Medieval, Agrarian and Demographic
After Rogers and Ashley, medieval economic history at Oxford resumed with the formidable figure of the Russian Paul Vinogradoff (Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, 1903-1925), who added to the reputation of his Villainage in England (1892) with The Growth of the Manor (1905) and English Society in the Eleventh Century (1908).
His student, A.E. Levett (History Fellow and Vice-Principal, St Hilda's, 1910-1923), the first woman economic historian in an Oxford post, wrote on monasteries and manors, most notably on the Black Death on the Winchester diocesan estates, but ranged into the early modern period and even published a text on Europe since Napoleon (1913). Ephraim Lipson covered the Middle Ages at the same time, in the first volume of his Economic History of England. R.V Lennard, a medieval agricultural historian, began to teach in Oxford before the First World War, lectured in the School of Agriculture and succeeded Lipson as Reader (1932-1951). Like many Oxford scholars of the time, he published little in post but a good Rural England, 1086-1135 (1959) after retirement.Exceeding Lennard in portentous silence was Trevor Aston (History Fellow at Corpus, 1952-1985), a specialist in the manorial economy with a significant reputation but only one important article. He also edited the important social history journal Past and Present for twenty-five years. In contrast with Aston, Lennard's prolific successor, WG. Hoskins (Reader, 1951-1965), wrote The Making of the English Landscape (1955), a foundational work in environmental history, as well as many highly cited articles and books on late medieval and early modern agrarian and urban history, without however engaging much with the questions of dispossession and agrarian development during the transition to modern growth. Barbara Harvey (History Fellow at Somerville, 1956-1993) followed Levett with studies of Westminster Abbey and its Estates in the Middle Ages (1977) and of the monastic experience (1993).
Rosamond Faith (independent scholar) writes on the English peasantry and the growth of lordship and, more recently, on the moral economy in the countryside in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England. Nicholas Mayhew of the Ashmolean Museum, an expert on numismatics, has written extensively on money and the money supply from the Middle Ages to the end of the early modern period while Pamela Nightingale also writes on medieval money and credit. Chris Wickham (Chichele Professor of Medieval History, 2005-2016) ventured into the deeper past: his landmark work on Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) came out at the point of his arrival and was followed by other studies of early medieval Italy and Europe. Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson, both of them classical archaeologists, study the economy of the Roman Mediterranean.Hoskins was followed by Joan Thirsk (Reader, 1965-1983), an early modernist. She preferred small differences to large movements, and traced them in probate records of household inventories, parish registers of birth and marriage, regional differences in soils and handicraft industries, the everyday experience of a distant and unfamiliar past, before the onset of factory industry. Probate records in particular provide a rich insight into status differentials, occupations, standards of living and material culture. Her most important achievement was as general editor from 1974 of The Agrarian History of England and Wales which she brought to completion (1967-2000, eight volumes). As editor of the three volumes spanning 1500 to 1750, she assembled a detailed account of the period by its foremost scholars, including herself. Her Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (1978) is an engaging account of material cultures and household experiences. In retirement, she retrieved early modern diets and occasionally served the staple barley bread to dinner guests.
Agricultural enclosure and innovation were another saga of immiseration and enrichment.
Working the land was still the largest economic sector at the end of the eighteenth century, and its transformation in Britain initially affected more people than the industrial one. Rogers' Six Centuries was a story of lost contentment. The largest disaster in British history, the Black Death of 1348-1349, was followed by relatively good times on the land as a shortage of hands drove up farming incomes and wages. By the nineteenth century, however, agricultural labourers had become the poorest of all manual workers.Agricultural development in England took the form of enclosing common land and the privately owned strips scattered on the open fields. Marx called this “primitive accumulation”, the initial big push of capitalist enterprise. It had two aspects: a conversion of long-term leasehold quasi-property into annual tenancy, and privatisation of common land that provided families with subsistence in kind. In the nineteenth century these transitions still had a bearing on the Radical struggle for political, economic and social democracy against the landed elite. Christopher Orwin became Director of the Oxford Agricultural Economics Research Institute at the very end of this period (1913-1945), and mostly directed surveys of current farming conditions. With his wife Christabel, he wrote The Open Fields (1938) about the sole remaining English unenclosed field system in Laxton, Northamptonshire. What they found was not a prelapsarian community, but a pragmatic arrangement by enterprising farmers. E.M. Ojala of the same Institute wrote an important and underappreciated work, Agriculture and Economic Progress (1952), a rich analytical account of development which provided estimates of farm output over the previous century in the United States, Britain and Sweden.
Hrothgar John Habakkuk (Chichele Professor, 1950—1967) made his mark initially in Cambridge as an historian of English landownership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, also publishing several articles on the subject while in the chair.
His magnum opus, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System (1994), investigates legal arrangements and property rights. His other main contribution, noted later, was in another field altogether.Richard Smith (Lecturer, then Reader in Population History, 1983-1994) approached medieval and early modern agrarian history from a demographic aspect. As Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine he considered the interface between demography and health care as well as informal support within the family. He was a large positive presence as teacher and research leader. Smith was followed by John Landers (Lecturer in Historical Demography, 1991-2005) whose most important publication was Death and the Metropolis (1993) which examined the demography of London from 1670 to 1830. Tony Wrigley (Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College, 1988-1994), Britain's foremost historian of population, spent most of his academic life in Cambridge. He is prolific and very highly cited.
Finally, Robert Allen (Reader and Professor of Economic History, 2001-2013) had already contributed to the early history of enclosure before his arrival, with the argument that agricultural improvement was the work of farmers more than landlords and had largely preceded the eighteenth century. He subsequently investigated another big push, this time into State capitalism: the industrialisation of Russia and the collectivisation of its agriculture between the wars (From Farm to Factory (2003)).
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