Human Motivation Throughout Time

The mere existence of market forces in an economic system may not be regarded as sufficient evidence that economic agents respond effectively to the material incentives these markets provide. We have been told repeatedly by historians and by economists in the classical tradition that the ruling elite in the Middle Ages preferred to ignore market signals by consuming rather than investing the surpluses they extracted from the peasantry. Indeed, we are expected to believe that medieval man, unlike his modern counterpart, was moral man rather than economic man.1 Some have challenged this conventional wisdom – such as Marshall in his debate with Cunningham (see Chapter 2), McCloskey in his discussion of medieval agriculture, and North and Thomas in their speculations about longrun institutional evolution2 – but, owing to a lack of hard evidence, their ideas have made little headway. Yet the evidence is available, in Domesday Book, to test this issue directly. It enables us to answer the fundamental question: were the ruling elite of Domesday England prisoners of custom, or were they primarily motivated by individual material self-interest? Were, in other words, feudal barons economically rational?