Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: was abandoned.The investigation of Wisbech is split into four periods: 1314-48, 1349-75, 1376-1409, and 1410-29.For each period, Stone evaluates the sale and consumption of produce; cereal-cropping strategies; crop rotation and field management; agrarian techniques and the maintenance of soil fertility; and livestock husbandry.In the book's final section, a larger set of demesnes is used to test the wider applicability of the findings from Wisbech.The Wisbech chapters highlight two key themes.The first is price responsiveness, shown most forcefully in the close correlation between the acreages sown with the various cereal crops, and movements in their relative prices.The second theme is that falling agricultural productivity both before and after the Black Death reflected a deliberate managerial strategy.For example, reeves who prioritized profits saw that it was not worth spending extra money on inputs to raise output in the low price era of the 1330s and 1340s.The declining yields of those decades should therefore be seen not in terms of traditional explanations such as soil exhaustion, but as a consequence of decisions to sow smaller quantities of legumes and spread less muck.Stone identifies the individuals behind such decisions and analyses their performances, showing that in most cases the responses of reeves were successful, leading to higher returns than might otherwise have been obtained.Nor, as Stone's final section reveals, were high managerial standards and the judicious use of techniques in any sense unique to Wisbech.It is possible to have doubts about the real degree of freedom enjoyed by farm officials who were not only subject to unpredictable forces, such as the sudden effects of disease on labour supply, but were also locked into institutional structures that they could not change, such as common field systems.Stone himself is, however, well aware of such problems, and discusses their implications.There is no doubt that in his determination to penetrate the reeve's 'mental world', and to put the people who worked the land back at the centre of the study of medieval agriculture, David Stone has written an important book, which, above all, demonstrates more clearly than any currently available work the consistency with which farmers in the middle ages understood and reacted to the stimuli of the market economy.Its relevance is not limited to the minority demesne sector either, since there is an innovative short section on the yield of peasant holdings, where the objectives of production differed markedly from those on demesnes.It is also likely that this book will be read widely by students as well as specialists: though its source material is technical, and the subject matter less than glamorous, the text is vividly written, and full of images that, given the centrality of manure to Stone's topic, can best be described as pungent.
Source: The Economic History Review
Author: Chris Briggs
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2031867824