The interplay of local and regional study with the grand narrative for the late medieval economy is the rationale for this collection of essays edited by Ben Dodds and Richard Britnell. The volume mixes broad historiographical overviews with original research and reinforces a recent return ad fontes to illuminate murkier corners of the postplague economy and to render an overarching portrait that pays due regard to the manifold variety of local experience.

Three themes are addressed: “markets, incentives, and the role of prices” (chaps. 1–4), “output, productivity, and the evidence of tithes” (chaps. 5–8), and “land, lordship, and peasant communities” (chaps. 9–12). Britnell (chap. 1) opens with a historiographical overview of the market’s role in a predominantly agrarian late medieval society. He then (chap. 2) employs prices and the agricultural use of land to trace the arc of agrarian economy following the Black Death: the demesne regime’s “Indian summer” through 1376; recession (1376–1410) marked by the dismantling of demesne arrangements; mild recovery (1410–35) spurred in some regions by booming pastoralism; and a slump (1435–65). In effect, a single, overriding agrarian trend, either geographically or temporally, was absent. Phillipp Schofield (chap. 3) examines grain prices for the estate of Durham Cathedral Priory in conjunction with national series of prices and a local series for Exeter and finds sufficient deviation in the Durham region to suggest a greater susceptibility to agrarian fluctuations locally. Elizabeth Gemmill (chap. 4) investigates the workings of the market for grain in Aberdeen and the measures adopted by urban authorities to ensure the town a reasonably priced supply from local, national, and even international sources.

The chapters devoted to agrarian productivity are prefaced by Dodds’s explication (chap. 5) of models employed to elucidate late medieval agrarian productivity. Conceptual frameworks that postulate both an inferior peasant agriculture (the Malthusian-Ricardian model and Robert Brenner’s surplus extraction analysis) and peasant farming equaling if not surpassing demesne productivity (a revisionist school) warrant the imperative to mine whatever source illumines peasant output. Records of tithe have the greatest potential. Robert N. Swanson (chap. 6) surveys the mechanics of tithe, lays out the challenges of the evidence, and assesses tithe’s capacity to gauge the productivity of peasant farming and to investigate commerce in grain and livestock. Dodds’s comparison (chap. 7) of tithe from Durham Cathedral Priory, France, and Castile demonstrates the wide variability of the Black Death’s agrarian impact from place to place, an irregularity arising not merely from vagaries of mortality but from the intricate interaction of local political, environmental, social, and economic circumstances. In the tithe of selected villages in Wiltshire and Hampshire, John Hare (chap. 8) discerns subtle but revealing differences between demesne and peasant agrarian output and examines how both access to an urban market and evolving consumer demand influenced a local producer’s choice of what to sow and sell. He also evaluates the risks inherent when a village embraced monoculture to satisfy the market.

As backdrop to chapters devoted to shifting seigniorial relations, Britnell (chap. 9) overviews prevailing wisdom regarding the pestilence’s effect on lord, peasant, and community. He, moreover, notes the atypical durability of unfreedom in England and cautions that any linking of growing “individualism” to serfdom’s demise must take into account the peasant’s need to belong to a community. Simon J. Harris’s investigation (chap. 10) of late expansion by Durham Cathedral Priory onto Spennymoor and a swift retreat from these intakes after the Black Death shows that abandonment of the margin sometimes indeed occurred. This “marginality,” however, arose not solely from the moorland’s quality as arable but also from inaccessibility and low potential for specialized production. John Mullan (chap. 11) examines the postplague land market in two of the bishop of Winchester’s bailiwicks in Somerset and Hampshire. Despite differing patterns in transfer of land from bailiwick to bailiwick, the predominant tendency was “polarization” of landholding: the larger holding often expanded, while the cottage was prone to alienation. The keys to a family’s success in engrossing land were lengthy residence in a village, wealth, and longtime participation in the market. Mullan cautions, however, against a facile equating of polarized landholding with polarized wealth. Greater mobility and the lure of higher wages may have made alienation the better option than landholding for a cottager. For Peter L. Larson (chap. 12), halmote rolls for Durham Cathedral Priory’s estate allow reassessment of the conceptual value of “village community” in light of the sociopolitical reordering unleashed by the Black Death. The estate’s preplague norm—a relatively loosely regulated and smoothly functioning preplague village community—had adequate cohesion to weather the Black Death. Comity crumbled in the mid-1360s: violence became more frequent and severe, while cooperation in communal obligations flagged. Failure to forge a new sense of community doomed some villages to chronic tension and disorder. The more usual pattern, however, was, by the mid-1380s, ascent to dominance in a village by an oligarchic group of families, owing to a burgeoning market in land and short-term leasing.

Implicit throughout these essays and explicit in the editor’s conclusion (chap. 13) is the case for local and regional analyses. From the perspective of evidence, intensive local study of any available source, such as tithe, remains the best path to narrowing the gulf in knowledge. From the perspective of perfecting an overarching narrative for late medieval agrarian life, the grounds for local analysis likewise are compelling. While the collection is rooted in northern England—Durham Cathedral Priory figures in several essays—analyses elsewhere in England and on the continent foster fruitful comparisons and uncover the mutually transformative interplay of local, regional, and international economies. The editors encourage an agenda for research that is collective and provisional in the best sense. Whether a scholar defines region by agrarian practice, topography, soil, institutions, a market’s purview, specialized production, density of population, or availability of a compelling source, each new study enjoins reassessment and perhaps refashioning of the main story.