The agrarian history of England and Wales. Vol. III: 1348-1500 (review)

Reviews 225 provides with considerable elegance. At that level his books are useful, provided one does not take thetexttoo seriously. Aedeen Cremin Centre for Celtic Studies University of Sydney Miller, Edward, ed.,77ie agrarian history of England and Wales. Vol. Ill: 13481500 , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xxv, 982; 33figures,23 plates, 60 tables; R.R.P. AUS$290.00. With the publication of volumes II and III of The agrarian history of England and Wales in quick succession (1988 and 1991) a great gap has been filled in the knowledge of rural England from Anglo-Saxon to Tudor times. Apart from its length, however, volume III has more in common with volume IV (1500-1640), published as long ago as 1967. For example, in the principle chapters on 'Occupation of the land', 'Farming practice and techniques', and 'Tenant farming and tenant farmers' England and Wales are divided into ten regionsratherthan eight, and there is a chapter on 'Marketing the produce of the countryside' which has been extended back to 1200 to compensate for the omission from Volume II. It is almost inevitable that fifteen contributors wdl not only bring a variety of approaches to the subject but will alsorehearsea number of common themes. These latter may be usefully placed into two categories: those that are already quite familiar to students of the period and those that aretoa large extent a result - ofrecent researches. In the former category there are the declining population of the Late Middle Ages, which is still seen by and large as fundamental, leasing of demesnes, widescale conversion from arable to pastoral farming, an early enclosure movement, an active land market, social disruption, and increased per capita wealth. Most of the authors agree on the existence of these phenomena to a greater or lesser degree in their original sections or chapters. There is also a great deal of agreement on how these familiar movements can be more closely defined and modified. The 1350s and 1360s are now depicted as a period of moderate recovery, an Indian summer of demesne fanning, as plague-stricken tenants were replaced from a reservoir of surplus population. A consequence of this is that the main period of change shifts away from 1348 to the period of 1380-1420 and, incidentally, tends to make the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 more pivotal than the Black Death. W e enter a period of increased social mobility, greater discontinuity of landholding, weakened ties between land and family, increasingly bluned tenurial distinctions, a great confusion of tenurial nomenclature, and a variety of novel inheritance strategies. 'In this atmosphere of frequent local disorders and of continuous tension between lords and tenants, 226 Reviews the domanial type of estate largely disappeared from England forty years after the Great Revolt' (p. 783). Within the second category at least four major themes emerge. First there is the need to distinguish between the reactions of large and small landowners to the reversals of this period of one and a half centuries, a theme that is best developed by J. M . Bean in his chapter on 'Landlords'. A great deal of the conventional wisdom on the movement away from direct farming in favour of a rentier economy has been formulated from studies of great landownersratherthan gentry, for w h o m it was often more prudent to retain traditional methods of direct management of estates. Secondly, in the context of deserted medieval villages an important distinction is drawn, especially by C. Dyer for the West Midlands, between the nature of tenant desertions before and after the midfifteenth century. In the earlier stages the desertion was largely voluntary and represented a rejection of landlord inducements fortenantsto stay by reducing rents and improving buildings, whereas from the middle of the century landlords seem to have taken a more active role in evicting tenants in the interests of conversion from arable to pasture. Thirdly, where arable farming continued uninterrupted, ontenantand demesne land, there was a tendency in many places for the furlong rather than thefieldto become the main unit of cultivation, as the practice of enclosing became more and more prevalent. Fourthly, all was not disruption and decay. As manorial lordship became...