Authority, Efficiency, and Agricultural Organization in Medieval England and Beyond: A Hypothesis

Recent accounts of medieval agricultural organization begin not with a description of “the” manor but with a warning that no single archetype may be considered appropriate. From place to place, from generation to generation, a property might be exploited as a single unit, divided between tenancies and demesne, or wholly partitioned into tenancies; and the land would be worked by a correspondingly varied mixture of “employees” and independent labor. This complex historical record is still far from being explained by a suitable model. In the secondary sources, the varying size of the demesne is most frequently attributed to changes in relative prices: the demesne is buoyant, it is argued, when output prices are high and wages low; when prices fall and wages rise, rents become more attractive and the demesne is parcelled out. The difficulty with this explanation, however, is that rents are not independent of output prices and wages: in simple economic theory, rent so adjusts to prices and wages as to always equal the surplus that could be earned by direct exploitation, and the proportion of tenant land on an estate is a matter of indifference. This does not of course mean that it was so in fact; it does mean, however, that one must carefully specify which of the many considerations neglected by that simple theory are in fact critical to the problem at hand.