English Seigniorial Agriculture 1250-1450 (review)

As every introductory medieval survey tells us, medieval lords lived sumptuously off the coerced labor of the peasant class, which composed 90 percent of the population. The truth has a more modest profile, but the centrality of agriculture to the lives of both peasants and nobles, whether lay or ecclesiastical, remains undisputed. The precise nature of cultivation carried out by English lords on their demesne farms receives detailed treatment in Campbell's exemplary study spanning the centuries that witnessed the change from population growth to demographic catastrophe. The extended time period allows Campbell to draw significant conclusions about the dimensions, chronology, and causes of medieval expansion, crisis, and contraction. No historian interested in any aspect of these centuries can afford to ignore his analysis.

Only because of a revolution in recordkeeping was the author able to attempt this study. By 1250, manorial accounts had spread in use and standardized in form to preserve detailed data on input and output. Within a generation, even minor lords kept such accounts. Campbell had originally envisioned a study focused only on Norfolk agriculture due to the abundance of accounts, but the records from that area provide a secure foundation for his national study. Also contributing to the database are inquisitiones post mortem generated by the central government as records of the properties of deceased tenants-in-chief. A scattering of charters, deeds, and inventories of stock and equipment complete the source base. (A more detailed list of the sources can be found in the three appendixes.)

Campbell's methodology reveals the ambitious nature of the work. Previous studies of agricultural economy focused on the abundant and clear records of perpetual ecclesiastical institutions. Historians who wished to include less extensive holdings tended to produce regional studies. Campbell has achieved a national study, of both lay and ecclesiastical demesnes, by applying a "consistent methodology to spatial and temporal analysis" (42). He employs six specific typologies for the periods 1250 to 1349 and 1350 to 1449: cropping types, pastoral types, mixed-farming types, land types by unit value, and types of demesne land use. Moreover, cluster analysis as the key statistical technique allowed the author to derive the typologies quantitatively rather than qualitatively (44).

The kinds of questions that Campbell pursues are varied and consistently pertinent to our understanding of medieval economy and society. He tracks, for example, the consequences of the small amount of livestock and the pasture needed to feed them, although record survival and interest may be limiting factors (sheep, he observes, are surprisingly underrecorded). Seigniorial diet, clothing preferences, and spending habits are firmly anchored in the analysis of farming and consumption practices, resulting in statistics on the proportion of bread grains, brewing grains, and fodder crops grown. Before the Black Death, simple forms of cropping predominated, in two- or three-course rotation of winter wheat, oats, and a few legumes. Although this strategy sustained a high level of population, on diets often coarse and monotonous, Campbell's findings indicate that production could have been even more extensive than it was. After 1350, cropping became more diversified, with an increase in legumes to feed the livestock, appealing to wealthier consumers who added meat to their diets. To his credit, Campbell can consistently draw from these accounts a living portrait of medieval society at its most basic and pertinent level.