This book is the outcome of a conference organized by Jane Whittle in 2012 to critically celebrate the publication centenary of R. H. Tawney's The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. The authors are remarkably consistent in their positive evaluation of The Agrarian Problem as a book whose research methods and judgments have lasted well. One hundred years of research using a wider range of records have modified whole areas such as population history and some of Tawney's judgments: he overstressed the extent of depopulating evictions rather than collusive actions, and his enclosure examples focused too narrowly on open-field midlands. Whittle's introduction discusses how Tawney came to write his book at the request of the Workers Educational Association and his use of female research assistants to trawl his sources—Tawney himself did not register as a Public Record Office reader until after The Agrarian Problem was published. She then discusses its critical reception at the time and the extraordinarily vituperative and political reaction against it by Geoffrey Elton and Tawney's pupil, Eric Kerridge, immediately after Tawney's death. This part is neatly complemented by David Ormrod's historiographical overview of the agrarian capitalism question over the past century. The succeeding chapters illuminate geographical regions less well covered by Tawney and update aspects of the legal and economic history of the period.

Chris Dyer's chapter sets the scene with an overview of the period before 1520, which places more emphasis on population, the importance of towns and markets, and events outside the Midland core of Tawney's book. Harold Garret-Goodyear follows with a discussion of the ways the early Tudor common law courts were involved in disputes over manorial rights, demonstrating that it was overwhelmingly manorial lords who went to court when they could not enforce their local jurisdiction, not tenants defending themselves against eviction or encroachment. The ambivalent nature of manorial courts, in which the lord as judge was the upholder of custom but also his own material interest, is apparent in the local studies in northern England (Derbyshire and East Yorkshire) by Briony McDonagh and Heather Falvey. These demonstrate the complexities of disputes over manorial rights that were rarely simply lord versus peasant. Andy Wood pursues his current theme of custom and memory to show how in Malmesbury (Wiltshire) a large block of common land originally shared by all the townspeople was unsuccessfully defended against elite enclosure by invoking King Athelstan's gift to the town in Anglo-Saxon times. Julian Goodacre refreshingly looks at the similarities and differences in Scottish land tenure systems and underlines how basic similarities in economic structures and pressures led to parallel phenomena across the border. Three further papers on northern England follow: Jean Morrin discusses how Durham Cathedral estates transformed feudal tenures into leases for lives after statutory intervention, and how tenant resistance and insistence on tenant right embedded secure tenancies with fixed rents and fines by 1626; Jennifer Holt's study of Tenant Right on the Hornby Castle estates in north Lancashire demonstrates the financial benefits to tenants of securing fixed rents and fines, using strategically placed manorial surveys, and key court cases to show that tenants were adept at using the London courts to defend their position from a distance of 250 miles; Bill Shannon's important study of the “approvement” process to drain the “mosses” in lowland Lancashire shows how landlord-led enterprise had considerable up-front costs but transferred long-run risk to the tenants, contrasting it with better known tenant-led enclosures of Bowland and Rossendale. Liz Griffiths contrasts three Norfolk landowners' approaches to their manorial tenants: the sheepfold system made it the landlord's interest to retain open fields for their own flocks, while tenants preferred enclosure. She cleverly balances examples of aggressive landlords attempting to recoup financial losses but finding themselves rebuffed by peasant resistance, with those of others, seeking to exploit alternative methods of estate improvement that did not directly erode customary tenures and thus working with their peasants. “Tawney's Century,” as F. J. Fisher called it, ended in 1640 and the politics of his era saw the English Civil War and Interregnum as the key turning point. Christopher Brooks examines the period, finding that Tawney misread Stuart agrarian policy and also the extent of legal continuity despite the abolition of the Prerogative Courts and attempts at legal reform. Landlords' rights in respect of the Crown/Executive were consolidated, but copyhold security of tenure was further reinforced in Interregnum judgments, culminating in Common Law becoming as involved in copyhold cases as the Equity courts.

This volume provides a fruitful reevaluation of Tawney's seminal volume, particularly in its attention to neglected parts of England. For those wishing to update their agrarian history it should be read in conjunction with Richard Hoyle's Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, UK, 2011), while we wait for his long-delayed overview of land tenure in the period. Whittle rightly focuses on the political dimension of Tawney's work and its changing reception. She might have added a final twist. Why would Tawney's Workers Education Association class in urban east London focus on Tudor rural conflicts, and why did his mentors steered him to write a book on the subject? We tend to forget that the Land Question was a burning issue in politics of the period 1906–14, central to radical politics but snuffed out by the cataclysm of the First World War.