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Medieval English Peasants and Market Involvement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Kathleen Biddick
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Abstract

This paper uses a taxation assessment to analyze the relations between taxable peasant wealth and regional marketing geography. The results show cashcropping patterns for different grains and livestock. The selectivity of market involvement poses broader questions concerning economic vulnerability at the household and community levels among the English peasantry, and strategies used to contain vulnerability.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , December 1985 , pp. 823 - 831
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1985

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References

1 Debate over the market is central to the essays collected in the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1978).Google Scholar For a comprehensive review see Brenner, Robert, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present, 97 (1982), pp. 16–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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7 The production of different demographic characteristics among economic groups in medieval villages and the greater vulnerability of poorer groups to harvest failure could be explored further in light of the differential risk of cash cropping between larger and smaller landholders: Razi, Zvi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 92–98.Google Scholar Studies of contemporary subsistence farmers drawn into cash cropping prompt the historian to look for change in field and village with the advent of cash cropping: Rodman, Margaret, “Masters of Tradition: Customary Tenure and New Forms of Social Inequality in a Vanuatu Peasantry,” American Ethnologist, 11, no. 1 (1984), pp. 61–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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9 Both Postan and Hilton have objected to the use of the Chayanovian model in interpreting the subsistence economy of medieval English peasants: Postan, Michael M., The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 135;Google ScholarHilton, Rodney H., “The Peasantry as a Class,” in his The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1973), pp. 6–7.Google Scholar For a more recent critique consult Smith, Richard M., “Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England, 1250–1800,” in Smith, Richard M., ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 6–38.Google Scholar

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13 The medieval taxable wealth of the county may be compared by consulting Buckatzsch, E. J., “The Geographical Distribution of Wealth in England, 1086–1483: An Experimental Study of Certain Tax Assessments,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 3, no. 2 (1950), pp. 180–202.Google Scholar

14 The term “taxation vill” is used here to indicate that the returns for some villages included their nearby hamlets.Google Scholar

15 Lay subsidies present the historian with certain problems as sources. Assessment of taxable wealth involved a deductible. Goods considered necessary for subsistence were not to be taxed. Not enough is known, however, about local attitudes towards subsistence to comment on the extent of the deductible; however, it is generally considered that assessments on grain and livestock, the principle movables listed in returns, were taxes on surplus that could be marketed: Willard, Parliamentary Taxes, p. 85. The extent of exemption and evasion is very difficult to measure, too. Each subsidy had its own eligibility minimum. Peasants whose assessed taxable wealth was less than the minimum, which in 1297 was set at nine shillings, would not appear on the rolls. In a study of the Lay Subsidies of 1327 and 1332 for the village of Broughton, Huntingdonshire, the roster of village taxpayers was crosslinked with the names of individuals and family groupings identified from the contemporary series of manorial court rolls.Google Scholar Of the 105 resident families reconstructed from the Broughton court rolls, only 40 percent appear on the tax rolls: Britton, Edmund, The Community of the Vill: A Study in the History of the Family and Village life in Fourteenth Century England (Toronto, 1977), pp. 70–76. Nevertheless, J. F. Hadwin concluded in a recent review article on the subsidies as sources that they “may constructively supplement information from other sources, form the basis for an interesting hypothesis which may be checked against whatever data exist.”Google ScholarHadwin, J. F., “The Medieval Lay Subsidies and Economic History,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 36 (05 1983), p. 214. Gaydon, the editor of the Bedfordshire rolls, noted (p. xii) that the corrections and notes on this roll suggest that the assessment was carried out with care.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Peasant taxpayers as a social group are discussed by Britton, The Community of the Vill, pp. 70–76;Google Scholar see also Raftis, James A. and Hogan, Mary P., eds., Early Huntingdonshire Lay Subsidy Rolls, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Subsidia Mediaevalia, no. 8 (Toronto, 1976). The term “kulak” is from Michael Postan, Medieval Economy and Society, pp. 70–76.Google Scholar

17 I consulted the following volumes of the Victoria County History: for the county of Bedfordshire, vols. 2, 3, Page, William, ed. (London, 1908; 1913);Google ScholarHuntingdonshire: vols. 2, 3, William Page et al., eds. (London, 1932; 1936); Hertfordshire: vols. 3, 4, William Page, ed. (London, 1912; 1914); Cambridgeshire: vol. 5, C. R. Elrington, ed. (London, 1973).Google ScholarBeresford, Maurice and Finberg, H. P. R., English Medieval Boroughs: A Handlist (Totowa, N.J., 1973). I am grateful to Maryanne Kowaleski for drawing my attention to the Public Record Office index. Information about medieval roadways, fording points, and bridges in the Victoria County History is unusually full and well documented for Bedfordshire. N. S. B. Gras recognized London's regional market pull, and we know that grain from the Midlands was transported to Cambridge which served as a major transport center for linking the Midlands with East Anglian ports:Google ScholarGras, Norman S. B., The Evolution of the English Corn Market (Cambridge, 1915);CrossRefGoogle ScholarCam, Helen Maud, “The City of Cambridge,” in Roach, J. P. C., ed., The Victoria County History: Cambridgeshire, vol. III (London, 1959), pp. 86–94;Google ScholarCarus-Wilson, Eleanora, “The medieval trade of the ports of the Wash,” Medieval Archaeology, 6–7 (1962–1963), pp. 182–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 My remarks apply to the thirteenth century. Regional marketing systems underwent reconfiguration in the later Middle Ages: Everitt, Alan, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce,” in Thirsk, Joan, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. IV: 1500–1640 (London, 1967), pp. 466–592; The study of farmers as part-time traders in periodic markets has been neglected by anthropologists and geographers.Google Scholar A call for such studies has been raised by Smith, Robert H. T. in a two-part review article entitled “Periodic market-places and periodic marketing: review and prospect,” Progress in Human Geography, 3, no. 3 (1979), pp. 471–505, and 4, no. 1 (1980), pp. 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Hay, Alan, “Some Alternatives in the Economic Analysis of Periodic Marketing,” Geographical Analysis, 9 (01 1977), pp. 72–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Based on a study of the spatial and temporal distancing of markets in medieval Nottinghamshire, Tim Unwin concluded too that the medieval peasants must have been part-time traders: “Rural marketing in medieval Nottinghamshire,” Journal of Historical Geography, 7, no. 3 (1981), pp. 231–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Wheat was certainly a main cash crop on the manor of the Earl of Cornwall at Sundon in Flitt Hundred, Beds. The accounts rolls for the manor in the year 1297 inform us that the Earl planted 189.5 out of 212 acres with wheat and dredge (a malting grain). He sold 43.4 percent and 49.1 percent of the yields of these crops respectively: Midgley, Laura M., Minister's Accounts of the Earldom of Cornwall, Camden Society, 3rd ser., 66 (1942), pp. 6–12.Google Scholar

20 The need of English peasants to pay taxes and rents, to make nest eggs for settling children and supporting retirement, or to supplement insufficient subsistence income could induce them to intensify household production and choose cash crop rotations. Extending output through more intensive labor input can heighten the vulnerability of the household economy: Ghatak, Subrata, Development Economics (London, 1978), pp. 107–13;Google ScholarKunreuther, Howard and Wright, Gavin, “Safety first, gambling, and the subsistence farmer,” in Roumasset, James A., Boussard, Jean-Marc, and Singh, Inderjit, eds., Risk, Uncertainty and Agricultural Development (New York, 1982), pp. 213–30. Such conditions can lay t he groundwork for immiseration. Historically, the growing demands of the English crown on the peasantry certainly produced immiserating conditions: John Robert Maddicott, The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294–1341, Past and Present Supplement, no. 1 (1975).Google Scholar

21 McCloskey, Donald, “English Open Fields as Behavior Towards Risk,” in Uselding, Paul J., ed., Research in Economic History, 1 (1976), pp. 154–62.Google Scholar

22 A point made for modern marketing systems as well: Smith, Carol A., “Local History in a Global Context: Social and Economic Transitions in Western Guatemala,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26 (04 1984), pp. 193–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Peasants could have engaged in sheep dairying. Unfortunately the assessors did not a s a practice distinguish ewes, wethers, yearlings, and lambs; therefore, the rolls offer no way of exploring the importance of sheep dairying among the peasantry.Google Scholar

24 Langdon, John, “The Economics of Horses and Oxen in Medieval England,” The Agricultural History Review, 30, part 1 (1982), pp. 31–40.Google Scholar