Mark Overton

Land, labour, and livestock : historical studies in European agricultural productivity

Productivity change in European agricultural development, Mark Overton and Bruce Campbell improving soil productivity in the pre-fertilizer era, Robert Shiel agricultural productivity in the pre-documentary past, Martin Jones agrarian productivity on the estates of the Bishopric of Winchester in the early 13th century - a managerial perspective, Kathleen Biddick labour productivity in medieval agriculture - Tuscany and the Low Countries, Gunnar Persson land, labour, livestock and productivity trends in English seignorial agriculture - 1208-1450, Bruce Campbell the determinants of land productivity on the Bishop of Winchesters demesne of Rimpton - 1208 to 1403, Christopher Thornton labour productivity in English agriculture - 1300-1860, Gregory Clark the two English agricultural revolutions - 1459-1850, Robert Allen measuring crop yields in early modern England, Paul Glennie the determinants of crop yields in early modern England, Mark Overton energy availability and agricultural productivity, E.A.Wrigley the growth of labour productivity in the production of wheat in the cinq grosses fermes of France - 1750-1929, George Grantham agricultural productivity in Belgium and Ireland in the early 19th century, Peter Solar and Martine Goossens the poverty of Italy and the backwardness of its agriculture before 1914, Patrick OBrien and Gianni Toniolo agricultural output and productivity in post-famine Ireland, Michael Turner Irish agriculture north and south since 1900, Cormac OGrada.

Estimating Crop Yields from Probate Inventories: An Example from EastAnglia, 1585–1735

There is at present no series of crop yields available for early modern England. This paper describes a method for calculating estimates of grain yields in bushels per acre using data derived from English probate inventories. Results are presented of 10-year average yields for wheat, rye, barley, oats, and peas for the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk during 1587–98, 1628–40, and 1660–1735. These results are compared with other yield figures for the periods before and after these dates, and used to revise existing estimates of the progress of productivity changes.

Norfolk livestock farming 1250–1740: a comparative study of manorial accounts and probate inventories

Abstract This paper examines developments in Norfolk livestock husbandry over a period of five centuries. It breaks new ground by combining evidence from manorial accounts and probate inventories and the methodological difficulties of using the two sources are examined in some detail. Despite these difficulties the evidence of accounts and inventories reveals the continuity of developed and dynamic pastoral farming systems in Norfolk. From an early date the distinctive feature of livestock farming was its close integration with arable farming, producing mixed-farming systems of remarkable productivity. By substituting horses for oxen and cultivating fodder crops, Norfolk farmers succeeded in maximizing the ratio of non-working to working animals, thereby permitting the development of specialized sheep farming, cattle-based dairying, and later, fattening. Sheep farming was transformed from a peasant to a landlord activity and dairying shifted in its spatial focus, gradually giving way to fattening, rendering Norfolk farmers increasingly dependent upon the import of young stock from outside the county. The most difficult comparison between accounts and inventories yields the most remarkable finding: between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries stocking densities approximately doubled. This implies significant gains in pastoral output per unit area, reinforcing the view that developments in livestock husbandry may well have been of greater importance in increasing agricultural production than the more heavily studied arable sector.

Re-estimating Crop Yields from Probate Inventories: A Comment

Robert C. Allen recently put forward some modifications and extensions to my method of estimating crop yields from probate inventories in early modern England, which was originally published in this JOURNAL some 11 years ago. His developments represent a considerable improvement on my original method and have been incorporated in some re-estimates of grain yields for Norfolk and Suffolk from 1585 to 1735. While I have no quarrel with Allens general argument, some aspects of his particular application of it to Oxfordshire inventories are open to question. Most importantly, his empirical findings of changes in Oxfordshire yields are based on such slender evidence as to fail to substantiate his conclusion that most of the yield increase in early modern England occurred in the seventeenth century rather than the eighteenth. 2 The reworking of my material for East Anglia suggests the opposite. My initial assumption in calculating yields was that inventory appraisers valued standing grain according to its future price and expected yield. Thus

Clark's Malthus delusion: response to ‘Farming in England 1200-1800’

Clarks claims about the scale of English agricultural output from the 1200s to the 1860s flout historical and geographical reality. His income†based estimates start with the daily real wages of adult males and assume that days worked per year were constant. Those advanced in British economic growth make no such assumption and instead are built up from the output side. They correlate better with population trends and are consistent with an economy slowly growing and becoming richer. Clarks denial that such growth occurred, his assertion that substantially more land must have been under arable cultivation, his belief that conditions of full employment invariably prevailed in the countryside at harvest time, his concern that the wage bill would have exceeded the value of output in British economic growth, his refusal to consider the possibility that the working year was of variable length, and his assertion that output per acre must have been equalized across arable and pasture are all shown to be figments of his ‘Malthus delusion’.

British Economic Growth, 1270–1870: GDP and GDP per head

Introduction This chapter is concerned with the estimation of real GDP per head. Today, the United Nations, World Bank and several other international organisations publish estimates of GDP per head for most of the world’s economies, ranking them in wealth and identifying the most advanced and least developed among them. The difference between the richest and poorest nations is now of the order of two-hundred-fold, whereas until the industrial revolution transformed productivity levels it was rarely more than fivefold. Modern economic growth can be fast and a dozen countries currently have reported growth rates of GDP per head in the range 10–20 per cent; it can also be negative and a dozen others, mostly already poor, have shrinking economies and declining GDP per head. Whereas there are plenty of historical precedents for such negative growth, there are none for such rapid growth, since the highest performing pre-modern economies rarely if ever achieved positive growth rates in excess of 2 or 3 per cent a year and were doing exceptionally well to maintain growth of 0.5 per cent or more for any sustained period of time. In fact, historically it is often presumed that in most countries for long periods there was next to no economic growth at all. This was because economic expansion was always liable to set in train and eventually be outpaced by population growth. It was the tension between economic and biological reproduction that preoccupied T.xa0R. Malthus, David Ricardo and other classical economists whose pessimistic musings on the potential for unlimited expansion led economics to be dubbed the ‘dismal science’. In their day, self-sustaining modern economic growth with its capacity to stay ahead of fast population growth had barely arrived. Its conception was unplanned, gestation long and successful delivery never assured, although ultimately transformative in its consequences. Among European economies, Italy and Flanders showed early promise of achieving a breakthrough but failed to deliver, Holland then overtook both but proved unable to maintain its momentum, and it was left to late-developer Britain to become the first to make the full transition to industrial revolution, closely followed by several of its most immediate European neighbours. Tracing the origins, charting the course and explaining when, how and why Britain became the world’s first industrial nation have been key subjects of historical enquiry ever since.

British Economic Growth, 1270–1870: Industrial and service-sector production

Introduction In 1270 the agricultural sector dominated economic output, dwarfing the industrial and service sectors. By 1870, notwithstanding an eightfold expansion of agricultural output, this situation had been reversed and industry and services were the fastest-growing and largest sectors. The progress of British industry has been closely scrutinised from 1700 but less so in earlier centuries notwithstanding that the roots of Britain’s industrial rise extend back much earlier than the conventional starting date of the industrial revolution in the mid-eighteenth century. The service sector, which already by the mid-nineteenth century had overtaken industry and emerged as the dominant sector within the economy, has received far less attention and awaits systematic investigation from the bottom up. This unevenness of treatment has required adoption of a range of approaches in order to derive valid estimates of industrial and service-sector output and thereby chart these profound changes in the structure of economic activity and volumes of industrial and service-sector output across the 600 years under investigation. Industrial output From 1700 industry is the one economic sector for which annual data have previously been gathered and analysed on a national scale. Full use has therefore been made of these existing estimates. Pioneering work by Hoffmann (1955) inadvertently overstated the growth rate of industrial output during the industrial revolution as a result of the weighting procedures applied to a dataset which covered only 56 per cent of industrial output. As Harley (1982) and Crafts (1985) separately point out, the problem is that a few industries, most notably cotton and iron, grew more rapidly than the rest of manufacturing, and these atypical industries bulk disproportionately large in Hoffmann’s output series. By extrapolating total industrial output from that series he effectively doubled the weights of the most dynamic industries. Harley (1982) and Crafts and others (1989) have overcome this problem by limiting the weights applied to cotton and iron and increasing those applied to other industries, thereby arriving at lower estimates of total industrial output growth.

British Economic Growth, 1270–1870: Epilogue: British economic growth, 1270–1870

Introduction Between 1270 and 1870 Britain slowly progressed from the periphery of the European economy to centre-stage of an integrated world economy. In the process it escaped from Malthusian constraints and by the eighteenth century had successfully reconciled rising population with rising living standards. This final chapter reflects upon this protracted but profound economic transformation from the perspective of the national income estimates assembled in Part I and analysed in Part II of this book. Because Britain’s economic rise did not unfold in isolation, account is taken of the broader comparative context provided by the national income reconstructions now available for several other Eurasian countries: Spain from 1282, Italy from 1310 and Holland from 1348, plus Japan from 725, China from 980 and India from 1600. All are output-based estimates but have been derived via a range of alternative approaches according to the nature of the available historical evidence. Several make ingenious use of real wage rates and urbanisation ratios (Malanima, 2011; Alvarez-Nogal and Prados de la Escosura, 2013), two economic indicators often used as surrogates for estimates of GDP per head. Only the GDP estimates for Holland, like these for Britain, have been made the hard way, by summing the weighted value-added outputs of the agricultural, industrial and service sectors and then dividing the results by estimates of total population obtained by reconciling time-series and cross-sectional demographic data. Methodologically, the British and Dutch national income estimates are therefore the most directly comparable. Each is free from overdependence upon any single or narrow range of data series and, instead, they encapsulate variations in the wide range of economic indicators, appropriately weighted in line with their importance in overall economic activity, from which they have been reconstructed.

Britain in an international context

Introduction How does Britain’s experience of long-run economic growth and development, as revealed by the output-based estimation of GDP per head set out in Part I of this book, compare with that of other countries? Maddison’s (2010) historical national income estimates show that by the middle of the nineteenth century Britain had become the most developed economy in the world, with higher output per head than any other country in Europe, Asia or the Americas. A majority of its population lived in towns, agriculture contributed less than a quarter of employment and a fifth of value-added output, after centuries of mercantilism it was trading across the world under the banner of free trade, and the value of that international commerce accounted for a fifth of national income and was rising. Demographic and economic growth were proceeding in tandem and thereby fulfilling one of Kuznets’s (1966) key requirements of modern economic growth. Contrary to Malthus’s gloomiest predictions, the population was not only growing but it was becoming richer. The Great Exhibition of 1851, conceived to make clear to the world Great Britain’s role as industrial leader, could not have been better timed. Eight centuries earlier, when William of Normandy had cast his covetous eyes upon the Crown of England, the country had been less a land of plenty than a kingdom with plenty of land. Its relatively sparse population of 1.7 million was overwhelmingly rural, towns were small and London alone had more than 10,000 inhabitants, commerce was limited and commercial institutions and infrastructure weakly developed, and exports were chiefly of unprocessed primary products, most notably wool and tin. England may have been resource-rich but its lack of development meant that its GDP per head was only a quarter what it would become in 1850. It was poorer than most of its immediate continental neighbours, significantly poorer than northern and central Italy, at that time Europe’s economic leader, conspicuously poorer than the world’s most successful economy, China under the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127), and poorer than the core economies of the Roman Empire a millennium earlier under Augustus (Lo Cascio and Malanima, 2009).

Agricultural land use

Introduction Agriculture was for long the single largest component of the English and British economies, both in terms of its share of employment and the value of its output. The latter was a function of the amount of land under cultivation, the uses to which it was put, the productivities of crops and animals and their respective prices. The main purpose of this chapter is to describe the methods used to derive the areas under arable and grass and, in particular, the total sown acreage. The crops produced and animals stocked are the subjects of the following chapter. Along the way, it will be demonstrated that claims that the peak arable area in the medieval period may have exceeded 20 million acres (Clark, 2007a: 124) are unrealistic, since, on the best available evidence, the combined total under field crops and fallow could not have been more than 12.75 million acres. In the absence of significant food imports, this limited both the population that could be supported and the supply of kilocalories per head needed for survival. It also shaped the production choices made by agricultural producers. Comprehensive national agricultural statistics were collected annually from 1866 and provide the starting point for calculating the acreages of arable and grass (Anon, 1968; Coppock, 1984). Together with the tithe files, which provide a precise but incomplete guide to the share of land in each county devoted to arable production during the 1830s (Kain, 1986; Overton, 1986), they are used to provide a nineteenth-century benchmark. The chapter proceeds as follows. After a discussion of the potential agricultural area of England in Section 2.2, Section 2.3 reviews the arable acreage by county from the tithe files of the 1830s and from the agricultural statistics of 1871. Section 2.4 then examines changes in land use between 1290 and 1871, while Section 2.5 presents county-level estimates of the arable acreage in 1290. Section 2.6 provides a further cross-check by examining changes in land use between 1086 and 1290. Finally, Section 2.7 provides estimates of land use for a number of benchmark years between 1270 and 1871.