38 See for instance Miller, Ely, p. 110.

39 The obvious difficulty with the proposed interpretation is of course that the very institutional conditions which supposedly explained the return to labor dues would never have allowed their abandonment in the first place. North and Thomas appear to finesse this problem by changing perspective in mid-argument: the successive systems before the thirteenth century nad been analyzed with an eye to the transaction costs associated with the system itself, in a static context, rather than with the introduction of a new system as circumstances changed over time. While the latter approach is in some sense more sophisticated, it is not superior if the objective is to explain not short-run disequilibria but the system's long-term evolution.

40 This involved “reimposing, in specified detail, the labor obligations which formerly were unspecified.” The impact of such specification on the structure of transaction costs has been discussed above; see also North and Thomas, p. 790.

41 See for instance Postan, Cambridge Economic History, pp. 556–559, and van Bath, B. H. Slicher, The Agrarian History of Western Europe A.D. 500–1850 (London: Arnold, 1963), p. 89Google Scholar.

42 This is not to deny that pestilence thrived in famine's wake; see for instance Slicher van Bath, ibid., p. 89, and Ladurie, E. Le Roy, Les paysans de Languedoc (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1966), pp. 141, 325, and 423–424CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The point to note, however, is the much higher mortality for given levels of population and malnutrition from the mid–fourteenth century.

43 See for instance Postan's analysis of “The Fifteenth Century,” Economic History Review, IX (1939), 160–167Google Scholar; Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans, p. 179 ff.; Slicher van Bath, Agrarian History, p. 163 ff.; and Génicot, L. in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. I, 2d ed. (1966), pp. 661–664Google Scholar.

44 See Saltmarsh, John, “Plague and Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages,” Cambridge Historical Journal, VII (1941), 23–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. J. F. D. Shrewsbury has recently argued that diseases other than bubonic plague were responsible for most of the epidemics of the later Middle Ages; see A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), esp. ch. 5Google Scholar. What matters here, however, is not the exact identity of the illnesses but their unusual virulence at that time.

45 This fact is further evidence against the proposed model of political innovation. Trade arose, we were told, when the lords coalesced in response to the opportunity to enrich themselves by doing so; but they failed to coalesce as buyers of labor even though the damnum emergens as they bia wages up was surely far easier to perceive than the lucrum cessans from not allowing trade to begin at all. In point of fact, as noted above, the modern Western state was not the product of a coalition at all, let alone a coalition of the aristocracy.

46 Assuming, of course, that the rise in real wages was not more than offset by the increased uncertainty that one would live to enjoy it …

47 See for instance Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 271; contrast North and Thomas, e.g., p. 779.

48 Nabholz, H. in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941), p. 511Google Scholar.

49 See above, n. 39.

50 North and Thomas concede as much, again undermining their own argument, with the statement that the customary rents were combined with labor obligations in one (new, surely) fixed rent contract, which moreover introduced lengthy leases (about which more forthwith).

51 Raftis, Ramsey Abbey, p. 251.

52 Postan, Cambridge Economic History, p. 616.

53 Raftis, Ramsey Abbey, pp. 259–260.

54 There is also a problem of internal consistency: why should the inflation of the sixteenth century have spelled the death of the manorial economy, if that of the thirteenth century had instead revived it in its “classic” form?

55 See for instance Nabholz, Cambridge Economic History, p. 519; Postan, Cambridge Economic History, p. 596; Raftis, Ramsey Abbey, p. 288. Where the rents did remain constant over the fifteenth century and became “customary,” moreover, they were increased (through the medium of entry fines) early in die sixteenth century; see Pollard, A. J., “Estate Management in the Later Middle Ages: The Talbots and Whitchurch, 1383–1525,” Economic History Review, XXV (1972), 558Google Scholar.

56 Bloch, French Rural History, pp. 127–128. On heritability as the norm in earlier centuries, see Titow, English Rural Society, p. 18 n.

57 See North and Thomas, p. 781 n. Bloch, for instance, argues instead that “the manor in itself has no claim to a place among the institutions which we call feudal” (Feudal Society, p. 279), and treats the decline of “manorialism” and of “feudalism” as quite separate in time as well as in identity (French Rural History, pp. 77 ff., 102 ff.). See also Pollard, “Estate Management,” 558–559. On a broader scale, it is of course the changing relation between the lords and the increasingly powerful state (rather than that between the lords and the peasants) which is crucial to the change in the “fundamental institutional arrangement” and “the rise of the Western World.”