Agrarian Change and Crisis in Europe, 1200-1500

Harilaos Kitsikopoulos

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415895781
• eBook ISBN: 9781136467615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Agrarian Change and Crisis in Europe, 1200-1500 addresses one of the classic subjects on economic history: the process of aggregate economic growth and the crisis that engulfed the European continent during the late Middle Ages. This was not an ordinary crisis. During the period 1200-1500, Europe witnessed endemic episodes of famine and a wave of plague epidemics that amounted to one of its worst health crises, rivaled only by the Justinian plague in the sixth century. These challenges called into question the production of goods and services and the distribution of wealth, opening the possibility of fundamental systemic change.

This book offers an empirical synthesis on a host of economic, demographic, and technological developments which characterized the period 1200-1500. It covers virtually the entire continent and places equal emphasis both on providing a solid factual framework and comparing and contrasting various theoretical interpretations. The broad geographical and conceptual scope of the book renders it indispensable not only for undergraduate students who take courses relating to the economic and social life of the Middle Ages but also to more advanced scholars who often specialize in only one country or region.

1 Introduction

Harry Kitsikopoulos

The essays in this volume address one of the classic subjects on economic history: the process of aggregate economic growth and the crisis that engulfed the European continent during the late Middle Ages. This was not an ordinary crisis. During the period 1200–1500. Europe witnessed wars, endemic episodes of famine, the culmination of a long-drawn process of declining temperatures, and a wave of plague epidemics which amounted to one of its worst health crisis, rivaled only by the Justinian plague in the sixth century. The combined effect of these challenges was to call into question the property rights and institutions which determined the production of goods and services and the distribution of wealth; in other words, this was a crisis which opened the possibility of fundamental systemic change, one of the rarest events in human history. Change did take place by 1500 but the outcomes that came about across different countries and regions were very diverse and often ambivalent in the sense that institutional arrangements shifted but were still in a state of flux.

This is not an easy story to tell given the scarcity of surviving sources and it is even more difficult to synthesize it at a high level of abstraction in order to make sense of it given the diversity of experiences across the continent. A limited number of commonalities do exist, the most noticeable being the universal population growth which took place during the thirteenth century. The various countries, however, started the period with very different population densities and thus by 1300 some of them (England, France, Italy, Byzantium) found themselves being heavily populated and highly urbanized, whereas others lagged behind in either one or both respects (Spain, Scandinavia, Russia, Central Europe). These developments raised the need for greater food supplies. Producers responded by utilizing various elements of the existing technological package with particular choices being determined by differences in climate, ecological profiles, and land/labor ratios. But the particular technological package was a mature one in the sense that it, by and large, was not infused with new inventions and hence it makes more sense to be preoccupied with the diffusion of existing techniques. Nevertheless, it was a package that, at its best, had the capacity to lead to exceptional levels of productivity. The latter was realized in a few regions; but, by and large, productivity levels in late medieval Europe reveal a very wide spectrum with most regions being classified towards the middle or low end of it.

Did Europeans raise their food supplies by 1300 sufficiently enough to match the demographic upswing? If not, this calls into question the very viability of the feudal system and opens the door to a debate on crisis based on endogenous factors. Plain intuition would suggest that such debate would be pertinent only to those countries which achieved the highest levels of population growth by that time but not to others. The issue of a systemic crisis has proven to be one of the most intractable aspects of this debate, leading many historians to seek the roots of the medieval economic crisis in a pair of exogenous factors: the decline of temperatures which culminated in a reduction of yields as well as famines by the beginning of the fourteenth century and, even more so, the shock brought by the series of plague epidemics whose impact reverberated through the next century.

The issues outlined so far are mainly empirical and the reason consensus on them is still eluding us has to do with major gaps that exist in the available evidence. The last issue pertinent to this debate is equally difficult to tackle: should the events of this period be explicated through the narrative of conventional historians or is it preferable to adopt the logic of models often used by economic historians? The latter methodology has dominated the debate on the feudal crisis despite the fact that it has both virtues and drawbacks. On the one hand, formal models offer a convenient ‘manual of instructions’ of how to choose from a multitude of facts and how to classify and interpret them; on the other hand, models are often restrictive in terms of the number of variables they incorporate and hence, in an effort to simplify the reality of human experience, may end up doing injustice to its complexity.

The aforementioned questions have sparked a fierce exchange among historians, particularly in the context of the Brenner debate which started in the pages of Past and Present in 1976 and culminated in a collection of essays in 1987.¹ The Brenner debate induced scholarship in the context of individual European countries, in some cases initiating such a dialogue for the first time, in others forcing the re-examination of views which predated this debate. The review of the literature that follows focuses on scholars who have offered holistic and comprehensive theoretical paradigms at the expense of others who have contributed partial theoretical interpretations and/or have generated empirical evidence buttressing a particular theory; the latter type of contributions, however, are cited in the context of individual chapters.

Since the theories of classical economists offered the inspiration for many of the key interpretations, it makes sense to make a reference to them, beginning with the Ricardian theory of rent. The Ricardian model portrays land as a non-reproducible factor containing a wide variety of plots with different levels of fertility determined by soil conditions and locational characteristics. Capital and labor are the variable inputs, the former embodying technology with inertial characteristics. Population growth functions as the dynamic element providing the momentum of historical change. The need to raise food supplies prompts two types of responses: either injecting additional quantities of labor and capital to already utilized plots (the intensive margin of cultivation) or leading to the reclamation of progressively less fertile plots (the extensive margin). Either way, marginal product declines whereas marginal cost and prices move up. Rent is not a component of price since the latter is determined at the margin but rent is generated in plots of higher fertility compared to the margin and is equal to the output differential between them; rent as social revenue keeps expanding throughout the process. As more marginal plots are brought into cultivation the productivity differential between them and more fertile plots widens and translates into growing rental income for landowners, assuming the presence of purely competitive markets. The Ricardian logic is mechanistic, teleological, highly pessimistic, and evokes the specter of a Malthusian ‘positive check’ as the most likely way out of this gloomy scenario. It is a theory which reveals tension among social classes, but class relations are irrelevant in terms of determining outcomes because even if landlords did not exist as a class the evolution of productivity, costs, and prices would remain identical.²

Ideas influenced by the Ricardian framework were expressed by several early historians but it was Postan who formulated one of the first comprehensive applications of this theory to the pre-plague English economy and became its most influential proponent by being one of the main participants in the Brenner debate.³ Postan, through his own research and that of his pupils and collaborators, established a causal relationship between the robust population growth of the thirteenth century and the responses it prompted, taking the form of extensive land reclamation and extending the margins of arable husbandry at the expense of grazing grounds since the former provides more calorific output than the latter; consequently, the increasing utilization of more marginal land and the shrinking numbers of livestock and manure supplies led to declining yields. The second option described in the Ricardian model, greater intensification through capital formation, was not particularly noticeable due to the absence of major technological innovations and on the basis of prevailing cultural values among the class of landlords which favored the possession of land, functioning as a status symbol, as opposed to investment spending; landownership translated to raising a standing army, seeking salvation through land endowments, and attracting alliances with other members of the baronial class through marriage arrangements. There is no doubt that English feudalism was in a state of crisis by the end of the century, reflected in rising product prices, in the exorbitant rents charged for leaseholds and tenancies-at-will as well as high entry fines relating to free and customary holdings and, most dramatically, in the heavy mortality of the 1315–17. famines. Ultimately, however, the crisis was resolved by the wave of plague epidemics which reversed the movement of key economic variables. Postan’s allegiance to the Ricardian logic was also reflected in his unwillingness to treat the feudal class structure as a relevant factor. In fact, when this stance drew sharp criticism by Marxist historians (see below), Hatcher (his main collaborator) argued that, unlike a capitalist economy in which rents are allowed to adjust upwards, customary law blocked in many cases the free functioning of market forces to the benefit of peasants.⁴

Marx’s theory of historical materialism offered another theoretical framework centered around the notion of a dialectical interpretation of historical change which is driven by class conflict over the distribution of wealth. It is this conflict in the context of the relations of production which determines the nature and degree to which skills and technology can develop and, therefore, the long-term viability of a mode of production. At some point, the former becomes a fetter to the latter, ushering a period of crisis which functions as the preamble to a transitioning into a different socioeconomic formation. There is a considerable degree of determinism in Marx’s account, allowing a very limited role to human volition as long as the relations and forces of production go through their symbiotic phase. It is only with the onset of the crisis that human will becomes instrumental, acting as a midwife, to use Marx’s analogy, in speeding up the transition to a new system.

The Marxist tradition had established a longstanding interest in the feudal crisis as part of its interest in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.⁵ But it was in the context of the Brenner debate that it transcended the stage of its members having a dialogue largely among themselves to the point of confronting the dominant mainstream approach. At the center of Brenner’s argument was the statement that “the problem … was not, as Postan and Hatcher contend, the ‘insufficient supply of new technological possibilities,’ but rather the feudal economy’s inability to make use of possibilities which existed.”⁶ In other words, granted the absence of technological innovations during the pre-plague period, what prevented the more widespread diffusion of already existing techniques carried through a more extensive capital formation? Postan’s and Hatcher’s emphasis on the cultural values of the ruling class did not seem particularly convincing. The explanation lies in the very class relations of feudal society which established seigneurial prerogatives based on political and military compulsion evident, to provide just one illustration, in the fact that the total obligations of serfs were significantly higher than those of free peasants. Access to such prerogatives, which often generated the bulk of the ruling elite’s revenues, diminished incentives towards investment; the problem was compounded by extravagant levels of consumption which siphoned away from productive uses a substantial portion of their revenues. At the same time, the feudal extraction mechanism drained resources away from peasant holdings, thus limiting also their capability towards productive investment. It follows that it was the nature of the feudal class relations that explains the failure to increase output through the intensive margin of cultivation, despite the fact that this is a distinct option in the Ricardian model; “feudal development tended to take inward-looking forms—forms of redistribution of wealth, rather than its creation.”⁷ In the end, Brenner found himself in agreement with Postan on the presence of a structural crisis but argued that the type of forces discussed by the latter were of limited relevance, only to the extent they were “refracted through the prism of changing social-property relations and fluctuating balance of class forces.” Such property relations “once established, tend to impose rather strict limits and possibilities, indeed rather specific long-term patterns, on a society’s economic development … as a rule, they are not shaped by, or alterable in terms of changes in demographic or commercial trends.”⁸ The resolution of the feudal crisis during the post-plague period took the form of multiple class conflicts, often violent, across Europe with outcomes being determined based on the relative strength of the opposing forces.

The New Institutional Economics (NIE) of D. C. North and his followers found itself in agreement with several aspects of Brenner’s analysis in light of the school’s core belief that “institutions … are the underlying determinant of the long-run performance of the economy.”⁹ According to North, institutional arrangements can be conveniently analyzed by utilizing the concept of equilibrium. The presence of equilibrium implies that the contractual arrangements among economic agents and their relative bargaining power does not render worthwhile any restructuring. That is not to imply that every agent is perfectly content with the existing arrangements, rather that the relative costs and benefits of change do not render the latter a worthy goal. Nor does the presence of equilibrium necessarily imply the existence of efficient outcomes. “The increasing returns characteristic of an initial set of institutions that provide disincentives to productive activity will create organizations and interest gro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1. Introduction
• 2. England
• 3. France
• 4. Italy
• 5. Byzantium
• 6. Spain
• 7. Scandinavia
• 8. Central Europe
• 9. Russia
• 10. Epilogue
• List of Contributors
• Index