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VOLUME 40 I992 PART I Rural Land-use in the Metropolitan Hinterland, 127o- 1339: the Evidence of lnquisitiones Post Mortem BRUCE M S CAMPBELL, JAMES A GALLOWAY AND MARGARET MURPHY Rental Policy on the Estates of the English Peerage, I649-6o IAN WARD Output and Prices in UK Agriculture, 1867-19 I4, and the Great Agricultural Depression Reconsidered MICHAEL TURNER 'Bab'ye Khozyaystvo': Poultry-keeping and its Contribution to Peasant Income in pre-I914 Russia STUART THOMPSTONE 'The Spade Might Soon Determine It': the Representation of Deserted Medieval Villages on Ordnance Survey Plans, 1849-19Io MAURICE BERESFORD Annual List and Brief Review of Articles on Agrarian History, 199o RAINE MORGAN Conference Report Book Reviews THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW VOLUME 4 ° PART I 992 Contents Rural Land-use in the Metropolitan Hinterland, BRUCE M S CAMPBELL, 1270-1339: the Evidence of Inquisitiones Post Mortem JAMES A GALLOWAY, AND MARGARET MURPHY Rental Policy on the Estates of the English Peerage, ~649-6o IAN WARD 23 Output and Prices in UK Agriculture, I867-I9~4, and the Great Agricultural Depression Reconsidered MICHAEL TURNER 38 'Ba.b'ye Khozyaystvo': Poultry-keeping and its Contribution to Peasant Income in pre-s914 Russia STUART THOMPSTONE 52 'The Spade Might Soon Determine It': the Representation of Deserted Medieval Villages on Ordnance Survey Plans, I849-I9Io MAURICE BERESFORD 64 Annual List and Brief Review of Articles on Agrarian History, I99O RAINE MORGAN 7 t Conference Report: 'Rural Society and the Poor', Winter Conference I99I JOAN THIRSK Book Reviews: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: a History of Wiltshire, XIV, edited by D A Crowley J H BETTEY 8.3 Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 157o-1640 , by Martin Ingrain BARBARA J TODD 83 Historic Farm Buildings, by Susanna Wade Martins and Old Farm Buildings in a New Courm'yside, edited by Susanna Wade Martins COLUM GILES 84 Grano e mercanti nella Puglia del Seicento, by Elena Papagna DAVID ORMROD 85 Regions arid industries: a perspective on the industrial revolution ir~ Britain, edited by Pat Hudson J A CHARTRES 85 Before the Luddites. Custom, community and machinery in the English Woollen industry, 1776-I 8o9, by Adrian Randall KIYOSHI SAKAMAK1 86 'By a Flash and a Scare': Arson, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East Anglia 1815-187o, byJ E Archer BETHANIE AFTON 86 Industry and Innovation: Selected Essays by W H Chaloner, edited by D A Farnie and W O Henderson GERARD L TURNBULL 87 John Bennett Lawes: the Record of his Genius, by G V Dyke STEWART RICHARDS 88 Lille and the Dutch Revolt: Urban Stability in an Era of Revolution, 15oo-1582, by Robert S Duplessis PETER CLARK 88 Rural Land-use in the Metropolitan Hinterland, I27O-I 339: the Evidence of Inquisitiones Post Mortem By BRUCE M S CAMPBELL, JAMES A GALLOWAY, AND MARGARET MURPHY' Abstract Inquisitions Post Mortem (IPMs) have been used by historians for a variety of purposes, but their value as a source for the study of medieval land-use has not been fully realized. Used in large numbers they can illustrate broad contrasts between places and regions in terms of resource endowment and value. This study outlines a methodology for analysing the IPMs with reference to a group of ten counties around London. The results point to the existence of distinctive and specialized agrarian regimes, responsive to a variety of influences- environmental, institutional, and economic. XPLOITATION of land lay at the core exploitation was limited or constrained. 2 of the medieval economy and Manorialism was superimposed irregu- E society, but to account accurately larly upon the land, with important impli- for the diverse forms which this exploi- cations for the respective land-use shares tation took, and thus to locate medieval of lords and their dependent tenants. 3 land-use within its social, economic, and Demesnes varied greatly in size, in the ecological context, is no simple matter. range of resources with which they were The biological constraints of an organic endowed, and in the supplies of customary agricultural technology, coupled with a labour upon which they could draw. They reliance upon hand tools and human and varied also in the size, composition, and animal muscle power, ensured that natu- type of ownership of the estates to which ral, environmental factors exercised an they belonged, with an important distinc- important general influence upon the tion existing between estates on which the overall pattern. Yet if climate, soil, and consumption requirements of the house- topography presented certain physical hold dictated patterns of production and opportunities, it was human factors which those on which production for exchange determined the precise land-use response. prevailed. 4 The need to provide for basic Prominent among these human factors were the socio-property relations which 'P Stamper, 'Woods and Parks', pp 128-48 in G Astill and A Grant, eds, The Countryside if Medieval England, Oxford, 1988, determined access to, and control of, land. pp I28 if; L M Cantor, 'Forest, chases, parks and warrens', Seigneurial and royal privilege marked pp 56-85 in idem, ed, The English Medieval Landscape, 1982. ' Variations in manorial structure and their implications are dis- out substantial areas of the countryside as cussed in E A Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England forest or park-land within which land in the Thirteenth Century, Oxford, 1956. For a case study see also B M S Campbell, 'The Complexity of Manorial Structure in Medieval Norfolk: a Case Study', Norfolk Archaeology, XXXIX, I986, pp 225--61. ' The research upon which this paper is based forms part of tbe 4 For analyses of the role of consumption in structuring production 'Feeding the City I' project at the Centre for Metropolitan on major ecclesiastical estates see K Biddick, The Other EconomF History, Institute of Historical Research, London. The project is Pastoral Husbatldry on a Medieval Estate, Berkeley and Los Angeles, funded by the Leverhuhne Trust and is organized in partnership I989, and idem, ~Agriculmral Productivity on the Estates of the with The Queen's University of Belfast. The authors are grateful Bishopric of Winchester in the Thirteenth Century: a Managerial to Jobn Power and Olwen Myhill for research assistance. Derek Perspective', pp95-t23 in B MS Campbell and M Overton, Keene, Richard Britnell, and Harold Fox have provided valuable eds, Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European guidance and advice. Agricultural Productivity, Manchester, 1991. Ag Hist Rev, 4o, I, pp t-2z 2 THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW subsistence is generally considered to have land supplies and that available technology loomed large in shaping the land-use of offered limited scope for the evolution of peasant producers and this, in turn, was pastoral farming systems which made influenced by the extent to which pro- more intensive and productive use of duction was organized on an individual available resources. High prices and valu- or collective basis. Thus, contrasting field- ations of meadow and pasture are thus systems imposed their own stamp on the regarded as evidence of the scarcity of land and its use and were themselves these resources rather than the returns inextricably related to a range of human contingent upon their productive and and physical factors/ profitable use. s Nevertheless, recent In an age when organic resources set research has tended towards a more posi- an absolute limit to the size of population tive interpretation, with medieval /and- that could be supported, these 'insti- use regimes - both arable and pastoral - tutional' considerations profoundly influ- being viewed as dynamic and adaptable enced .the fundamental relationship rather than stagnant. 9 Within this reap- between population and land. 6 The size praisal the role of market demand as and density of the population for its part mediated via economic rent is seen as affected the total area of land devoted to crucial. specific activities and the intensity with In contrast to Ricardo's notion of econ- which those activities were conducted. In omic rent, with its emphasis upon land the formulation of M M Postan and his quality and population density as determi- followers, a mounting imbalance between nants of land-use, yon Thi.inen's formu- population and land-use resources during lation stresses the differential impact of the thirteenth century is seen as the key concentrated urban demand and its pro- to the 'agrarian crisis' which emerged pensity to generate zones of specialized during the first half of the fourteenth land-usage in the hinterlands of cities. '° century. In its essentials the 'Postan thesis' While the assumption that urban demand holds that an increasing scarcity of grass- is necessarily a positive and progressive land vis-a-vis arable, in the absence of factor is by no means universally shared - significant technological progress, led, as witness the literature on 'parasitic cities' through a shortage of animal manure, to reviewed by P Abrams - its significance a progressive impoverishment of the is increasingly stressed by medievalists." arable and eventually a general pro- Recent reappraisal of the population of ductivity decline and associated abandon- London and of several leading English ment of 'marginal' land. 7 Central to this provincial towns has increased this interest interpretation is the belief that stocking SM M Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society: an Economic densities were a direct function of