Peasants, productivity and profit in the open fields of England: a study of economic and social development

England's pre-industrial development, and that of western Europe in general, is traditionally approached by historians within a Malthusian framework of analysis, which has been shaped largely by neoclassical and Marxist economic models. The amount of food produced by each full-time agricultural worker, that is, labour productivity, is held to be the primary engine of growth. Historians hold that the middle ages were characterized by widespread dire poverty and economic stagnation, based on the belief that the amount of food produced by each worker was very low. By the early fourteenth century, they believe that it did not even suffice to feed the existing populace. Medieval social and economic institutions---serfdom and the open fields---precluded socioeconomic progress, by lowering labour productivity in the huge peasant sector as well as on the demesne, the lord's share of the open fields. The direct measurement of English labour productivity rates in this thesis, c. 1280 to 1415, which are the first ever produced for any country in medieval Europe, were rendered possible through the construction of a methodology that allowed the exploitation of manorial account rolls. The approach taken was a comparative analysis of nine villages which were reconstructed at the local level and studied in their socioeconomic contexts. The labour productivity rates in these peasant-controlled open fields surpassed those for English agricultural workers in enclosed fields of the mid-nineteenth century. These findings have a number of implications, not simply for the middle ages, but also for the early modern period. For example, support cannot be found for the notion of an Agricultural Revolution, currently defined as a rise in labour productivity, which served as a necessary precursor to the Industrial Revolution. Food surplus was quite high and there was no danger of a Malthusian crisis in the pre-1350 period. And if Malthus does not apply in this period, with its high population levels, he certainly is not applicable to any centuries that followed, with their lower population levels. Many historians argue that only with the dismantling of serfdom and the open fields was economic progress achieved. Unlike eastern European serfdom, analysis of labour rents on these English manors indicates that the manor was not a labour-based system in the west. As for the medieval open fields, they were not an impetus to development but appear to have served as the cornerstone for peasant economic progress. New economic models are offered for both institutions. This thesis demonstrated that development did not occur in medieval and early modern England as historians have supposed, and by extension, perhaps did not necessarily proceed as assumed elsewhere in time and place. Instead, a comparative analysis of labour productivity rates between the pre- and post-1350 periods suggests an alternative paradigm for medieval development, one that is perhaps applicable for the entire pre-industrial period: income distribution in the huge peasant sector might have shaped socioeconomic trends. It seems possible that growth was fostered by a more equitable division of wealth in the pre-1350 period. More research is required to substantiate this hypothesis but at the very least, trends in the real value of output per worker and per acre, which were higher before 1350 than in the decades that followed, indicate that the first half of the century was the primary period of economic growth and was characterized by higher living standards than the half-century that followed. Historians have usually held that the converse was the case.

Keywords: Economic history
Peasants, Economic aspects
Peasants, England