In this impressive work Alex Brown studies a region of northeast England from the late fourteenth until the early seventeenth centuries. It was a region with diverse natural resources and one in which ecclesiastical and lay estates in the later Middle Ages were large and highly concentrated. Brown makes a compelling case for investigating the whole period from the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. He argues that estate management and associated institutional constraints emerging in the fifteenth century created a degree of path dependency, which determined decision-making and fortunes both of landlords and tenants in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Over six chapters, Brown systematically considers the economic responses of ecclesiastical landowning institutions, changing patterns of landownership among the laity, and the developing circumstances of local tenants. This is set against a background initially of economic stagnation, followed by one of rapid population growth and price inflation.
Two substantial chapters consider in turn the fortunes of the estate of Durham Cathedral Priory and that of the Bishops of Durham. In 1538 the monks of Durham Cathedral Priory surrendered the church to the crown. Within 17 months this medieval institution had been reconstituted, in many respects unaltered, as the dean and chapter of Durham Cathedral, ensuring a clear institutional continuity for both estates throughout the period. Both estates were confronted with the impact of waste, decayed rents and arrears, and both had to withstand the severe mid-fifteenth century recession, although the practices and policies adopted by the two estates differed markedly.
From the late fourteenth century the monks of Durham Cathedral Priory began to lease their lands, while the bishops were largely inactive in that regard. The bishops were more hands-off and peripatetic, with a growing preference for using income from their mineral resources and parks as an income. Sixteenth-century price inflation and the Crown's long leases of many of the bishops' manors, alongside other long leases to the region's gentry, ensured that the bishopric could not exploit their leaseholders to supplement their stagnant copyhold rents. Crown leases of their coal mines thwarted use of coal sales to bolster the bishops’ depressed rental income. The dean and chapter inherited an estate with a predominance of leasehold tenure, and a relatively harmonious relationship with now comfortably situated tenants. This offered an institutional framework that enabled them to ride the inflationary forces with which the neighbouring bishopric was unable to cope.
Another substantial section of the book considers landholding among the region's laity. Initially investigating the great lay landowners, Brown finds that after the Black Death they accumulated manors from less fortunate and more modest landowners. This was partly as a result of their commercial connections, and social networks extending beyond the region, which granted them access to credit and capital. But in the sixteenth century they experienced relative hardship as their landholdings were reduced. There were confiscations arising from the Rising of the North, inheritance failures and an inability, in common with the bishopric as rentiers, to sustain their incomes in a period of increased inflation. By comparison, smaller (gentry) landholders who retained their land under direct management found themselves in a far more favourable position in the sixteenth century. They took advantage of rising agricultural prices and, when tenants of large lay landowners, experienced the advantages of stagnant rents. Consequently, by the early seventeenth century, a substantial restructuring of landed society had occurred. Few lay families held estates of more than ten manors because the properties of the largest lay landholders had shrunk, and Newcastle merchants and prebendaries of the dean and chapter had entered the land market.
All of these findings require noteworthy reassessment, and a nuancing within this regional context of the older debates relating to the ‘crisis of the aristocracy’ and ‘the rise of the gentry’ in the generations leading up to the Civil War. Brown carefully considers the land acquisitions of those merchants who became increasingly engaged in the mining industry and shows that they were not engaging in rural land purchases principally to boost their social stratus as landed gentry, but more often than not to gain access to the mineral resources that were coming to be the main foundation of their growing wealth.
The final chapters focus on the circumstances of the tenants. Brown sees the tenants of the dean and chapter as the group faring best of all, since among them a durable social structure had been created, in which most held properties ranging between 50 and 150 acres, with limited evidence of fragmentation or downward mobility. In contrast, on the ecclesiastical estates the lack of a uniform direction from the Bishops of Durham permitted accumulation by a minority, and fragmentation of holdings among a majority of tenants, leading to greater overall social differentiation.
Brown has achieved a great deal in this book and has made a strong case for giving pride of place to estate policies and practices that forged substantial path dependency in determining economic developments in this region over the two centuries before the Civil War. Of particular significance is his observation that ‘if we were to choose examples of Durham villages at random in the early seventeenth century we would find significant differences in the tenure, rents and size of holdings between a village in the dean and chapter's estate and its counterpart on the bishops' estate’ (p. 28). The study is less forthcoming on any generalisation regarding villages in which neither of these two ecclesiastical landowners was predominant.
Perhaps too, given the quantity of research now focused on the well-being of persons and households across the whole social spectrum and not just concentrated on those owning or leasing land in this period, it would be helpful to know how well all sections of village society fared in those years of increasingly frequent harvest and subsistence crises between c. 1580 and c. 1640. Did the communities where the dean and chapter‘s tenants loomed largest in the local social structure fare better than the more differentiated communities with a larger base of economically less well-endowed inhabitants?
Brown has offered us the possibility of testing some challenging hypotheses as a result of this very important and in certain respects paradigm-setting work, but much of this may require resort to community-focused reconstructions of which this book is somewhat critical.
