As a proportional tax on material production, the tithe holds out the tempting promise that time series of tithed output can be reconstructed from accounting records of tithe receipts. Owing to the difficulty of translating such data into consistent series of physical output, however, few have succeeded in making this dream reality. The difficulties stem from fragmentation and reassembly of individual tithes resulting in inconsistent aggregation in the accounts, variations in the rate of effective collection, and most importantly, farming out the tithe for cash payment. With signal exceptions, then, hope that tithe data might accurately reveal the aggregate contours of medieval and early modern agricultural production is largely unfulfilled. The present work represents a new attempt at tracking agricultural production in a small region using an exceptionally long and continuous set of tithe records from the accounts of the Benedictine priory of Durham. The data stretch from the 1270s to the establishment's dissolution in 1536, spanning a statistical void that separates the age of manorial accounts from the age of probate inventories, and including tithes taken not only on the traditional agricultural crops, but also on nonagricultural goods such as coal and fish.

The author subjects this data to statistical and narrative analysis by addressing two questions. What do they tell us about the chronology of agricultural production (and indirectly of the movement in population), and what do they reveal about the economic rationality of the production strategies taken in the face of the late medieval economic crisis? Analysis of the data with respect to the first question confirms the secular decline in aggregate agricultural output. From their high point in the late thirteenth century, the priory's tithe receipts fell 60 to 70 percent to the 1530s. Contrary to expectation, roughly half the decline occurred the single decade of the 1320s, followed by another sharp drop right after the Black Death that was repaired over the next twenty years. From the 1380s the series commenced its prolonged decline to the middle of the fifteenth century, after which it remained steady to the end. The main anomaly with respect to the conventional wisdom is the sharpness of the decline from the 1280s to the 1330s, and the absence of any signs of recovery between 1450 and 1536. The former may in part reflect the small number of observations between 1310 and 1330, which was a troubled time on England's northern frontier that may have affected the rate and method of collection. The latter is more problematic, but may in part reflect the shifting allocation of agricultural resources to pastoral husbandry, the products of which were not as heavily tithed as grain and pulses. Perhaps the most intriguing issue, however, concerns the reasons why the level of tithes receipts and presumably agricultural output recovered after the hecatomb of the Black Death. Was it due to the income effect of a higher land-labor ratio? Were there new market outlets? The pattern suggests a conundrum worth exploring, as it appeared elsewhere.

The changing product composition of the tithe is consistent with the predictions of economic rationality. Economists will be dismayed by the crudeness of the statistical apparatus deployed to demonstrate a correlation between prices and the composition of output, but the overall conclusion that peasants were guided by material concerns in allocating resources is hard to dispute. Whether this issue needs to be retained on the research agenda is another question. The book is competently written, with an excellent introductory survey of the research on tithe data. The statistical information is presented mainly in graphs that would be perhaps more usefully summarized in tables of decennial averages. This is a useful and well-executed work that not only illuminates a small fragment of English agriculture's “statistical dark age,” but reveals a promising young economic historian.