The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labor in Norfolk, 1440-1580 (review)

Medieval and early modern social history has yet to recover, so it seems, from the controversy over the historical origins of European capitalism sparked by Brenner in 1976.¹ Whittle's monograph is an effort to test some of Brenner's more controversial propositions against an intensive case study of a half-dozen manors in northeast Norfolk. In particular, the book focuses on (and ultimately rejects) Brenner's argument that the insecurity of English land tenure enabled sixteenth-century lords to expropriate peasant family farms and consolidate them into much larger productive units. The large farms were then leased out to entrepreneurial tenants, who worked them with landless "free" wage laborers, and it was in these agrarian factories, Brenner argued, that the precocious capitalism of early modern England was born.

Whittle's Norfolk looks decidedly different from what Brenner had presumed. The burden of rents, fines, and other landlordly exactions declined in real terms while the peasants enjoyed considerable security of tenure. There was no net transfer of land from customary (peasant) tenure to leasehold, and, on balance, the manor was "a constant background, rather than an active force in causing change" (84). By contrast, the market for land among the peasants saw more significant changes. The fifteenth century saw a steady increase in both the proportion of land transferred according to the active wish of the tenant (rather than descending postmortem by inheritance custom) and the average size of the parcels transferred, followed by a decline in land market activity and an increase in the price of land from the 1530s, and especially the 1540s.

These conditions, Whittle convincingly argues, imply engrossment by peasants, rather than dispossession and consolidation by landlords, although she concedes that as late as 1580, "a major transformation of landholding structure, from one dominated by medium-sized peasant proprietors and smallholders to one in which large capitalist farms were dominant, had still to take place" (195). Indeed, the wage-dependent proportion of the population seems to have changed very little between the 1380s and 1550s. The continuity is underscored by the persistent enforcement of medieval labor legislation by sixteenth-century Quarter Sessions courts.

If these conclusions make the title something of a misnomer, they are also not particularly new. That the English yeomanry arose from the internal differentiation of the peasantry was argued for early modern Cambridgeshire by Spufford in 1974 and for medieval Norfolk itself by Campbell in 1984.² The book is further hampered by a rigid methodology, which maintains that a society must be either "peasant" or "capitalist" (there is no trace of the seminal 1970s articulation debate among anthropologists and development economists in the bibliography, let alone in the text) and clings to an outdated contrast between "dynamic" England and "stagnant" France (the author seems unaware of recent work by Moriceau and Hoffman on early modern France).³

Even within the narrower parameters of the findings for Norfolk, similar problems obtain. After taking Brenner and others to task for an exclusive preoccupation with a single prime mover of economic development, Whittle goes on to read the late medieval stirrings of peasant land concentration as an autonomous process unleashed by the collapse of serfdom. Demography, she insists, had nothing to do with it, even though her claim that serfdom impeded the process of accumulation runs contrary to the opinion of most medieval historians and is supported by no direct evidence from the study area. Furthermore, Whittle's own evidence indicates that the abundant supply of land in post-Plague Norfolk made it much easier to accumulate. Parcels got larger long before the price of land itself began to rise.

An impressive array of sources undergirds this study. It would have been nice, however, to see more conceptual creativity emerge from such careful archival spadework, especially given the author's admonition that historians ought to pay more attention to theory.