Agriculture and Rural Society after the Black Death

Common Themes and Regional Variations

Ben Dodds, Richard Britnell

• Publisher: University Of Hertfordshire Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781907396441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

With special emphasis on the period following the Black Death, this new collection of essays explores agriculture and rural society during the late Middle Ages. Combining a broad perspective on agrarian problems—such as depopulation and social conflict—with illustrative material from detailed local and regional research, this compilation demonstrates how these general problems were solved within specific contexts. The contributors supply detailed studies relating to the use of the land, the movement of prices, the distribution of property, the organization of trade, and the cohesion of village society, among other issues. New research on regional development in medieval England and other European countries is also discussed.

Part 1

Markets, Incentives and the Role of Prices

Chapter 1

Markets and incentives: common themes and regional variations

Richard Britnell

However locally varied the commercial incentives that operated in Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many aspects of production and consumption were experienced almost everywhere. Agriculture was still largely the business of peasant families who used their own produce to supply much of their food and clothing; production for the market was combined with subsistence farming.¹ This was particularly true of the vegetables and fruit grown in cottage gardens, and of the poultry that scrabbled about in enclosed tofts, but much of the grain grown in village fields was also consumed by its growers, since bread remained the staple part of the normal diet. The largest units of farming, the demesne lands of kings and lords, lay and ecclesiastical, were either cultivated directly for the benefit of their owners or, more commonly, leased to others, but even these were subject to management for subsistence. Large estates had many mouths to feed and often preferred to supply themselves rather than depend upon bought produce. In addition to those resident in the central community or household, who needed to be fed daily, estate workers often received much of their wages in doles of grain. Another restriction on the amount available for sale was the amount of each year’s output that growers had held back for the following year’s farming operations. The proportion was much higher in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than now because of lower levels of productivity. In England it was usually necessary to retain a third or a quarter of the wheat harvest for seedcorn.²

English landlords at the time of the Black Death, and for a generation or so afterwards, generally preferred to supervise the management of their own properties rather than lease them, and it is possible from their accounts to assess how much they marketed. It turns out that even in south-eastern England they sold less than half the grain they grew each year.³ The consumption of produce by landowners and their dependants was particularly characteristic of monasteries, colleges and hospitals.⁴ Even commercial rents might be negotiated to ensure produce rather than cash for landlords. As the rural economy of northern Italy became more commercialised in the thirteenth century, for example, lords swung strongly into managing their estates by leasing them out, but they still exacted a large part of the rent in kind, either as fixed rents or as a fixed share of harvest. Although some of this produce was sold in city markets and elsewhere, some was used to supply their own needs.⁵

The volume of trade in agricultural produce

There were many regions like the Limousin in France where there were no large towns, and where the evidence for local trade is less than impressive, even if some aspect of farming, pastoral in this case, was relatively more commercialised than others. Regional differences in the extent of trade remain to be systematically explored by standardised criteria, since comparisons are likely to mislead without closer controls than historians currently have over their terminology. The results of such a survey are nevertheless likely to show that, despite strong contrasts between regions, some kind of local commercial infrastructure existed over most of Europe. Even in the Limousin there were numerous markets and fairs.⁶ Some areas had so little trade that it is difficult to identify trading institutions of any kind, as in much of Scandinavia, western Ireland and western Scotland, but money rents were quite common even there by the fifteenth century.⁷

Despite the continuing weight of self-supply, and the existence of wide variations in the degree and character of commercial development, the multiplication of local markets across Europe implies that the marketing of surplus agricultural produce affected rural producers in almost every part of the Continent.⁸ The most widespread evidence for the volume of demand at the time of the Black Death is the extent of town life and manufacturing industry. Europe had few large cities, but numerous small towns were significant centres of demand for food, fuel and raw materials because a large proportion of their inhabitants were landless and lived by manufacturing, trade or services rather than agriculture.⁹ In Saxony at the start of the fourteenth century there were about 103 towns of which almost half had fewer than 500 inhabitants, and none more than 5,000, but together they are estimated to have accommodated a fifth of the population of the province.¹⁰ Many larger villages, too, contained poor families, who needed to buy their food because they had too little land to grow it themselves. Wool for textiles, hides for leatherware, and timber for carpentry and construction, were all vital to the functioning of everyday life, and these products were supplied in the countryside to meet market demand as well as family subsistence. Wool and hides were probably the most heavily commercialised of all agricultural products, since few of the households that supplied them needed more than a small fraction of what they could produce.

The volume of local trade varied across Europe chiefly according to the size of towns and the number of households dependent upon wages and profits for their livelihood. The larger a town, the larger the share of its population whose livelihood derived from manufacturing, trade or services, and the more dependent it was on trade in food and fuel.¹¹ Because their agrarian hinterlands were poor, some of Europe’s largest cities, notably Venice and Genoa, had grown up dependent on farm produce imported from distant regions.¹² The most heavily urbanised region was northern Italy, with the four major cities of Milan, Venice, Florence and Genoa. Before the Black Death, on a conservative estimate, there were between 32 and 39 towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants in Italy between Rome and the Alps.¹³ There was a secondary concentration of urban development in north-western Europe, including Paris, London, Ghent and Cologne. A similarly conservative estimate implies at least 19 towns of over 10,000 people in the triangle of territory between Paris, Cologne and London, all three included. To concentrate on larger towns even in these regions can be misleading, since there were also numerous smaller towns, industrial villages and marketing centres. Production and trade in agricultural produce was intensified by the overlapping demands of large cities and smaller centres of consumption within their supply region. Bonvesin de la Riva reports that the region subject to Milan’s jurisdiction in 1288 contained ‘fifty pleasant smaller towns (borghi), amongst which Monza, ten miles distant from Milan, deserves to be called a city rather than a borgho’.¹⁴ Florence’s fourteenth-century territory included 54 places with independent markets; this number includes village markets as well as those of subordinate borghi.¹⁵

Britain was on the edge of the exceptionally urbanised region of north-western Europe, not at its centre, and the commercial opportunities it offered were strongest in the southern and eastern parts of England. London was by far the largest focus of demand, with a population of perhaps 50,000-80,000 on the eve of the Black Death, and although the city’s population declined during the following hundred years it maintained, and even enhanced, its prime status.¹⁶ There were numerous smaller centres of demand in southern and eastern England, so that in the mid fourteenth century perhaps 30-40 per cent of all grain produced by lords and their tenants was sold. The east and southern coasts were able to trade produce across the English Channel and the North Sea to towns on the Continent. However, in north-western England, the marches of Wales, and in Wales itself, urban populations were significantly smaller. In the Scottish kingdom, too, although there were numerous burghs, few of them were of more than a few thousand inhabitants, and there were no towns beyond the highland line. Even the production of wool and meat for the market was little developed in the remoter parts of Scotland.¹⁷ So regional variation within Britain ranged from extensive mercantile trade on the perimeter of one of Europe’s most commercialised zones to localised economies where the circulation of money was very restricted.

Institutional structures: money and markets

Both local and long-distance trade had come to depend long before the fourteenth century upon monetary systems primarily using metallic currencies.¹⁸ Some of the smaller monetary units, especially in Italy, used base metal, but the higher denominations were of silver and, more recently, of gold. For retail trade, silver and silver alloys remained the medium of currency throughout the medieval period. Gold currencies of larger unit value had been pioneered by Spanish kingdoms in the twelfth century, in imitation of earlier Muslim currencies, but became more current in the Mediterranean trading area after 1252 when Florence and Genoa introduced them. France had followed on in 1266, Venice in 1284, and the papacy in 1322. Northwestern European governments took to minting gold from the 1330s. England did so in 1344, and the princely rulers of the Rhineland did so about the same time.¹⁹ The resulting currency systems were flexible enough to allow the value of all commercial transactions to be expressed in terms of a price, for a loaf of bread at the humblest extreme and for a landed estate at the most exalted. The value of different goods had long been expressed in money terms, and in most parts of late medieval Europe even the most impoverished families were used to handling coin and to thinking of relative values in terms of relative prices. Then, as now, if the value of an individual item was too small to be paid for in coin, it was usual to sell a number together. The reeve of the bishop of Winchester’s manor at Bishopstone, Hampshire, sold 200 eggs for 10d in 1409-10, implying that the smallest unit of English currency that the mints could supply, the farthing, would buy five.²⁰ Whatever the units of currencies in any region -and in some parts several coinages circulated concurrently - prices were usually expressed in terms of moneys of account in which the fundamental unit, in England and Scotland the pound (Latin libra, Spanish libra, French livre, Italian lira, German Pfund), comprised twenty shillings (solidi, sueldos, sous, soldi, Schillinge), and each shilling comprised twelve pence (denarii, denaros, deniers, denari, Pfennige), so that 240 pennies were reckoned as £1. But because there were very many different local currencies in circulation on the Continent, the English pound was not directly equivalent to any of the various French livres or Italian lire.

Families needing to acquire food, if unable or unwilling to buy from their neighbours, were served by large numbers of officially established market places and fairs. Theologians and canon lawyers, in their discussions of the just price, had given a good deal of though...