A History of Agriculture and Prices in England

Rogers was part of the English Historical School of Economics, an important goal of which was to overturn the classical approach, founded on deduction, and replace it with inductive methods, based on empirical observation.

Prior to Rogers, various studies had examined the development of prices in Britain, notably Fleetwood (1707), Eden (1797), Shuckburgh-Evelyn (1798), Young (1812), Mundell (1829), Porter (1836) and Tooke and Newmarch (1838-1857).^{[72] [73] However, none of these contained both the depth and breadth of data and analysis that was to appear in A History. Granted, Tooke and Newmarch's monumental six-volume study, which attempted to show that changes in prices precede changes in the money supply, is regarded as a mile­stone in the field and, in a nod to this, the period covered by Rogers' research ended in 1793, the first year examined by Tooke and Newmarch. This aside, Tooke and Newmarch only looked at the four or so decades up to 1837, a much shorter span of analysis than the nearly five and a half centuries surveyed by Rogers.}

A number of other factors help to explain why Rogers embarked on A History.

Equally important was a direct challenge laid down by Newmarch (1860) at the International Statistical Congress held in London in 1860 which Rogers attended. He describes what happened at the meeting and subsequently:

I was led in the first instance to enter upon this branch of history in conse­quence of some suggestions made at the meeting of the [Congress], as to the importance of researches into ancient values, and the relations which might be determined between the prices of labour and food. On returning to Oxford, as I was obliged to remain during the long vacation at home, I searched in the Bodleian Library, and found a little evidence for the fourteenth century, and much for the sixteenth. At first it was my intention to confine my researches to the change of values which took place in the sixteenth century, and thinking that information might be obtained from the account books of the Colleges, I investigated in the first instance those of All Souls. Subsequently I obtained permission to examine the muniment room at Merton, and here I found a vast store of the most valuable documents. I resolved therefore to begin as early as I could, and to make use of the archives in the Public Record Office. I have thus become an antiquary by accident (Rogers 1866—1902, 2: xi).

As well as the sources listed by Rogers, he would also go on to inspect records at, amongst others, Cambridge University, York Minster, the Tower of London, the British Museum, the schools of Eton and Winchester and the private records of individual families, with the most detailed information derived from the rolls of farm bailiffs and the accounts of college bursars.

What did Rogers discover? He himself regarded his views and findings on rent as the most important of his contributions to economics. The subject was of interest to Rogers as he was of the opinion that Ricardo's theory of rent was the ‘ark of the deductive economists' (Rogers 1880: 673) and so set his sights on disproving it through the data contained in A History¹ Rogers acknowl­edged that Ricardo's theory was correct insofar as where competitive conditions exist, rent can be defined as the excess realised over the costs of production plus the ordinary rate of profit on capital investment. However, this truism was, in Rogers' opinion, hardly a great theoretical innovation in the history of economics as it had already been known to the Egyptians.

The claim that was far more contentious for Rogers was Ricardo's proposi­tion that increases in population drove the cultivation of lands possessed of differing levels of fertility and that, given the same amounts of labour and capi­tal, rents would be influenced by the amount of excess production taking place on the best soil compared to the “margin”. It was this aspect of Ricardo's theory which motivated Rogers' research, and which resulted in him showing that, contrary to Ricardo, during the eighteenth century when there was the most significant increase in rents in the history of English agriculture (and when the prices of agricultural products were either stable or fell), the cause was to be found in advances in land management for growing crops rather than popula­tion increases (see Gibbins 1890: 606).¹5 Coupled with other empirical find­ings by Rogers, his broad position was that any failings in agriculture were often attributable to factors such as a lack of investment in production-enhanc­ing techniques or the poor protection of tenants' rights (see Koot 1987: 71). As Kadish notes (1989: 62), many of the objections which Rogers levelled against Ricardo's theory had already been made by Wakefield and Torrens, but it was Rogers who provided the empirical evidence to back them up.

Rogers was a passionate defender of laissez-faire, the obvious counterpart to this being his dislike of government involvement in the economy. Rogers used A History to identify periods when he thought that the laws of supply and demand operated most purely, without distortion from the State. He argued that the best example of this was to be found in the Middle Ages, in particular the mid-thirteenth century to the mid-fifteenth century, as ‘governments had not developed to any marked extent that protective system, that perpetual interference with the freedom of trade which has characterised their later activity' (Rogers 1866-1902, 1: ix-x). Measured in terms of real wages, labourers were better off during this period because, amongst other things, the feudal system operated to the mutual benefit of landowners and those who worked the land and because land ownership was widely distributed (see De Marchi 1976: 368).

The ending of this age of prosperity was precipitated, as Rogers saw it, by the onset of legislation being used by the aristocracy to advance its own interests,^[74] a period which he identified as beginning from the reign of Elizabeth I, lasting through to the early nineteenth century:

I contend that from 1563 to 1824, a conspiracy, concocted by the law and car­ried out by parties interested in its success, was entered into, to cheat the English workman of his wages, to tie him to the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into irremediable poverty (Rogers 1884, 2: 398).

Rogers focuses specifically on 1563 as it was the year in which the Statute of Artificers became law, restricting workers' freedom of movement and imposing maximum wages. However, Hewins (1898: 341) for one was scepti­cal about the emphasis that Rogers placed on the Statute, arguing that it was actually meant to raise real wages and that Rogers had not fully accounted for the fact that from as early as the fourteenth century, justices of the peace had wide powers in the regulation of wages.^[75]

A History was subject to various other criticisms.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, Rogers' work became the inspiration for similar research both in the UK and abroad. Perhaps the most prominent example of the latter was Georges d'Avenel's seven volumes examining the development of property prices, wages and general prices in France from 1200 to 1800 (see d'Avenel 1894-1926). In Britain, a notable study was William Beveridge's Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (1939), which uncovered a number of sources that had been missed by Rogers (see Hamilton 1942: 54). Beveridge's volume was part of a series published under the auspices of the International Scientific Committee on Price History (of which Beveridge was the Chairman) (see Cole and Crandall 1964).

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