I. COMMERCIALIZATION, COMMODITY MARKETS, AND FACTOR MARKETS IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

Was precocious development of efficient factor markets a key ingredient of England's eventual emergence as the world's first industrial nation? If so, it is in the two centuries prior to the Black Death of 1348–1349 – half a millennium before the onset of sustained economic growth – that the origin and early development of those markets must undoubtedly be sought. That was when the governmental, fiscal, legal, tenurial, and commercial infrastructures were put in place upon which so much subsequent economic development would be founded.Footnote ¹ Moreover, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were themselves a period of significant economic achievement, when commercial activity expanded and populations grew throughout the known world. For Janet Abu-Lughod this culminated in the creation of the first world economy, when a series of trading links were established connecting easternmost Asia with westernmost Europe.Footnote ² England, however, was marginal rather than central to that world economy, whose commercial epicentres lay elsewhere – in Flanders and northern France, northern Italy, Constantinople, and the East. Indeed, contemporary mappae mundi place it on the outer edge of the known world, with only Ireland, Scotland, and Iceland lying beyond.Footnote ³ At this early stage of development there was nothing to indicate that England would one day achieve world or even European economic hegemony.

At the climax of its medieval economic expansion, c.1290, England remained an overwhelmingly agrarian economy, geared towards the production of primary products by mostly relatively land-extensive methods, and dependent upon the import of luxury commodities, manufactured goods, and bullion from other more developed economies, notably Flanders and Italy.Footnote ⁴ In contrast with the latter, it was relatively weakly urbanized (with less than 15 per cent of its population living in towns of all sizes and less than 7 per cent living in towns with populations of at least 5,000) and in absolute terms its leading towns were small.Footnote ⁵ By 1290, London, by far the largest and most important, could boast fewer than 75,000 inhabitants and it is likely only four others had populations of at least 10,000.Footnote ⁶ At that time the national population probably numbered between 4 and 4½ million.Footnote ⁷ Although craft manufacture for domestic markets was firmly established, it was limited in scale and as yet made but a modest contribution to GDP. There was a highly developed building industry, but buildings by their very nature cannot be exported.Footnote ⁸ Instead wool, hides, tin, and lead were England's principal exports, a clear indication that the country's international comparative advantage lay in grass-based livestock production and the extraction of scarce minerals. Nor did most of the profits of that trade accrue to England, since alien rather than denizen merchants handled a majority of it.Footnote ⁹ Small wonder, therefore, that agriculture dominated the national economy, both as an employer of labour and in its contribution to GDP.Footnote ¹⁰ Nor is it surprising that GDP per capita and agricultural output per worker were probably lower in England than in the more advanced European and Asian economies of the day, where the division of labour was greater and ‘value added’ activities were more significant.Footnote ¹¹

Most historians of the medieval English economy now regard the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a period of active commercialization, when more people became more dependent for more of their livelihoods upon market exchange.Footnote ¹² Of late this process of commercialization has come in for a good deal of attention. Prices for a vast array of commodities have been collected and assembled into annual series.Footnote ¹³ Monetarists and numismatists have assessed the quantity and quality of the money supply.Footnote ¹⁴ Marketing institutions chartered by the Crown – markets, fairs, and boroughs – have been documented, counted, and mapped.Footnote ¹⁵ Individual towns have been researched and excavated and efforts made to estimate their sizes and functions and to reconstruct the extent to which they were integrated into a functioning urban hierarchy.Footnote ¹⁶ Attempts have been made to define the supply hinterlands of the greatest of those towns for provisions, fuel, and raw materials and to elucidate how rural suppliers were linked to urban consumers.Footnote ¹⁷ Much attention has also been paid to the commodities that were traded, both unprocessed and processed, and especially those that entered international trade.Footnote ¹⁸ From 1275, exports of wool, woollen cloth, untanned hides and, from 1304, all goods imported by alien merchants became liable to the payment of customs duty, and thus more visible and measurable than any other components of trade.

The role of overseas and domestic demand in shaping the production decisions of rural producers has been investigated by reconstructing patterns of land-use and husbandry on the well-documented estates of seigniorial lords and by measuring the proportion of net production that was sold on the open market.Footnote ¹⁹ Patterns and levels of commercial involvement by non-seigniorial producers, in turn, have been inferred from the evidence of tax returns and pleas of debt, both of which survive in abundance from the late thirteenth century.Footnote ²⁰ Consequently, although it is generally accepted that a majority of England's population c.1290 lived at a subsistence standard of living – and was increasingly susceptible to crises of subsistence – it is now acknowledged that few if any households were economically self-sufficient. Most people met a growing proportion of their daily needs by buying and selling goods, services, and labour and by lending and borrowing to make ends meet.Footnote ²¹ Consequently, when supply failed, demand faltered, or markets malfunctioned, many experienced significant and sometimes severe economic hardship.Footnote ²² Those who lived by the market on occasion perished by it. Commercial recession was an important component of the so-called ‘crisis’ of the early fourteenth century, of which war, famine, and plague were more conspicuous and dramatic components.Footnote ²³

In all of these commercial developments the existence and operation of factor markets in land, labour, and capital have largely been taken for granted.Footnote ²⁴ Certainly, they have attracted far less systematic attention than marketing institutions, the rules of marketing, and the commodities marketed, on all of which there is now a substantial literature. In part, of course, the existence, operation, and growth of factor markets was a sine qua non of the rise of commodity markets and few if any historians would argue that land, labour, and capital were excluded from the process of commercialization. All three could certainly be bought and sold in pre-Black-Death England and probably had been since at least the advent of the first explicit evidence in the second half of the twelfth century, if not long before. More at issue are the ease and regularity with which they were transacted, the rules and procedures that governed their exchange, the efficiency and cost of these transactions, and the extent to which markets for land, labour, and capital remained limited, localized, and un-integrated. As Graeme Snooks emphasized in 1991, when drawing attention to the neglected importance of medieval factor markets, ‘by 1300 factor markets in land, labour, and capital had all been established and much growth had occurred; in subsequent centuries further growth resulted from improvements to the efficiency of those markets and an increase in their activity’.Footnote ²⁵

Self-evidently, an array of entrenched rules, rights, beliefs, and institutions militated against the cheap, smooth, efficient, and universal operation of medieval factor markets and therefore against high levels of market activity. Land, for instance, was not a chattel. At no point in the Middle Ages was it owned outright and exclusive of the rights of others. Only the monarch – from whom, under feudal property law, all land was ultimately held – was an exception. This, as Marc Bloch observed, was a characteristic feature of European feudalism: ‘nearly all land and a great many human beings were burdened at this time with a multiplicity of obligations differing in their nature, but all apparently of equal importance’.Footnote ²⁶ It meant that if land changed hands, by conveyance or inheritance, the rights of those with claims upon it had to be respected, especially those with a superior proprietary right. It also meant that these ‘domainal’ rights could change hands independently of use rights to the land.

Labour, too, was bound and constrained. Slavery was not abolished in England until the close of the eleventh century.Footnote ²⁷ Serfdom, by which many more people were tied, lasted as an institution until the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and offered lords real advantages during the conditions of labour scarcity prevailing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.Footnote ²⁸ Rapid population growth brought about its relative decay during the thirteenth century and from the fourteenth century it was in absolute and accelerating decline.Footnote ²⁹ Serfdom was an inherited status. Serfs were born unfree, were tied to the manors of their birth, typically held land by villein tenure, were subject to the sole jurisdiction and justice of their lord, and, unlike free tenants, were denied the protection and justice of the royal courts. During the thirteenth century lawyers elaborated the common law of villeinage, which gave lords first claim on the labour of their bonded serfs.Footnote ³⁰ By the early fourteenth century the latter accounted for just under half of the tenant population and just over half of all tenanted land was held by villein tenure.Footnote ³¹ Only gradually did a distinction emerge between the personal status of being unfree (serfdom) and the tenure of unfree land (villeinage). Eventually, villein tenure was transformed into copyhold tenure, the land in both cases being held at the will of the lord, with proof of title being recorded in the relevant manorial court roll.Footnote ³² Only then did freemen who acquired villein land escape the risk of being tainted by serfdom.

Just as the law of villeinage imposed geographical, occupational, and contractual restrictions on labour, so canon law imposed constraints upon capital due to the Church's censure of usury.Footnote ³³ Because interest per se could not be charged, other devices needed to be employed to secure an adequate return to those who provided credit and to offset the considerable risks of doing so. Legal procedures for the recovery of debts could be cumbersome, especially when these were incurred in overseas trade.Footnote ³⁴ Consequently, thirteenth-century English interest rates on private loans – calculated by Gregory Clark at between 9 and 12 per cent – were roughly double those prevailing in later centuries (although only half to a third of those recorded for ‘money-poor, cash-hungry and debt-ridden’ parts of the pre-industrial world).Footnote ³⁵ Credit was certainly available – indeed, to judge from the quantity of recorded debt cases, it is doubtful that the economy could have functioned without it – but it came at a price.Footnote ³⁶

To date, research into each of these factor markets remains limited and uneven. Most is, and probably can be, known about the labour market, since it is the most explicitly and abundantly recorded in the available historical sources and has long captured the interest of economic historians. The land market has attracted less attention, notwithstanding a wealth of information, since historians have been more reluctant to engage with the technical complexities of tenure and property law, and gathering and analysing data on land transactions requires much hard labour in the archives. For a combination of evidential and technical reasons, reconstruction of price and rent series for land has barely begun.Footnote ³⁷ Only a handful of historians have attempted to grapple with the greater complexities of the capital market. Here, there has been a tendency to focus on the lenders rather than the loans and on the debtors rather than the debts. Moreover, the bulk of the evidence from which historians perforce must work tends to be negative, insofar as it derives from legal records of bad debts. Nevertheless, recent efforts to reconstruct interest rates from the beginning of the thirteenth century have met with some success. Significantly, Clark and Larry Epstein identify a significant fall in both English and European interest rates over the course of the fourteenth century, prompting interesting questions concerning the precise timing of and reasons for that fall.Footnote ³⁸

II. LABOUR MARKETS

Hired labour was undoubtedly less important than self-employed and family labour within the medieval economy, but it was almost certainly more important than servile labour, notwithstanding that the last is typically regarded as one of the hallmarks of the English feudal economy. Richard Britnell has estimated that by 1300 wage labour may have accounted for about a fifth to a quarter of the total labour expended in producing goods and services within the economy at large.Footnote ³⁹ Waged labour was the norm in the building industry (especially on the many large building projects of the period), which experienced a sustained boom from the late eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries.Footnote ⁴⁰ Its records provide the best and longest available series of task-specific wage rates, as famously reconstructed for the period 1264 to 1954 by Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins and now revised and extended back to 1209 by Clark.Footnote ⁴¹ Wage earning was also integral to the urban economy and lured many, over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, into migrating to towns. Nevertheless, it was in the countryside that the single greatest volume of waged employment was to be found, both throughout the year and, most conspicuously, at periods of peak labour demand during the hay, wool, and grain harvests.

It was as employers rather than coercers of labour that lords were most important, since the seigniorial sector – which, from the resumption of direct management in the early thirteenth century, accounted for at most a quarter to a third of total agricultural production – was never adequately supplied with servile labour.Footnote ⁴² By 1300 the proportion of seigniorial production actually accounted for by labour services may have been as little as 8 per cent, whereas the proportion accounted for by hired labour was more than ten times as great.Footnote ⁴³ Consequently, the labour sold to lords by tenants far exceeded that paid to them in rent. Manorial accounts, the earliest of which date from 1208–1209, record the payments made to hired workers, both casual and full-time, and sometimes the work performed by servile tenants. David Farmer used the task-specific payments for threshing and winnowing and for reaping and binding to reconstruct an annual series of agricultural wage rates commencing in 1208–1209 and has combined this with prices to estimate the purchasing power of wages.Footnote ⁴⁴ Clark has drawn upon these and other data to reconstruct the nominal and real wages of agricultural workers from 1209 to 1869, an exercise which highlights both the antiquity and the long-term continuity of this factor market.Footnote ⁴⁵

By the close of the thirteenth century – in marked contrast to the situation at the start – hired labour was both cheap and abundant and in the second half of the fourteenth century David Stone has shown that it was better motivated and cheaper to police than servile labour.Footnote ⁴⁶ Accordingly, prudent and progressive lords increasingly commuted labour services for cash and substituted hired workers. John Hatcher reckons that less than a third of villein households were still regularly performing weekworks (the most burdensome of customary services) at the close of the thirteenth century, and, presumably, performing them indifferently.Footnote ⁴⁷ Lords of the many small manors with only free tenants had no alternative but to hire labour and the same usually applied to the thousands of modest glebe farms belonging to rectors. Except on the great serf-run estates, such as those operated by the bishop of Winchester and the abbot of Glastonbury in southern England, lords typically managed their demesnes with a permanent staff of farm servants or famuli (forerunners of the ‘servants in husbandry’ of later centuries) employed on annual contracts in return for food, accommodation, and a fixed money wage, and supervised by salaried serjeants and bailiffs.Footnote ⁴⁸ In many respects famuli were the aristocracy of labour, for they enjoyed considerable security of employment and were relatively well looked after. There were also many small ways in which they could profit at their lord's expense.Footnote ⁴⁹ On the vast majority of English manors, these were the workers who ploughed, harrowed, sowed, reaped, and carted, managed the working animals, and herded and shepherded livestock. Substantial freeholders and even many 30-acre (12-hectare) yardlanders (tenants of the largest class of standard villein holding) also undoubtedly hired labour on a casual or annual basis. On serf-run estates, yardlanders owing weekworks often lacked sufficient family labour to manage a 30-acre arable holding and fulfil their potentially heavy labouring obligations on the demesne, and they therefore hired workers to make good the shortfall.Footnote ⁵⁰

So populous was the pre-Black-Death countryside in the most congested parts of eastern and southern England that there was evidently no shortage of workers available for hire. The families of cottagers, labourers, paupers, and vagrants outnumbered those of yardlanders (of whom there were perhaps 150,000) by more than two to one. In addition, there were at least a quarter of a million smallholding families, most of whom had more labour than they could gainfully employ on their own holdings. In fact, three-quarters of all rural families were crowded onto less than a third of the land and were therefore obliged to augment the inadequate agricultural income from their holdings with such earnings from by-employment as they could obtain.Footnote ⁵¹ Freeholders, who by 1300 outnumbered serfs, were disproportionately represented among these smallholding groups due to the greater susceptibility of their holdings to subdivision and subletting.Footnote ⁵² Without a well-developed labour market such households with a marked surplus of labour over land could not have survived; the more that the market was glutted with labour, however, the lower real wages sank: at the opening of the fourteenth century they were lower than at any other time between 1209 and 1869.Footnote ⁵³

Those who worked as wage labourers did not as yet constitute a rural proletariat. Individuals may have been landless, but households rarely were. Together, land and family were the prerequisites for survival and, undoubtedly, this must have constrained the geographical mobility of waged labour (although this is an issue that awaits systematic investigation). Within the countryside, those who lived by their labour alone, unsupported by landholding in any form, were as yet a minority. Employment opportunities varied too much from season to season and year to year for wage earning by itself to provide a reliable basis for family formation and household survival. Without at least some land, albeit only a cottage and a garden with a cow on the commons, it was difficult for labourers to survive slack seasons and poor years. The principal suppliers of live-in servants were therefore young adults from established tenant households – the garciones of the documents – and those cottagers and smallholders with labour in excess of their own needs. The truly landless were always liable to succumb to destitution and vagrancy, becoming beggars and thieves rather than workers. Vagrants were the most vulnerable members of rural society and those vagrants who were able-bodied were the object of much contemporary social disapproval. In 1349 the Ordinance of Labourers complained of ‘many sturdy beggars – finding that they can make a living by begging for alms – are refusing to work, and are spending their time instead in idleness and depravity, and sometimes in robberies and other crimes’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Wage earners, particularly those who were women and children, are among the most anonymous members of rural society.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rarely are they named in the documents that record their employment. Nor do manorial court rolls shed much light upon them, for it is those landed villagers who dominated manorial life whose careers and families are most readily reconstituted.Footnote ⁵⁶ Poor labourers and their families, who typically held land as subtenants rather than head-tenants, usually feature but fleetingly in court rolls, not least because of their propensity to die out and disappear. At Halesowen in Worcestershire Zvi Razi has demonstrated that it was the constant downward social displacement of the surplus children of substantial tenants into the ranks of cottagers, commoners, squatters, and subtenants that maintained the supply of wage earners on the manor.Footnote ⁵⁷ These are the very groups least well represented in extents and surveys. Nor do they show up in extant tax lists, for most who laboured for a living were too poor to contribute to the lay subsidies, from which those with movable goods worth less than 10 shillings were exempt.

For all their very tangible social and economic presence, rural wage earners are hard to identify and harder still to count. They were the small fry of the medieval countryside and they slip through the historical net. This is unfortunate for this is the rural socio-economic group that expanded most before 1349, shrank most thereafter, and most bore the brunt of famine, economic recession, and plague. Upon their numbers largely hinges the debate over the size of England's medieval population: the higher the estimate of the population the greater their numbers must have been. Only on the estate of Glastonbury Abbey do the landless shed their anonymity, for those present on each manor were enumerated annually in the rolls of the Eastertide court.Footnote ⁵⁸

Well before the Black Death, in fact, there was evidently a serious oversupply of agricultural labour, resulting in extensive under- and unemployment.Footnote ⁵⁹ Undoubtedly, the situation had been much healthier a century earlier, when the economy had been expanding rapidly and was as yet unencumbered by an excess of labour. The superior labouring opportunities of the opening decades of the thirteenth century are apparent in real wage rates double those at the close of the century (and on a par with those at the opening of the nineteenth century), which in turn implies correspondingly superior levels of marginal labour productivity.Footnote ⁶⁰ Unfortunately, all attempts to extend these wage series back to before their erosion by the rampant price inflation of 1180 to 1220 have foundered on the lack of suitable documentation.Footnote ⁶¹ Quite possibly, the twelfth century was the first ‘golden age’ of the hired labourer, when wage earners may have reaped the reward of an economy that was expanding faster than the labour supply. Over the ensuing century, in contrast, money wages failed to keep pace with the progressive inflation in prices while population growth resulted in growing competition for work.

Real wages held up reasonably well until the famine of 1257–1258 but thereafter took a permanent turn for the worse, especially in years of bad harvests and high prices.Footnote ⁶² Wage earners found themselves penalized by the inherent inertia of nominal wages, to which John Munro has recently drawn attention.Footnote ⁶³ To compound the situation, expansion of the economy was slowing down while the accumulated momentum of population growth meant that the supply of labour was increasing more rapidly than the demand for it. By the mid-1270s wages would buy only half what they had bought at the start of the century. Wage-earning households either had to settle for a lower material standard of living or work longer and harder to maintain real incomes, with increased labour-force participation by female and child household members.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such an ‘industrious revolution’ may have mitigated the erosion of real wages. Nevertheless, as the number of poor families steadily rose, consumption of leisure must have gained over that of goods. For the next fifty years it was only when harvests were abundant and food prices low, as in the late 1280s and early 1300s, that real wages registered any improvement. Bountiful harvests also boosted seasonal demands for casual labour. Such gains were invariably wiped out as soon as harvests reverted to or sank below normal, as in the mid-1290s and, most traumatically, during the prolonged agrarian crisis of 1315–1322.Footnote ⁶⁵

The oversupply of unskilled labour reinforced by the high cost of capital is reflected in the favourable wage premium commanded at this time by skilled workers.Footnote ⁶⁶ Training cost time and money, and access to education was restricted. As the population rose and living standards fell, so the unskilled multiplied faster than the skilled. As yet, government made no attempt to promote skill acquisition through the provision of elementary schooling. Nor did it intervene in and regulate the labour market. It took the mass death of workers in the Black Death of 1348–1349 to provoke a government of landowners into enacting first the Ordinance (1349) and then the Statute of Labourers (1351), which endeavoured to impose a system of wage restraint by setting rates of remuneration at their pre-plague levels, imposing annual contracts upon workers, and creating a policing structure of local justices to enforce these regulations.Footnote ⁶⁷ Whether pre-plague wage rates represent a genuinely competitive market wage is, however, a matter of debate. Certainly they were not indifferent to supply and demand shocks but nor was their response necessarily proportionate to those shocks. Thus, whereas Clark has recently asserted that by the early fourteenth century wage rates provide a genuine index of the real market price of labour and on that basis can be used to infer trends in the marginal productivity of labour, Munro, more prudently, has emphasized the ‘stickiness’ of money wages and their sluggishness in responding to changed market conditions and especially the marked price deflation brought about by the depletion of bullion stocks in the 1330s and 1340s.Footnote ⁶⁸ Consequently, price variations and changes in the supply and value of money had a disproportionate impact upon real wages. Few historians versed in the period and its evidence would disagree with Munro‘s empirically informed but economically unorthodox verdict.

III. LAND MARKETS

If, as the legal historian Robert Palmer has argued, a genuine market in land had to await protection of the title to property ‘by a bureaucratic authority according to set rules’, that protection in England was provided by the legal reforms of Henry II (r. 1154–1189).Footnote ⁶⁹ Creation of the common law, enforced in royal courts by Crown-appointed justices, was the essential precondition for the growth of a genuine market in freehold land over the course of the thirteenth century. Material testimony to the rise of that market is provided by the ‘private charters that grant or sell or exchange or quitclaim or lease tiny pieces of land [and] survive in their thousands in the muniment-rooms of estate owners, in local record offices, and in other repositories’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Some historians have speculated that this documentation of specific transactions post-dated the appearance of the market itself and was primarily a function of the proliferation of written records that was such a feature of the thirteenth century.Footnote ⁷¹ Nevertheless, insofar as a clear, written title to property providing unequivocal legal proof of ownership was a necessary precondition for the development of a land market, it seems reasonable to accept the rising number of private charters as evidence for an increasingly active market in freehold land. That market was lent further momentum by the increased commercial availability of clerical skills, combined with the cheap and effective legal procedures developed by the royal courts for the conveyance of free land.Footnote ⁷² From the 1160s a stream of legal reforms extended the efficiency and scope of the writs necessary to initiate litigation in the royal courts. The cost of the writs required for the defence of freehold tenure also fell dramatically, from 10 marks (£6 13s 4d; decimalized £6.67) to ½ mark (6s 8d; £0.33).Footnote ⁷³ Only freeholders transacting freehold land could avail themselves of this service, but their numbers were increasing both absolutely and relatively to such an extent that by the opening of the fourteenth century they outnumbered those of servile status.Footnote ⁷⁴ The co-existence of freehold and villein land, which was an enduring feature of even the most manorialized parts of lowland England, also meant that where a market in freehold land led, a local manorial market in villein land often followed.

Over the course of the long thirteenth century land was an appreciating asset; in relatively fixed supply but increasing demand, with the price of its products subject to steady inflation. Freeholders wanted land for the standing it gave them within rural society. More fundamentally, in an age without a universal system of institutionalized welfare other than the charity and almsgiving urged on all Christians and religious orders, occupancy of the land was the soundest insurance against risk. It was a source of food, raw materials, and revenue, bestowed common rights, could be sold to realize its capital value, mortgaged as security for credit, or sublet as a source of revenue. Those with capital to spare who wished to invest in land were most likely to purchase freehold land, not least because, unlike villein land, its ownership conveyed no taint of status. M. A. Barg has demonstrated that much of the freehold land recorded in the 1279 Hundred Rolls was held by gentry, clerics, tradesmen, and craftsmen who then, presumably, leased it out to tenants for the going market rent.Footnote ⁷⁵ This market in leasehold land is less well recorded, either because it was less well developed or, more probably, because surviving sources pay less attention to it. Leasehold tenure was also less secure under the law and those who held at will or for terms of years had no access to the actions specific to freehold tenure. In particular, lessees could find their leases suspended upon the death of the lessor, since the terms of leases were rarely binding upon a lessor's successors.Footnote ⁷⁶ Consequently, lessees were vulnerable to eviction by third parties, against which as yet they had little or no legal redress.

Notwithstanding the legal inferiority of leasehold tenure in the thirteenth century, there were powerful tenurial and economic incentives to the widespread leasing and subleasing of freehold land.Footnote ⁷⁷ Where the head rents paid by freehold tenants were fixed and substantially below the prevailing market rent for the land, the economic imperative to sublet was powerful.Footnote ⁷⁸ Nor was this something that manorial lords were able or inclined to obstruct. At Thorncroft in Surrey the warden and fellows of Merton College, Oxford found that whatever influence they may have exercised over their villein holdings did not extend to those held by their free tenants, whose disintegration they were powerless to prevent.Footnote ⁷⁹ That disintegration was a function of the legal security afforded to freehold tenants by the common law and the widening disparity between head rents and potential rack rents. Such institutional rigidities had particular repercussions for the operation of medieval land markets and the latter's effect on the number and size of land holdings and the terms upon which they were held. The peasant land market did not invariably lead to optimal economic outcomes.

The same, to a less extreme degree, applied to the market in customary (in other words villein) land, which had sprung up on many manors in the wake of the market in freehold land.Footnote ⁸⁰ Sales and leases of villein land between servile tenants lay outside the purview of the royal courts and were subject instead to the jurisdiction of manorial courts, whose rolls provide a more comprehensive register of customary land transfers than anything available for freehold land.Footnote ⁸¹ Although some lords, such as the abbots of Glastonbury, set themselves firmly against anything which threatened the integrity of villein holdings and thereby compromised the apportioning and levying of rent, most condoned both the leasing and selling of villein land, provided that leases for more than five years and sales were registered in the manor court and an entry fine was paid. Custom, however, varied a great deal even between manors on the same estate; hence this was a market with much local variation.Footnote ⁸² Even when selling and leasing were allowed, the higher unit rents paid for villein land meant that it was less prone than freehold land to extreme subdivision and subletting.

Where manorial court rolls survive the market in villein land is even more visible than the market in freehold land. due to the insistence by lords that a written record was made of all such transactions. Again, the pipe rolls of the bishops of Winchester provide the earliest documentary evidence of this market and it is not until the 1240s that corresponding evidence begins to become available for other estates.Footnote ⁸³ Strikingly, these inter vivos transactions in villein land employ the language and conventions of the royal courts. Thus, the seller typically ‘surrendered’ the land to the lord who ‘re-granted’ it to the purchaser in return for a licence fee.Footnote ⁸⁴ Only rarely was the sum actually paid for the land recorded. From this evidence it is possible to measure the size and frequency of transactions, the annual turnover of land on individual manors, and to identify which individuals were most actively disposing of or acquiring land.Footnote ⁸⁵ On those East Anglian manors where the market appears to have operated with fewest constraints, alongside an equally active market in freehold land with much crossover between them, it often became the case by the early fourteenth century that more land changed hands on the land market than via inheritance. Indeed, given that in England land could not be bequeathed until the Statute of Wills of 1540, many tenants undoubtedly used the land market to circumvent the rigid rules of customary inheritance.Footnote ⁸⁶

These manorial land markets were naturally circumscribed in their operation and localized in their effects; nevertheless, their legal maturity is reflected in the efforts made to accord villein tenants the same rights extended by the royal courts to freeholders. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, in addition to the rights of surrender and admittance, tenants on manors in the vanguard of these developments could claim and exercise the rights of entail and jointure. Entail ensured that the wishes of the original possessor of the land were respected; jointure recognized the proprietary rights of women in land jointly held with their husbands. In 1317, for example, Agnes of Holme of the manor of Hakeford Hall in Norfolk conveyed just over half a hectare of villein land to Robert of Dokingges, her affianced husband, with reversion to herself if Robert predeceased her and the marriage proved childless.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the same year on the same manor, Agnes wife of William Snoudoun successfully sued her husband for having sold without her consent 0.21 hectare held by them in jointure.Footnote ⁸⁸ These two cases demonstrate that even peasant women by this date enjoyed clearly defined property rights in land and were far from reticent in asserting those rights. Already, well-run courts required the formal examination of married women when they disposed of property with their spouse, lest they make a subsequent claim over the land in their own right.Footnote ⁸⁹

How these active local land markets were financed is rarely explicitly recorded. At Coltishall, in fertile and densely populated east Norfolk, the purchase price of even an acre of land could be the equivalent of half a year's earnings from labouring. Many tenants can only have raised such substantial sums by selling grain and livestock but, to judge from the numbers of debt cases recorded in the court rolls, many must also have contracted loans in order to finance these land purchases.Footnote ⁹⁰ In this respect, a rural credit market was a sine qua non of an active land market. The extent to which the peasant land market was underpinned by credit has been demonstrated for the Suffolk manor of Hinderclay by Phillipp Schofield.Footnote ⁹¹ Here, the coincidence of taxation and bad harvests in the 1290s led to the withdrawal of credit by the better-off tenants, leaving those who could not repay their debts little option but to sell land. At Hinderclay, as on a number of other East Anglian manors that have been studied, a close correlation existed between harvests, prices, and the activity of the land market.Footnote ⁹² Analysis of the numbers and scale of freehold land transactions has identified a similar pattern.Footnote ⁹³ This highlights both the harvest-sensitive nature of rural society at this time and the role played by the land market as a buffer against hard times.Footnote ⁹⁴ As a last resort, tenants could raise the cash they needed to survive by selling off tiny parcels of land, in the hope of recouping those losses when better times came. Progressively, however, this tended to promote the fragmentation of both holdings and plots, thereby exacerbating an already bad economic situation. It required a shock of the magnitude of the Black Death to set in train the processes that would eventually reverse this trend.Footnote ⁹⁵

As the activity of the peasant land market illustrates, once property rights in land had been created independent of personal relationships, land became an economic resource that could be alienated and manipulated. In particular, it became more liquid and could be used as a security for loans. In Robert Palmer's view, the economic consequences of this development were profound since liberation of the stored capital value of land stoked inflation.Footnote ⁹⁶ Palmer dates the creation of a legal system and the generation of a law of property to the period between 1176 and 1215. Over the same period prices, on average, doubled and thereafter continued to rise steadily to a peak in the second decade of the fourteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁷ If Palmer's diagnosis is correct, there could be no more telling symptom of the advent in England at the close of the twelfth century of a genuine factor market in land, nor of the growth in the activity of that market during the ensuing hundred years.

IV. CAPITAL MARKETS

During the thirteenth century England's capital stock progressively rose. According to the latest estimates by Martin Allen, the amount of silver coin in circulation grew at least eight-fold in value between 1180 and 1290, largely due to a net inflow of bullion from overseas trade.Footnote ⁹⁸ Under the careful supervision of the Crown, which maintained a monopoly of minting, the economy became more monetized and confidence grew in the soundness of the currency. The country's substantial population of domesticated animals also constituted a significant capital resource. Medieval England was relatively livestock-rich and over the course of the thirteenth century considerable effort was invested in the extension and improvement of pastures and meadows and in the building up of increasingly specialized flocks and herds.Footnote ⁹⁹ The same period also witnessed much investment in barns and byres, mills, vehicles and bridges, boats and ships, and warehouses and wharves.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ By 1290 England was markedly richer in fixed and working capital than it had been in 1180. This was an impressive achievement, for on the evidence so far assembled, capital in England until the mid fourteenth century was expensive.

Clark has used the evidence of rent charges to chart English interest rates between 1170 and 1914. Between 1170 and 1300 these were invariably 9 per cent or higher and for virtually the whole of the ‘prosperous’ thirteenth century they fluctuated at between 10 and 12 per cent. Epstein has reconstructed equivalent chronologies for a range of European countries. On his figures, capital was marginally cheaper in England than in Poland and east Germany by 1300, and cheaper in London than in England as a whole, but dearer than in Flanders or Switzerland and west Germany.Footnote ¹⁰¹ From interest rates on public debt, Epstein is also able to show that at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Italian republics probably enjoyed the lowest interest rates in Europe.Footnote ¹⁰² Not surprisingly, therefore, when Edward I (r. 1272–1307) and Edward III (r. 1327–1377) wanted large loans to finance their ambitious and expensive military campaigns, it was to Italian merchant bankers that they turned.Footnote ¹⁰³

Before the advent of the Italian bankers English kings borrowed on a massive scale from the Jewish moneylenders who, from the time of Henry I (r. 1100–1135) until their expulsion by Edward I in 1290, enjoyed the Crown's protection. In the twelfth century Jews had been attracted to England by the opportunities for dealing in bullion, moneychanging, and moneylending, but in the thirteenth century they became much more exclusively dependent upon moneylending and for the first half of that century enjoyed a virtual monopoly. They employed a system pioneered by Christian financiers of moneylending by bonds against gages (pledges).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In fact, from the 1190s the Jewish exchequer provided a reliable mechanism for registering bonds and collecting debts, which, until the Statute of Acton Burnell in 1283, gave them a legal advantage over their Christian counterparts. Throughout this long period of economic expansion the English Jewry therefore performed a key financial role and dominated the English credit market. ‘Nowhere else in northern Europe was there a Jewish community with so much wealth per capita, or one so completely dependent upon moneylending, as were the Jews of England in the century or so prior to 1275’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the 1240s, for which period detailed records of their assets survive (including loans), Robert Stacey estimates that the English Jewish community as a whole was owed between £76,500 and £79,000 on its unpaid bonds, exclusive of any interest charges, equivalent in value to almost a fifth of the total circulating coin in England at that time.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Although these Jewish moneylenders advanced many small loans to peasants and townsmen, the great bulk of their capital was committed to loans of at least £10 made to country knights, great men, and major monasteries, all of whom were in growing need of credit in a century of rising inflation, escalating conspicuous consumption of wealth, and, towards its end, mounting taxation.

From the 1260s, for mainly political reasons, Jewish moneylenders found their activities increasingly restricted and curtailed and their capital assets seriously depleted by royal taxation. They also suffered from the anti-Semitism that was a growing phenomenon throughout Europe but which became particularly acute in England. In the final years before their expulsion in 1290 their loans were mostly small-scale, short-term, and rural, in other words they became pawnbrokers and suppliers of capital to the peasantry. It was as their fortunes waned that those of the Italians and other Christian financiers rose. Since it was land that was offered as the most usual security for loans, the Italians had a far stronger vested interest than the Jews in foreclosing on debts in order to acquire landed property.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This may help to explain why the land market appears to have increased in activity during the final decades of the thirteenth century as Christians became more actively involved in the credit market.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The scale of that credit market following the Statute of Acton Burnell, which at last placed Christian lenders on a par with Jewish lenders, can be estimated from the certificates of debt registered under the 1285 Statute of Merchants. Between 1290 and 1309 the annual total numbers of registered certificates ranged between 167 and 864, with a total value of £3,000 to £27,000.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Although the average value of a debt was an impressive £17 in 1284–1289, and thereafter became progressively higher still, large numbers of relatively modest debts were registered, sufficient to cover the purchase price of several acres of average-quality land such as many a peasant must have contracted. Indeed, the creditors and debtors include representatives from most of the principal walks of life – rural and urban, lay and ecclesiastical, and humble and illustrious. Whether the certificates are truly representative of all the relevant debts contracted in the kingdom is a moot point but, if they are, Pamela Nightingale reckons that they represent an average unpaid debt of at least £10,000 per year.Footnote ¹¹⁰ If a fifth of all contracted debts remained unpaid, this represents credit with a total value of £50,000, equivalent to 2.6 per cent of the total taxable wealth of the nation, both lay and ecclesiastical and, maybe, 1.4 per cent of National Income. Significantly, as the nation's taxable wealth waned from its medieval peak in 1290–1291, so the size of its debt grew, to as much as £150,000 in some years.Footnote ¹¹¹ In all probability, these are minimum estimates of the value of credit. Given the high rates of interest, most loans were given short-term, for months rather than years.

Kings taxed and borrowed on a massive scale in order to wage war. Their principal subjects borrowed in order to pay taxes, build, and finance a lifestyle of largesse and conspicuous consumption. Additionally, those directly involved in agricultural production needed credit to help bridge the inevitable lags between sowing and harvesting, rearing and shearing, breeding and culling. They bought – land, livestock, seed, implements, buildings – on credit, which they then counted upon their harvests of wool and grain to repay. At greater risk, they borrowed to expand their operations against the security of their land and livestock.Footnote ¹¹² Many monastic houses, in particular, got themselves into serious financial difficulties by making bulk wool sales in advance to Italian merchants, which they were then unable to deliver.Footnote ¹¹³ Those forced into bankruptcy were put into receivership until their debts were paid off.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Their difficulties echoed those of the many small peasants whose precarious credit arrangements were undone by the recurrent harvest failures that punctuated the first half of the fourteenth century, commencing in the 1290s.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The more commercialized the economy became, the more dependent it undoubtedly became upon credit.

Those with credit to advance were professional moneylenders, traders and townsmen, and those – notably country rectors – whose incomes greatly exceeded their household expenditure. Pleas of debt in manorial courts, borough courts, county courts, and royal courts highlight the scale and extent of these credit operations and who was engaged in them.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Nevertheless, although credit may have been all-pervasive, at least in the most populous and commercialized parts of the country in the south and east, the capital market was not as yet strongly centralized. Analysis of debt litigation as recorded in the Court of Common Pleas during the Michaelmas Term of 1329 demonstrates that London may have been the nation's single greatest source of credit but its lending activities nonetheless remained largely confined to proximate counties in the south and east.Footnote ¹¹⁷ It was over the next hundred years that the credit operations of Londoners were progressively extended to the limits of the realm so that by 1424 London had become what it has ever since remained: the capital of the English capital market.Footnote ¹¹⁸

London's rise as the chief supplier of capital to the country at large coincided with the dramatic and lasting fall in English and European interest rates charted by both Clark and Epstein.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In large part, this appears to have been a windfall gain from the massive thinning of population in the four successive plague epidemics of 1348–1349, 1361, 1369 and 1375, which reduced England's population by approximately half within the space of a generation, killing humans but not coins. Consequently, as Epstein points out, ‘by the second half of the fifteenth century, Europeans were enjoying a huge “free lunch” consisting of a more than doubling in the amount of capital available per person’.Footnote ¹²⁰ By implication, the far higher rates of interest prevailing before the Black Death, together with the more determined and effective opposition of the Church to usury, inhibited the growth and integration of the capital market and ensured that ‘outsiders’, such as Jews, played a disproportionate role in it.

V. ENGLISH FACTOR MARKETS BEFORE 1348–1349: SOME GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

The experience of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England suggests that the establishment and growth of factor markets was intrinsic to the contemporary process of commercialization about which so much of late has been written.Footnote ¹²¹ Certainly, there is no reason to suppose that the factor markets in labour, land, and capital that evolved in England at that time were particularly precocious or efficient by the standards of the most developed European economies of the day. On the contrary, if interest rates provide a crude index of economic efficiency, English factor markets were significantly less mature than those operating in ItalyFootnote ¹²² – hence the migration of Italian capital to exploit the superior interest rates prevailing in England. The important point, as far as England's medieval and later commercial development is concerned, is that by 1348–1349 all three factor markets were firmly established and had long been in operation. An infrastructure of knowledge, practice, rules, and legal procedures had been put in place. What is surprising is not that these factor markets were so well developed but that their importance has been so little recognized by historians and the subject, therefore, of such limited systematic investigation. Yet their contribution to the economic achievements of the age was tangible.

As has been outlined in this article, a market in labour emerged relatively early, both in the countryside and in towns. Establishment of a genuine market in land had to await those legal developments which divorced property from personal relationships and thereby created both a private title to land, which could be bought and sold, and the legal means and safeguards for effecting such transactions. From the late twelfth century these developments stimulated a market in freehold land and the growth of a manorial market in villein land soon followed. Fuller development of formal leasehold tenures was, however, inhibited by the inadequate legal protection afforded to lessees. Consequently, leasing rather than leasehold tenures developed during the thirteenth century and remained essentially informal and insecure. Once a land market had come into being it became possible for property owners to use their land as a security against loans. This had two important economic effects. First, it stoked inflation and helped make land an appreciating asset. Second, it fed the growth of a capital market. Although credit and moneylending had prevailed in England long before the legal innovations that between 1179 and 1220 created the common law of property, it was only in the wake of those legal developments that they grew to significant proportions and became indispensable components of most aspects of economic life.

Like the contemporary markets in commodities which they underpinned, the activity of all three of these factor markets varied over time and operated on a range of scales. In the main, however, labour, land, and credit were mostly transacted locally between individuals who were personally acquainted with each other, since trust was an important ingredient of transactions in land and especially in capital. Jews were therefore doubly vulnerable, for not only did they have to trust those Gentiles to whom they lent but also the Crown which gave them protection. In the final analysis, it was the latter which let them down.Footnote ¹²³ To speak of national or even regional markets in labour, land, and capital is therefore premature and it would be some centuries before these began to emerge. Even on the eve of the Black Death the evolution of these markets was geographically uneven, having proceeded further on some manors and in certain parts of the country than in others. The economy's quickening commercial pulse did not beat everywhere with equal force, and it should be noted that most of the examples given in this article are drawn from the south and east rather than the north and west.

Part of the problem was that none of these factor markets operated free of institutional constraints. Money wages were strongly influenced by established conventional rates of payment and hence were prone to stickiness in the face of changes in market conditions.Footnote ¹²⁴ Serfdom restricted the geographical and occupational mobility of, and handicapped full participation in the labour market by, almost half the population. Villein tenures excluded almost half of all land from the jurisdiction of the royal courts and subordinated the wishes of tenants to the policies of their manorial lords. Leasehold tenures lacked adequate legal protection. Until 1273 Jewish and Christian moneylenders enjoyed unequal access to the legal enforcement of debts and Christians were liable to prosecution under canon law if they attempted to make an explicit interest charge on loans. Not until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did these constraints significantly loosen. Contributing factors included the accelerating decay of serfdom, the progressive divorce of status from tenure (thereby facilitating the acquisition of customary land by freemen and townsmen with capital to invest), the decay of manorial custom as it applied to the inter vivos and post mortem transfer of land, the belated reform of property law as it pertained to leasehold, and the subtle but nonetheless real reform of canon law and progressive refinement of credit procedures.

As a direct result of the massive demographic haemorrhage precipitated by the Black Death, labour alone became subject to tighter control. In 1349 the Ordinance of Labourers (confirmed as the Statute of Labourers in 1351) introduced an era of formal wage restraint. This nominally reinforced the inherent ‘stickiness’ of money wages and laid the foundation for a code of employment enforcement that would last until the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹²⁵ As a direct result the freedom of wage earners to enter and leave employment was curtailed. The unpopularity of that labour legislation was one of the prime causes of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, in which the justices who enforced the statute were often singled out as targets for rough treatment and worse.Footnote ¹²⁶ Paradoxically, this meant that the labour market was far freer in its operation during the century before than in the century after the Black Death. At the very time when one institutional constraint – serfdom – was dwindling in importance, a new institutional constraint was imposed, this time by the state.

The Ordinance and Statute of Labourers highlight the lack of any official consciousness of the desirability of ridding these markets of the institutional inefficiencies which hampered and distorted their operation. Except at times of acute crisis, such as 1349 and 1381, medieval kings and their governments seem to have been as oblivious of the economic importance of these factor markets as most modern historians. Thus, notwithstanding the profound long-term economic implications of Henry II's legal reforms, they did not derive from any consciousness on Henry's part of the economic dividends to be reaped from a clearer definition of property rights. With more economic foresight, he might have regretted excluding servile tenants and villein tenures from the purview of the royal courts. He and his justices might also have been less assiduous in defending the property rights of freeholders and effectively freezing their rents at customary levels, for this created the tenurial preconditions for the progressive subdivision and subletting of land which a century later would prove so baleful in its effects.Footnote ¹²⁷ In removing one institutional barrier another had been created which, once enshrined in the law, proved particularly difficult and costly to remove.

England's early evolution of factor markets during the two centuries preceding the Black Death was therefore a mixed blessing. Undoubtedly it helped create a more dynamic economy, more open to change and better able to reallocate and redeploy its resources of land, labour, and capital, thereby preparing the way for England's eventual economic relocation from the periphery to the core. Furthermore, buying and selling and lending and borrowing land, labour, and capital enabled individuals and households to weather the periodic setbacks that arose from bad harvests, sudden mortalities of livestock, and other unforeseen adverse events. Yet the operation of these factor markets long remained economically suboptimal due to the legacy of legal, tenurial, and institutional complexities bequeathed by feudalism, manorialism, and serfdom. When and how and with what outcomes these various obstacles were removed are central to the story of English factor markets following the Black Death.