Growth and Stagnation in European Historical Agriculture

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Rural History in Europe 6

COST Action A 35 PROGRESSORE

COST – the acronym for European COoperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research – is the oldest and widest European intergovernmental network for cooperation in research. Established by the Ministerial Conference in November 1971, COST is presently used by the scientific communities of 35 European countries to cooperate in common research projects supported by national funds. The funds provided by COST – less than 1% of the total value of the projects – support the COST cooperation networks (COST Actions) through which, with EUR 30 million per year, more than 30,000 European scientists are involved in research having a total value which exceeds EUR 2 billion per year. This is the financial worth of the European added value which COST achieves. A ‘bottom up approach’ (the initiative of launching a COST Action comes from the European scientists themselves), ‘à la carte participation’ (only countries interested in the Action participate), ‘equality of access’ (participation is open also to the scientific communities of countries not belonging to the European Union) and “flexible structure” (easy implementation and light management of the research initiatives) are the main characteristics of COST (Web: www.cost.esf.org). As precursor of advanced multidisciplinary research COST has a very important role for the realization of the European Research Area (ERA) anticipating and complementing the activities of the Framework Programmes, constituting a “bridge” towards the scientific communities of emerging countries, increasing the mobility of researchers across Europe and fostering the establishment of ‘Networks of Excellence’ in many key scientific domains such as: Biomedicine and Molecular Biosciences; Food and Agriculture; Forests, their Products and Services; Materials, Physical and Nanosciences; Chemistry and Molecular Sciences and Technologies; Earth System Science and Environmental Management; Information and Communication Technologies; Transport and Urban Development; Individuals, Societies, Cultures and Health. It covers basic and more applied research and also addresses issues of pre normative nature or of societal importance.

Growth and stagnation in European historical agriculture

Edited by Mats OLSSON and Patrick SVENSSON

H

F

EDITORIAL BOARD Gérard Béaur, director Rosa Congost Anne-Lise Head-König Socrates Petmezas Vicente Pinilla Jürgen Schlumbohm Bas van Bavel

This publication is supported by COST. It is the result of the work launched in the working group 2 ‘Management of Rural Land’ of the COST Action A35. It came into existence thanks to the funding of both the ESF (COST) and the Swedish Research Council (VR 421-2005-1503). We are grateful to Anne Varet-Vitu (UMR 8558, CNRS) who created the lay-out of the book. We would also like to thank Gérard Béaur (CNRS/EHESS) for the enormous work of creating the possibility for this book in the first place and for his efforts along the way. Cover: Les glaneuses, painting by Jean-François Millet (1857), Musée d‘Orsay, Paris. D2011/0095/93 ISBN 978-2-503-54076-4 Printed on acid free paper.

© 2011 Brepols Publisher n.v., Turnhout, Belgium and COST All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

CONTENTS List of Contributors

6

List of Figures

7

List of Tables

9

The series Rural History in Europe 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

13

Measuring and explaining agricultural growth Mats OLSSON and Patrick SVENSSON

15

Some aspects of the question of productivity in Early Medieval Europe: the case of Eastern Belgium Alexis WILKIN

35

Agricultural productivity in England, 1700-1914 Joohn BECKETT and Michael TURNER

57

Agricultural productivity in the coastal and inland area of Friesland, 1700-1850 Merjin KNIBBE

83

Agricultural production in southern Sweden 1702-1864 Mats OLSSSON and Patrick SVENSSON

117

Land and labour intensification in the agricultural modernization of southwest Germany, 1760-1860 Frank KONERSMANN

141

The limits of agricultural growth in a fragile eco-system. Total factor productivity in Alentejo, 1750-1850 Helder Adegar FONSECA and Jaime REIS The modernization of agriculture under tough environmental constraints. One hundred years of Aragonese agricultural production, 1885-1985 Vicente PINILLA and Ernesto CLAR Prices and productivity in inland Spain during the nineteenthcentury: a ‘sleepwalking’ agriculture? José-Miguel LANA-BERASAIN

10. Agricultural productivity growth in Russia, 1861-1912: from inertia to ferment Carol S. LEONARD 11. Italian agriculture 1861-1940: a regional perspective Giovanni FEDERICO

167

195

229

255

285

5

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

6

John BECKETT

University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Ernesto CLAR

University of Zaragoza, Spain

Giovanni FEDERICO

European University Institute, Florence, Italy

Helder Adegar FONSECA

University of Évora, Portugal

Merijn KNIBBE

Wageningen University, the Netherlands

Frank KONERSMANN

Bielefeld University, Germany

José-Miguel LANA-BERASAIN

Public University of Navarre, Spain

Carol S. LEONARD

University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Mats OLSSON

Lund University, Sweden

Vicente PINILLA

University of Zaragoza, Spain

Jaime REIS

University of Lisbon, Portugal

Patrick SVENSSON

Lund University, Sweden

Michael TURNER

University of Hull, United Kingdom

Alexis WILKIN

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1.

Eastern Belgium and the Bishopric of Liège

Figure 3.1.

The English wheat trade balance, 1700-1820

Figure 3.2.

Weighted English wheat yields, 1720-1914

Figure 3.3.

Weighted English grain yields, 1720-1914

Figure 3.4.

Combined grain yield index, 1720-1914

Figure 4.1.

The northern united provinces Friesland, Drenthe and Groningen

Figure 4.2.

Value of land and agricultural areas in Friesland, about 1825

Figure 4.3.

The height of the wealth tax and the percentage of the population paying it, different agricultural areas in Friesland, 1578

Figure 4.4.

Rental value of arable land, pastures and meadows in different regions, around 1825 (guilders per hectare)

Figure 4.5.

Rents in the clay soil area (including land tax), 1575-1850

Figure 4.6.

Rents per hectare (including land tax) in the inland area of Friesland, 18201855

Figure 4.7.

Daily wages, master carpenters in the clay and the inland area as well as all kinds of groundwork, 1658-1824 (Stuivers per day, 20 stuivers to the guilder)

Figure 4.8.

Money wages of boarding servants in the Frisian clay soil area and of male servants in Lichtenvoorde, guilders per year, 1697-1824

Figure 4.9.

The development of total factor productivity in the clay soil area in Friesland, and land and labour productivity in Groningen, 1697-1860

Figure 4.10. Prices of first and second quality hay in Leeuwarden, 1783-1812 Figure 4.11. Arithmetical average of yields of barley, wheat and oats, Anjum, Friesland, 1847-1883 (1847 = 100) Figure 5.1.

The province of Skåne and the 34 parishes in the sample

Figure 5.2.

Production estimates 1702-1864. Bad and good harvests from qualitative sources marked

Figure 5.3.

Animal production, 1711-1864

Figure 5.4.

Calf production, 1711-1864

Figure 5.5.

Crop production with trend, 1702-1864

Figure 5.6.

Crop production and enclosures for selected villages

Figure 7.1.

The region of Alentejo in Portugal

Figure 7.2.

Total factor productivity. 31 Évora estates, 1750-1850 (1750-1754 = 100)

7

Figure 7.3. Total factor productivity. Monte de Trigo, 1750-1850 (1750-1754 = 100) Figure 7.4. Wheat-sheep price ration, 1750-1850 (1750-1754 = 100) Figure 7.5. Rents+taxes – wages ratio, 1750-1850 (1750-1754 = 100) Figure 7.6. Marginal product of labour, 1750-1850 (1750-1754 = 100) Figure 7.7. Real rent index, 1750-1850 (1750-1754 = 100) Figure 7.8. Wool-mutton and sheep-wool price relatives, 1750-1850 (1750 = 1) Figure 8.1. Location of Aragon in Spain Figure 8.2. Population employed in agriculture in Aragon, 1887-1987 Figure 8.3. Aragonese gross domestic product represented by gross agricultural value added, 1960-1985 Figure 8.4. Growth of the area under irrigation in Aragon, 1900-1985 Figure 8.5. Share of mutton and lamb, pork and poultry in the value of livestock production, Aragon, 1955-1985 Figure 9.1. Farming price index in the south of Navarre, 1781-1900 (1850 = 100) Figure 9.2. Evolution indexes for labor, animal traction and fertilizer prices (1856=100) Figure 9.3. Average land rentals in the south of Navarre, 1780-1900 Figure 9.4. Evolution of price and cost index and of TFP in the south of Navarre, 17821900 (five years mobile average, 1856 = 100) Figure 10.1. Output of crops and potatoes, puds (% of total), 1870-1913 Figure 10.2. Output of crops and potatoes, Mlns rubles (% of Total), 1870-1913, current prices Figure 10.3. Equipment input dynamics, 1913 = 100 Figure 10.4. Livestock inventories, fixed prices, 1881-1914 Figure 10.5. Land prices, 1867-1913 Figure 11.1. Value added, 1861-1938 Figure 11.2. Gross output, 1861-1913

8

LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1.

Measures of historical agricultural productivity

Table 2.1.

Dues levied each year on the mansi

Table 3.1.

UK wheat trade balance, 1831-1915

Table 3.2.

English wheat yields. Summary statistics, 1720-1900

Table 3.3

Wheat seeding rates, crop yields and yield rates, 1720-1900

Table 4.1.

Amount of land per area (hectares * 1000)

Table 4.2.

Value of 45 farms in the inland and the clay soil area, 1820

Table 4.3.

Cost structure of a clay soil farm specialized in arable production and horse breeding, in Barradeel, near Sexbierum, 1799-1810 and an arable farm in Oostdongeradeel, near Anjum, 1845-1859

Table 4.4.

Household size, composition and wealth and farm size in different agricultural areas of Friesland, 1749 and farm size, 1794

Table 4.5.

A comparison of wealth of farmers (excluding land) in different areas in 1749 and 1820 (indices, es-area = 100)

Table 4.6.

Total factor productivity in different agricultural areas of Fryslân around 1800, Es-area = 100

Table 4.7.

Yields of hay per hectare, Friesland, 1810

Table 4.8.

Arable yields in the Friesland and Groningen, 1736-1883 (hectoliter per hectare)

Table 5.1.

Number of farms in the sample by year (every tenth year)

Table 5.2.

Animal and vegetable share of farm production output value, 1702-1864

Table 5.3.

Annual population growth and grain production growth for 34 parishes in south Sweden, 1702-1864

Table 5.4.

Index of crop production by property rights, 1711-1850 (5-years centered averages)

Table 5.5.

Annual crop production growth rates on village level, 15 years before and after enclosures

Table 6.1.

Land use on three farms of peasant merchants, 1760-1790

Table 6.2.

Land use on twelve farms of peasant merchants, 1800-1850

Table 6.3.

Land productivity on three farms of peasant merchants, 100 kilos per hectare, 1760-1790

Table 6.4.

Land productivity on twelve farms of peasant merchants, 1800-1850

Table 6.5.

Land productivity in three areas of the region, 1791, 1812, 1853 and 1863

9

Table 8.1.

Annual growth rate in total agricultural output (%) (volume index at 1910 prices)

Table 8.2.

Reasons for growth in total crop output in Aragon, 1888-1920

Table 8.3.

Principal soil nutrients applied (N, P2O5, K2O)

Table 8.4.

Use of farm machinery in Aragon, 1932-1982

Table 8.5.

Labour productivity

Table 8.6.

Animal production as a percentage of agricultural output

Table 8.7.

Reasons for growth in total crop output in Aragon, 1932-1950. Change in area, output and output per hectare (1932 = 100)

Table 8.8.

Animal production as a percentage of agricultural output

Table 8.9.

Average annual growth of gross agricultural value added

Table 8.10.

Reasons for growth in total crop output, 1955-1985

Table 8.11.

Rate of growth of crop output

Table 8.12.

Evolution of gross agricultural value added per worker, 1955-1985

Table 8.13.

Origin of intermediate inputs used in Aragonese agriculture in 1978 (percentage of total)

Table 9.1.

Gross farming production in Navarre in 1803-1807, 1857 and 1910, valued at each year’s prices (data in pesetas = pts)

Table 9.2.

Participation of the factors in cultivation costs in the south of Navarre, 1905

Table 9.3.

Gross farming production in the Tudela de Navarre District, 1800-1906

Table 9.4.

Estimation of the growth rates of factor endowment and the expected rate of production increase for the district of Tudela, 1800-1900

Table 10.1.

Historical rates of change in total factor productivity in agriculture

Table 10.2.

Output quantity of cereals and potatoes. Percentage shares

Table 10.3.

Annual rate of production and livestock (heads of cattle, sheep and pigs) by decadal average, European provinces of Russia, 1861-1911

Table 10.4.

Seed and waste shares for the main grains and potatoes (Moscow, Iaroslav, Don and Orlov, 1861-1911)

Table 10.5.

Output by category, 1861-1911 (per cent)

Table 10.6.

Annual output growth rates in Russian agriculture by decade, 1861-1911

Table 10.7.

Input cost shares, 1861-1911

Table 10.8.

Annual rates of change in inputs (Thornqvist Theil), 1861-1911, by decade, in per cent

10

Table 10.9.

Total factor productivity (TTI). Annual change (per cent) by decade

Table 11.1.

The growth in factor use in Italian agriculture, 1861-1938, current boundaries

Table 11.2.

The growth of total factor productivity, yearly rates

Table 11.3.

The performance of Italian regions (Italy 1911 = 1)

Table 11.4.

Differences in growth rates of TFP (percentage points)

Table 11.5.

Implicit level of TFP (Italy in 1911 = 1)

Table 11.6.

Rates of growth in value added

Table 11.7.

Rates of growth in TFP by country

11

The Series Rural History in Europe

Sometimes viewed as the producer of foodstuffs and raw materials, as a garden or a space for the production of energy; sometimes seen as a reservoir of manpower destined to be subverted to the needs of cities and industries or as a peaceful haven which welcomes weary city-dwellers; also regarded as a places of easily incensed ‘backward’ societies or as an idyllic spot, close to nature where societies act as guardians of a certain conception of quality of life, the countryside has not ceased to be at the centre of economic, social, political, and now environmental, concern of governments and public opinion. Pulled between contradictory demands, the countryside of today presents an image of a place and a society in clear transformation, which, in itself, is difficult to decipher. In Europe, the difficulty is that the countryside, which forms a complex and evolving universe, is experiencing ruptures and also exhibits inertias. These complex transformations of the rural world can only be fully understood if they are viewed in a manner which transcends national boundaries and if the discrepancies, which can only be observed by adopting a broad view, in fact at the continental scale, are taken into account. These changes cannot be explained without reference to their past. The question is how to create such a dialogue between researchers which goes beyond national boundaries, crosses chronological barriers and breaks disciplinary boundaries. The main objective of the ‘Rural History in Europe’ collection is to provide just such keys to unlocking the changes experienced by present-day European rural societies in the light of their historical experience. It is to produce the historical knowledge which will allow us to conceptualize the future of European country-dwellers, as they face the kinds of problems which historians have grappled with in examining societies in the past: under-employment and multiple occupations, migrations and rural depopulation, distortion of competition by the marketplace or by the policies established by political authorities, competition with non-European producers, problems of resource allocation (land and water), distribution and redistribution of heritages and land-holding, the future of owner-occupied farms and the function of agriculture as employer, the tensions between private ownership and public access to land, the changes induced by settlement of urban migrants, environment and sustainable development, and so on. In most European countries, rural society and long term change have been the subject of intensive research. Over the last half-century, a lively historiography has developed around questions concerning the factors of growth and systems of agricultural production, as well as the periodization of growth and the impact of agriculture on industrial development. As a result, a body of knowledge has built up on techniques, forms of land-use, levels of production, the differing conditions and nature of the peasantry and the strategies of economic agents. More recently

13

environmental concerns have made a dramatic impact on the consciousness of historians in the field, while previous findings have been questioned in a critical way and new perspectives have been drawn. The field known as Rural History remains very much alive, despite the decline of the agricultural sector over the last several decades. Rural History remains fundamental in a Europe which has for so long been kept together by its Common Agricultural Policy and which now has to face the heavy impact of Brussels-based initiatives upon its rural regions, and an unprecedented revision of current agrarian systems and systems of production in the countries which have recently joined the EU. How can the changes taking place in present-day Europe be understood without taking into account a past which is still very present, and which determines both structures and behaviour? The first volumes of this collection are the result of several workshops which have been held during the past three years and which have mainly been supported by funds of the European Action COST A 35 and by other institutions like CORN, GDR CNRS Sociétés Rurales Européennes, Universities… The COST Action, which was initiated three years ago, intends to extend the historical analysis of rural society over the last millenium in order to envisage the problems of the countryside in an extended timeframe and also to draw upon the commentary and expertise of specialists from other disciplines (sociology, economics, anthropology). This will enable the first real comparison of Europe from historians from all over the continent, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and from the western frontier to the eastern limits. Papers from these meetings will be published after a peer-review process, supported by the editorial board and, of course, the work of the authors and editors of the volumes. This collection will be constructed upon four main pillars: Landed property; The management of rural land; Peasant societies; The state, government, politics and peasants. Each of these will bring new perspectives and produce new tools to better understand the changes which are taking place today. In order to ask the relevant questions about the future of these peasantries and rural spaces in transformation, the books of this collection will deal with the ‘longue durée’ and will present either research in progress or a synthesis on a regional or national scale. The cumulative effect of this approach will be to produce volumes, the geographical coverage of which will be the whole of Europe. The volumes will also, of course, take into account the role of history as an explanatory factor for contemporary European Societies. If rural societies have been overthrown, if rural landscapes have been profoundly transformed and if the intervention of the State has considerably strengthened the regulation of production and trade, the contrast between a contemporary rural world in rapid transformation and a traditional rural world with frozen landscapes, petrified societies, immobile economies and lethargic political contexts will be an illusion. It is important, therefore, to detect, to measure and to interpret the range of recent changes by illuminating those that have taken place in past centuries in a European context.

14

1.

Measuring and explaining agricultural growth

Mats OLSSON and Patrick SVENSSON I.

Introduction

Since the Neolithic revolution agricultural production has been the basic and single most important factor for the well-being of mankind. Insufficient agricultural output has led to insufficient means of subsistence and sometimes even starvation, while rich harvests have brought about plenty and prosperity. Continual increases in agricultural output have transformed whole societies and continents, with radical changes in people’s lives and economic success. Simultaneously, the absence of prolonged agricultural growth in other parts of the world has contributed to their economic stagnation and backwardness. These realities have made much research in agrarian history focus on two related issues: First, on levels of agricultural production and productivity and, second, causes of changes in these levels. This book adheres to these related topics, and it does so with new empirical findings on production and/or productivity on both macro and micro levels, resulting in a novel understanding of European agricultural growth and change. The book is a result of a joint-European network in rural history set up through the COST-action A35 ‘Programme for the Study of European Rural Societies’ and is part of the series ‘Rural History in Europe’. Its foundations and starting point are to be found in the working group dealing with ‘The rural management of land’. The aim of this group is to deal with agricultural production in three different but interrelated respects: the impact of markets on the management of land (Pinilla, 2009), on specialisation, and by focusing explicitly on levels and changes in growth. To fulfil this latter objective, a group of European researchers met in Lund in June 2007 to present and discuss new findings on European agricultural production and productivity. This book contains the most important contributions from this meeting1. 1

The Lund workshop was organised and financed by COST-action A35 with supplementary financing from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and Handelsbankens Forskningsstiftelser for which we are very thankful. During the conference and throughout the work on the book several persons have been engaged as discussants and as referees of the manuscripts. We are therefore very much indebted to Bruce M. S. Campbell, Kerstin Enflo, Carl-Johan Gadd, Jonas Ljungberg, Anders Nilsson, Mats Morell, Cormac Ó Gráda, Karl Gunnar Persson, Vicente Pinilla, Rui Santos, José Vicente Serrao, Lennart Schön

15

Measuring and explaining agricultural growth

II.

Measuring agricultural production and productivity

Statistics on the agricultural sector in most countries were either non-existent or of dubious quality before the end of the nineteenth century. Consequently, researchers dealing with preindustrial farming have been forced to put a lot of effort into reconstructing reliable data on inputs and outputs. Two main ways of estimating production and productivity in pre-industrial European agriculture have been proposed (see Overton, 1996:74). One is to work with aggregates, using information on rents, prices, wages and population to estimate production and productivity (e.g. McCloskey, 1975; Hoffman, 1996; Allen, 2000). The logic of this approach is founded on the simple assumption that each citizen needs food, and that production, at least in the long run, must correspond to consumption. Moreover, increased farm productivity implies lower costs, which will be reflected either in higher profits, leading to rising rents, at least in a well-functioning lease economy, or in changes in prices or wages. One potential obstacle to this approach is that product and factor shares of revenue and costs must be specified, but this can be solved by using farm accounts or other sources containing this information (see Hoffman, 1996: chapter 4). The other approach is to work from bottom up, using farm accounts, probate inventories, tithes or other sources as the main sources for estimating crop yields, crop mixes, total area and the size of the area cultivated or the agricultural output. This approach, aggregating local micro series and often combining them with macro series on land, gives rise to specific problems; different sources exists for different periods of time, and, of course, the question of how representative the local sources are for national estimates (see Overton & Campbell, 1996). Both these approaches are highlighted by the discussion on preindustrial agricultural productivity in England and France, but are valid also for most other European countries . Moreover, depending on the objective of the study and types of sources available, researchers use different measures to describe agricultural development. A first and direct measure is agricultural output. In this tradition, different concepts such as gross production, net production and value-added are intermixed. In the reconstruction of national accounts this has been an important target. Top-down approaches are most often used in this branch of research. Starting from the first ‘reliable’ year of official statistics, backward series are constructed, typically using population statistics and assumptions about average consumption baskets, balanced with estimates of exports and Aud Mikkelsen Tretvik for valuable comments and for providing new insights into the subtle world of production and productivity. We are grateful to Jaya Reddy for correcting our English and, finally, we would like to thank Cormac Ó Gráda and Vicente Pinilla once more for their careful reading of this chapter.

16

Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson

and imports, and sometimes further balanced with changes in relative prices (e.g. Krantz & Schön, 2007). In his contribution to this book Giovanni Federico, using a similar methodology, has revised earlier estimations of gross output and value-added output for Italy; estimations that were based on official statistics. Gross agricultural output can also be drawn from time series from different official sources as in the case of the contribution below by Vicente Pinilla and Ernesto Clar. They have calculated gross agricultural output and, for the period after 1955, used calculations of agricultural gross value added for one region in Spain. Furthermore, individual farm outputs are used on micro level to estimate crude gross production, which then can be aggregated into production series for districts, regions or even countries, and used for further estimations of productivity development. One example of this approach in this book is the chapter by Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson, which uses local tithes at farm level i.e. annual payments based on crop and animal production to construct gross production output per farm for one Swedish region. Table 1.1. Measures of historical agricultural productivity A

B

Land and livestock productivity 1.

Crop yield per unit sown

2.

Crop yield per unit arable

3.

Livestock output per animal per year

4.

Total agricultural output (arable and pastoral) per unit area of farmland

Labour productivity Output per worker employed 1. in agriculture 2.

C

Capital productivity 1.

D

Output per worker per unit of time

Value of output per unit of capital

Total factor productivity 1.

Ratio of total output to a weighted combination of inputs

Sources. CAMPBELL & OVERTON (1991: 11). Note. The table has been somewhat simplified from Overton and Campbell’s original, in that no distinction has been made between individual and aggregate crop yields.

The concept of agricultural productivity implies production output divided by production input. The most important input factors in agriculture are land, labour and capital. Table 1.1 shows some alternative measures of productivity that have

17

Measuring and explaining agricultural growth

been used in historical literature, here only slightly modified from a presentation by Bruce M. S. Campbell and Mark Overton in 1991. In modern industrialised agriculture, capital is regarded as the single most important factor, and the productive impact of each possible branch of investment (engineering, seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, livestock) is a branch of science in its own right. In early economic historical literature an often used productivity denominator was yield ratios per unit sown, which is harvest divided by seed, point A1 in Table 1.1. They are expressed in figures like 4:1 and 7:1, and can be estimated quite unproblematically from sources like manorial accounts and other farm accounts across Europe (Slicher van Bath, 1963). As a pure indicator of harvest per seed it can be used as a denominator of variations in agricultural output, especially for short-term fluctuations, but even for comparison between regions and countries (van Zanden, 1999). The problem with isolated yield ratio figures is that they do not tell us how much was sown, or the intensity of land use. A striking practical example is the introduction of a type of early autumn rye in parts of northern Europe in the eighteenth-century, which could double yield ratios (typically from 4-7:1 to 9-15:1), but was sown about half as densely in the fields2. Without knowledge of the latter, researchers can be led to believe that this implied a major productive breakthrough in agriculture. The concept of land productivity in modern agricultural statistics is therefore most often measured as yield per arable land or per sown acreage of a certain crop (e.g. tonnes per hectare). As long as land use is not altered this is a consistent measure over time, but if new crop rotation systems are introduced, the amount of fallow, ley and root crops must be considered. For example, moving from a three-course-system to a classical Norfolk four-course rotation system implies that the fraction of arable land used for grains is reduced from two thirds to half. Consequently, a rise in wheat yields per sown acreage does not necessarily mean a rise in wheat output per total acreage or per farm. Furthermore, change in land use goes beyond changes in crop rotations. In their paper John Beckett and Michael Turner estimate the agricultural productivity in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They start by looking at the overall development of agriculture on a macro-scale. They find that the vast majority of English food production was produced within the country, at least until the midnineteenth century. At the same time, the farmed area did not increase at the same rate 2

The famous botanist Carl von Linné mentioned the use of Larsmässo-rye in his Scanian Journey 1749. It was sown already around the Lars-day (Sankt Laurentius, Lawrence) August 10. Linné wrote that it was a labour intensive crop; it was first and foremost used on the manorial demesnes and demanded lots of fertilizers and almost garden-like cultivation efforts (LINNAEI, 1749: 277-278).

18

Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson

as the population, which is an indication of rising productivity within the agricultural sector. To estimate the productivity advance, Beckett and Turner use rich sources consisting of hundreds of farm records, which make it possible to calculate the yields and the yields per hectare arable land over time (A2 in Table 1.1). Since wheat was the dominant cash crop and the major food consumption item, in the form of wheaten bread, wheat productivity is used as the main indicator in their study. However, they also relate this to the development of other crops such as barley and oats. In the case of Sweden, Olsson and Svensson (below) use another approach to estimate land productivity. They calculate the gross production per average farm, and since the average size is constant, this displays productivity on total land (A4). So, increased production per farm may be due to improvements per area unit or a conversion of previously non-arable land to arable. In effect, both display a more productive way of using land, since an increase of arable land by reclaiming wasteland and meadows meant that fodder and manure, for which these latter areas previously were used, had to be produced within the arable rotation. For Aragon, Spain, Pinilla and Clar (below) are able to distinguish these two ways of increasing land productivity, and it is clear from their study that a cyclical pattern of land use was at hand. An increase in the cultivated area through land reclamation and conversion of pastures to arable land during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries was followed in the 1920s and 1930s by increased intensification to uphold fertility on less fertile land. After the mid-1950s a new wave of land reclamation took place, made possible by new technology allowing for expansion on marginal lands. These findings relate to economic theories concerned with land productivity. In the classical Ricardian view land reclamation meant diminishing returns, since all the best land was supposedly already used and less pastures meant less fertilizers. Two historical innovations would dramatically change these prerequisites. The first was the abolition of the natural meadow and the introduction of fodder crops in the field rotation system. Besides a considerable increase in the output of grain, roots and grass, it meant that new lands could be cultivated without causing a manure shortage. Its implementation was a long drawn-out process that started in Medieval Northern Italy and Flanders, developed and flourished in the Early Modern Netherlands and England, and was principally introduced in the rest of Europe’s central agricultural districts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Slicher van Bath, 1963: 178, 239; Grigg, 1980: 153, 147). The second innovation was the introduction of energy from outside the farms, first in the form of fertilizers and finally in form of mechanical power. The former enhanced land productivity substantially, even on poor soils, and, by breaking the natural bond between plants and manure, made farming without animals possible. The latter raised labour productivity to, until then, unimaginable

19

Measuring and explaining agricultural growth

levels, made draught animals superfluous, and eventually reduced employment in agriculture to a small fraction of the population. This leads us over to the concept of labour productivity. Going back to David Ricardo’s law of diminishing returns, marginal productivity in pre-industrial agriculture should be falling, inasmuch as the supply of land is limited and capital investments insignificant. Many studies on historical productivity are founded on this theory, and increased land productivity and labour productivity have been regarded as almost incompatible. This is, however, a debated view. A vast number of studies have dealt with the British agricultural development before and during the industrial revolution. Using different kinds of data and methodologies, most researchers have agreed upon a long-run increase in agricultural productivity. However, when it comes to date specific periods of swift growth, results have been more inconclusive. While some researchers have argued that for example English agriculture did not succeed in enhancing output per acreage without sacrificing labour productivity before the middle of the eighteenth century (Campbell & Overton, 1993), others claim that both started to grow, simultaneously, long before that (Kerridge, 1967; Wrigley, 1985; Allen, 2000). Beckett and Turner (below) find that it was when population increased during the nineteenth century that the real breakthrough in productivity occurred. In any event, with historical data the concept of labour productivity in reality often is rather crude; it is in many cases agricultural output divided by agricultural population or by the agricultural workforce (B1 in Table 1.1). One example of this in the book is the article by Olsson and Svensson where growth in agricultural gross production is divided by the growth rate of population in the same area. The problem with calculating labour productivity in this way is that it is not possible to separate the effects of labourers becoming more efficient (B2) and the fact that the increased production per labourer may be attributable to a larger work input in the form of more hours or days worked per labourer. Some researchers argue that using either labour productivity or land productivity could result in incomplete or, at worst, erroneous conclusions on the agricultural development (e.g. Overton, 1996: 84; Federico, below). This has led to the concept of total factor productivity (TFP) being established in agrarian history (D1 in Table 1.1). TFP, according to Robert Solow (Solow, 1957), is the difference between the rates of growth of output and input. It requires information on quantities and the shares of different inputs, which is hard to find for historical agriculture. Most studies of agriculture using TFP have dealt with the period after 1870, or even after 1945, but a few have also estimated earlier periods. This is true for English agricultural development (e.g. McCloskey, 1975; Allen, 1982) and for Ireland (Ó Gráda, 1991). However, a well-cited contribution in this area of research deals with France

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(Hoffman, 1996). Hoffman’s approach illustrates one way to circumvent the lack of data on quantities in historical sources by using prices instead. It is fair to say that his work has inspired subsequent TFP-calculations for other European countries. Helder Adegar Fonseca and Jaime Reis (below) estimate TFP for one region in Portugal by applying the approach outlined by Hoffman (1996). Their aim is to calculate efficiency within agriculture in a context where the source material does not consist of information on quantities, but where prices of factors and products exist. For this purpose the so-called ‘dual approach’ is ideal. Besides prices, information on factor and product shares is needed. So, some kind of data on input and output quantities must be available in this approach as well. In this base version of the dual method two assumptions are made: Markets must be competitive and factor and product shares must remain constant over time. Hence, an elaborated knowledge of the study area is of immense importance. In his contribution Josemiguel Lana-Berasain (below) estimates agricultural growth through an alternative route. This gives him the opportunity of testing the TFP-calculation. He uses a rich source material estimating total factor productivity for Navarre for the period 1781 to 1900. Based on calculations of agricultural output he compares this to the growth of production factors adding the TFP growth. The results show in a clear and convincing way that the TFP method holds, at least in the case of Navarre. Also following Hoffman’s approach, Merijn Knibbe’s contribution studies the longterm development of productivity in one area of the Netherlands. His study highlights one potential problem with this approach. If factor and product shares are fixed at certain benchmark years, short and medium-term changes in shares in between these years might not be reflected in TFP. Conversely, if one factor remains constant, e.g. land rents while the others fluctuate, it is profitability rather than productivity that is measured in the short term, as noted by Knibbe. He also shows that TFP can be used for a comparison of areas with different geographical and natural conditions at a specific point in time. Here, the amount, use, and value of land, labour and capital are closely analysed and a comparison of the two regions reveals significant productivity differences for an average farm in each context. As regards the assumption of the constant factor shares, methodological innovations have made it possible to relax such assumptions (see Federico, 2005:74-75). In the fourth contribution using TFP, Carol S. Leonard (below) illustrates the need to take changing factor shares into account when estimating TFP. In Russian agriculture, the input side gradually shifted so that over time increasing amounts of land and capital were used in relation to the use of labour. This is taken into account through 21

Measuring and explaining agricultural growth

calculating TFP with the Tornqvist-Theil index, which is based on a time varying weighting scheme. Giovanni Federico also uses this approach in his article (below) to seek explanations for the growth pattern found in agriculture. Furthermore, Federico uses TFP to analyze the regional development in Italy, revising the conventional wisdom that the gap between the North and the South was a historical phenomenon dating back to the Middle Ages. Federico finds that this gap essentially emerged from the late nineteenth century through a more efficient agriculture in the North. In conclusion, the contributions in this book use different sources and methods, dispersed along the lines of earlier research, but all meet different problems leading to new and innovative solutions. Sources have to a large degree shaped the methods used and in theory this creates the problem of how to compare the developments in different regions. Added to this, there is the matter of time; sources exist for different time periods. However, by focusing on processes and general factors affecting growth, explanations can be suggested and compared over time and space. Before we go into that, however, we need to assess how the estimations put forward in this book have changed our view of agricultural growth and stagnation in Europe.

III. The development of production and productivity in European historical agriculture This volume contributes to the picture of European historical agricultural production and productivity in two principal ways: First, new regions are incorporated into the overall knowledge3. This both deepens and challenges our knowledge and understanding of European agriculture. Second, new estimations using better data and enhanced methods of countries or regions previously studied have similarly led to new interpretations of how and when growth came about. Traditionally, the overall pattern of agricultural growth in Europe shows that agriculture flourished in Italy and Flanders in the high and late Middle Ages. They were overtaken first by the Netherlands and later on by England. In this book the high performance agricultural of coastal Friesland is an example of this latter highproductive agriculture (Knibbe, below). Here, both arable and pastoral agriculture reached high productivity during the seventeenth century due to low transport costs and good natural conditions. However, long term productivity growth came to a halt during the eighteenth century and this stagnation continued over the first half of the nineteenth century. Productivity was lower in inland Friesland but over time a slow 3 This is to a certain degree true in respect to, for example, this volume’s forerunner of historical European agricultural productivity edited by CAMPBELL & OVERTON (1991).

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convergence took place; even so, overall growth in this leading European region was stagnant. A growth in output in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is also evident in the English case, and even if it still is debated whether this actually increased production or income per capita, it is clear that yields were higher than in most other European regions, and that this allowed a larger share of the population to be employed outside agriculture. Unlike Friesland, this rather slow growth in England was replaced by a fast increase in productivity during the first half of the nineteenth century (Beckett and Turner, below). The results obtained by Beckett and Turner are interesting as well as challenging in many respects: Most of the requirements of the English population in terms of food were met by English agriculture, and when population grew so did production. All in all, their story is one of an elastic agricultural supply provided by a smaller proportion of the population that responded to increased demand from the growing urban population; the major breakthrough in land and labour productivity came in the 1820s and not before. The authors conclude that if an agricultural revolution took place, it was not during the slow growth of the eighteenth century but during the first half of the nineteenth century. Earlier research generating reliable estimations has been sparser for countries outside this core area. The results in this book show that growth also took off in peripheral European regions before the late nineteenth century. From the late eighteenth century growth rates started to increase in peripheral Europe, e.g. the Iberian Peninsula and Scandinavia. In Spain, as seen by the example of Navarre, Lana (below) shows that total factor productivity increased in the long run but that growth was not linear. The major surge in productivity came in the period 1815– 1830, with very high yearly growth rates in a period previously regarded as one of crisis, at least politically. Spanish agriculture grew during the period studied and this was done by expanding production both extensively and intensively. The previously found dormant development was therefore not as dormant as has been supposed (e.g. Simpson, 1995). Besides, productivity increased in commercial regions in Portugal during the first half of the nineteenth century (Fonseca and Reis, below). Fonseca and Reis reveal that TFP fell almost continuously during the eighteenth-century but rose, in a cyclical way, during the nineteenth-century. From the mid-eighteenth century growth in south Sweden took place within the traditionally organized agricultural society, but it was only with the enclosures and the subsequent strengthening of property rights that the introduction of new crop rotations, and thus increased secular growth, was made possible (Olsson and Svensson, below). Growth rates in Swedish agriculture were higher than in the European core economies during this period, illustrating a catching-up process in that part of peripheral Europe.

23

Measuring and explaining agricultural growth

Returning to the Mediterranean, from the late nineteenth century to around the 1930s growth continued in Spanish agriculture although regional differences were substantial (Pinilla and Clar, below). Comparing this to Italy, earlier calculations show that growth in output in Italy was quite slow during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly during the 1880s. According to Federico, this development is incompatible with all other evidence of living standards and consumer behavior, and is due to bad data and flaws in estimating the series for the second half of the 1800s. Federico revises the output growth for Italy during this period and the new estimates show a somewhat higher annual growth rate but, more importantly, the trend is more linear and the ‘agrarian crises’ of the 1880s is no longer a valid concept. All in all, the Italian growth resembled that in Spain although the latter seems to have been somewhat faster during this period. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century is a debated period in Russian historiography as well and traditional notions of an agrarian crisis before the 1917 revolution are refuted by Leonard. In accordance with other new estimates of output, she finds that growth took place during the second half of the nineteenth century with a spurt from the 1890s. Moreover, in contrast to others, she also estimates the productivity advance and finds that labour productivity and total factor productivity in Russian agriculture were rising during this debated period. In all of these countries regional differences were clearly at hand, and Federico shows that it was in the twentieth-century that the North outperformed the South in Italy. In twentieth century Spain, the growth phase in output and productivity was interrupted by the Civil War period, but the post 1950 period displayed an even faster growth in Spain as a whole, but with regional differences (Pinilla and Clar, below). The overall story told by these new estimations does not change our fundaments regarding the development in Europe: First, its main contribution in terms of estimations is not to rank predecessors and followers in a new order, but to show that the timing for when growth and stagnation occurred for each part, as stated by earlier research, has to be adjusted. In most cases the new estimations are compatible with other indications of the economic development and therefore make our understanding of the historical development more uniform. In other cases the results are more challenging, directing us towards more intense studies of these important periods of growth or stagnation. Second, what has come out of this and of earlier research is that studies must take regional differences into account (cf. Hoppit, 1990:186-187). National averages often hide important variations. This gives rise to two severely negative implications: First, negative and positive growth patterns within a country can balance each other out, and thereby present a pattern of stagnation or slow growth where both fastgrowing regions and regions falling behind are present. Second, these regional

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differences in growth are important in order to trace explanations for the performance of agriculture. Only by looking at lower levels than national averages can we evaluate the importance of the environment, natural conditions, institutions, technical change etc. Altogether, the new and innovative ways of estimating production growth and productivity performance in historical European agriculture generate important clues to what happened and when.

IV.

Explaining changes in agricultural production and productivity

Based on the theories of Thomas Malthus on population and agricultural production, researchers have argued that there could not have been real improvements in income per head before 1800. It is even claimed that the average person then was no better off than the average person 100,000 years earlier. A Malthusian trap stood in the way of an increased standard of living. According to Gregory Clark, population systematically outpaced any technical progress, the latter occurring ‘slowly and sporadically‘ (Clark, 2007: 29). This view of technological advance in agriculture is, however, debated, and so is the Malthusian trap theory. In an effort to explain why and when technology changes occurred in preindustrial agriculture Ester Boserup uses a quite different perspective: When population and population density increase, agriculture is intensified and technological improvements take place (Boserup, 1965). Thus, while the Malthusians regard technological changes as exogenous, random and slow, the Boserupians regard them as endogenous to, and trigged by, population growth. Most current research has moved away from the Malthusian model since dynamics within agriculture have been observed across preindustrial Europe. Here, growth is affected not only by population but also by the degree of market integration and the prevailing institutions creating incentives for change. Growth, although at a slow pace, was achieved by step-wise improvements introduced by rational and economically motivated farmers until major breakthroughs in productivity took place. A proposed model of explanation based on earlier findings is that basic factors affect the way land is managed and thereby the level of production. These basic factors consist of natural conditions such as climate, topography and soil conditions. There are also economic and institutional factors affecting land management, e.g. traditions, inheritance systems, property rights, proximity to urban centres, population density, transport costs and trade restrictions. Together these factors affect farm sizes, technology, choice of crops and degree of specialisation. Hence, changes in the basic factors create incentives for altered management which eventually leads to changes in production and productivity.

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Measuring and explaining agricultural growth

Starting with the basic factors, traditional agrarian history most often has not regarded ecological and environmental conditions as decisive factors preventing growth, but as the reason for a delay in the timing of the introduction of new techniques or new forms of management (see Pinilla and Clar, below). This concerns, for example, the possibilities of technical diffusion between light soils and clay soils within a region or country (e.g. see Overton, 1996). However, inspired by historical geography and ecological economics, this has recently shifted and natural conditions have been integrated into the analysis of agricultural growth and stagnation (e.g. Brunt, 2004; Bohman, 2010). The contributions in this book clearly adhere to this new orientation. One example, as pointed out by Pinilla and Clar (see also Tortella, 1994), is the problem of adapting north-western European techniques and crop rotations to the natural conditions prevailing in Mediterranean Europe. Federico concludes that for growth to occur, ecology and environment require specific solutions. In Italy, overall regional specific innovations were introduced alongside a general commercialization responded to by entrepreneurial farmers (landlords and peasants). Still, the impact of natural conditions is not only associated with problems of technological diffusion, but also with differences in the long-term viability of agriculture. In Spain the droughts made irrigation necessary to enhance productivity, but over time this caused an increase in soil salinity, resulting in decreasing soil productivity (Pinilla and Clar). This was only a minor feature, affecting areas where irrigation was introduced, in relation to what happened in more remote areas; in mountainous regions the conditions were so adverse that adaption to a modern agriculture was impossible, leading to abandonment and depopulation. The same pattern has been found in similar regions across Europe (Collantes, 2006). This feature of land being degraded or not suitable for commercial farming is not isolated to mountainous regions. In the Netherlands, Knibbe (below) finds marginal sandy soils turning into sand drift, a phenomenon present in north-western Europe and in Scandinavia (Bohman, 2010). Part of this was caused by over-exploitation of the land and in some instances the pressure could be relieved by reclamation of wetlands or by planting of forests to change the use of the land. Another factor that seems to have been critical to increased production and productivity in agriculture is the commercialization of the agrarian sector4. The emergence of urban markets, both in terms of demand for food and the supply of urban-made products, together with improved transportation, is said to have 4

The role of the markets in the management of land has been extensively covered by an earlier work in this series (PINILLA, 2009) where the introduction describes in a very fruitful way the impact of this factor on production and productivity. In this book we will merely put the results from the different contributions into that perspective through a short compilation of this huge subject.

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increased economic incentives for farmers (e.g. de Vries, 1994; van Zanden, 1999; Allen, 2009). With rational managers this would lead to improved efficiency of the agricultural sector. This demand-side approach could be one explanation for the development from short-term increases in supply to a more secular rise in production. A gradually larger urban context increased market integration, for example in Flanders, the Netherlands, northern France, England, and parts of Italy. Local and regional trade based on differences in natural endowments developed further in other areas of Europe. The market-integrated core expanded when income per capita and urbanization rose, leading to a widened and deepened market where some countries in eastern, northern and southern Europe specialized in their comparative advantage and exported their products to the core. But markets also grew within these countries, for example in rural-urban trade in Germany and from grain-surplus to grain-deficit areas in Sweden. As is revealed in one of the articles on Spain, specialization led to trade with other regions in Spain and neighboring countries demanding olive oil, wine and sugar (Pinilla and Clar, below). Market incentives therefore constitute one basic factor creating incentives for growth, apparent and decisive all over Europe. However, the direction of this basic factor could clash with the incentives coming from the other basic factor, the natural conditions. Fonseca and Reis (below) discuss whether commercialization and increased demand were sufficient conditions for enhanced productivity in agriculture and whether ecological conditions would in any way affect this relationship. Their case is Alentejo in Portugal and they find TFP was falling during the eighteenth century, but from around 1800 Alentejo farms experienced rising TFP. There could be several reasons for this development: technical, institutional or political factors (e.g. farm concentration, wars, inability to adopt technical innovation) but Fonseca and Reis find that the evidence points in the direction of the joint effect of market incentives and natural conditions. When prices and price relatives changed, the farmers adapted their production accordingly. However, during the eighteenth century this led to falling productivity since ecological barriers prevented productivity from rising. At the turn of the century, when price relatives changed in another direction more suitable to the ecological conditions, productivity was restored to initial levels. So, even if Alentejo was a commercialized setting and a dynamic farming community, natural conditions prevented it from reaching long-term economic growth. Other factors that are widely discussed in relation to growth are institutions. These can be divided into those affecting the security of possession and the distribution of output; those affecting the possibility of individual action; and those regulating trade and barter (see Olsson & Svensson, 2010). The first set of institutions is connected to the property rights structure. Whereas some researchers argue that secure and stable

27

Measuring and explaining agricultural growth

property rights enhanced investments and thereby growth (e.g. North & Weingast, 1989: 805), others see no link between the property rights structure and economic development (e.g. Clark, 2007: 147). In Russia the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 did not have a simultaneous positive effect on growth but rather the opposite; TFP was negative. However, Leonard (below) argues that this is explained by the fact that institutional adjustments take time. The effect of more secure property rights and higher economic incentives on growth is clearly visible and was one important feature of agricultural development in Russia during this period. In Sweden, the farms where the farmers owned the land displayed a higher growth rate than farms under tenancy. Olsson and Svensson suggest that this is explained by the fact that with tenancies farmers property rights were insecure, including insecurity of possession and flexible land rents threatening to expropriate any increase in production. This made tenants invest less than freeholders. Institutions governing the possibilities of individual management of land are of course also related to property rights. Here, however, the collective versus private ownership is often discussed, in particular the potential impact of breaking up the open-field system. The collective decision-making process within this institution has often been said to increase transaction costs and to prevent innovations in crops and methods from taking place. This has been a widely discussed topic in British research, both in terms of the rigid structure of the open-field system and the actual gains in productivity coming from enclosures (e.g. Thompson, 1971; McCloskey, 1975; Allen, 1992 and 2009; Overton, 1996; Clark, 1998). Adding to this debate, Beckett and Turner (below) contend that, in the English case, the introduction of new technology was probably enhanced by enclosures. The same argument is put forward in relation to Sweden where new crops and crop rotations are discernible only after the enclosures. As regards the institutions governing trade, Federico states that what may have hindered an even more fruitful development in Italy was not the problem of environment but a non-optimal state trade policy. This is in line with the findings for France by Hoffman (1996), although this regards an earlier period. Hoffman also stresses trade, state policy and institutions as decisive for the development of agricultural productivity in the preindustrial world. From the institutional structure there is a link to the behavior of different groups of farmers, i.e. the responsiveness of the farmers was associated with the institutions surrounding them, deciding the possibilities of individual management and the incentives for increasing production. The proponents for the notion of the rational peasant have previously convincingly proved their case in relation to the advocates of the traditional idea of the inward-looking conservative peasant (e.g. Schultz, 1964; Popkin, 1980; versus: Wolf, 1966; Scott 1976), and the former are also supported by

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the findings in this book. As early as the ninth century, landlords in Flanders used a management form resting on profit-maximization as showed by Alexis Wilkin in his article below. This original study creates a starting point in the discussion on motives, incentives and willingness to adhere to these by people managing land across Europe. The findings in this book clearly show that this way of managing land, where landlords strived to better their economic position, thereafter became frequent among more groups within the rural society and resulted in enhanced growth and commercialization. When it comes to landlords, the gentry, or other groups of people from the upper stratum of the social structure, this view of profit maximization and openness towards change has never been debated. However, as regards people from lower segments, i.e., the farming majority, opinions have differed (see Svensson, 2006). This book provides numerous examples of and arguments for farmers from all social groups changing their management of land in response to economic incentives and opportunities, e.g. in Spain, Italy, Sweden and Russia. These changes in the management of land manifested themselves in different forms. Introduction of new methods and new seeds took place at the same time in Spain as it did in Sweden in the early nineteenth century. Russian farmers, still bound by serfdom, had to wait until the late nineteenth century whereas farmers in England, who faced fewer institutional obstacles and more incentives earlier, raised production as far back as the sixteenth century (Allen, 1992). Even in England, however, it was in that very same late eighteenth, early nineteenth century period that better seed, new nitrogen-fixing crops, better preparation and improved drainage occurred and had a massive effect on yields (Beckett and Turner, below). Depending on property rights, topographic conditions relating to market demand, and/or some other characteristics, it might be that some groups within this stratum paved the way for the others by being more entrepreneurial. Frank Konersmann (below) is able to contrast the economic behaviour and outputs of different groups of peasants. He highlights the importance of certain groups of peasants in this process and states that these ‘peasant merchants’ were important for the spread of new ideas and that they acted as initiators of the agricultural revolution in the region. They introduced new husbandry and enhanced land productivity, with less fallow and more varied production with crop rotation, more livestock and year-round stall feeding and fodder production that gave more manure and higher yields. They also included more cashcrops as well as further manufacturing at, for example, distilleries. The reorganisation of the farms meant that they gradually became more and more capitalistic, in terms of labour organisation. The peasant merchants were in the forefront of the agrarian revolution in this part of Germany until the 1790s, when other peasant groups caught

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Measuring and explaining agricultural growth

up, but this region stayed as forerunner in a German context, with modern farming techniques and high yield rates, until well into the middle of the next century.

V.

Conclusion

New approaches and estimates provide new ways of explaining growth patterns in European agriculture. Comparing the results across regions and countries shows that the producers of agricultural commodities, seigniors and peasants, responded to markets and economic incentives from early on. However, property rights and institutions seem to have mattered in this respect. Old traditional structures and serfdom did not promote growth to the same extent as individual management and higher degrees of market integration. Improved transportation, openness in trade, and a common national institutional context also mattered, although an increased supply of agricultural products in the first phase of expansion was mainly traded on a local and regional level, rather than between regions and countries. Another factor affecting growth was the possibility of flexibility and sustainability; soils and other natural conditions limited the ways land could be managed in both the short and long run. Obstacles in the form of geographical or ecological factors were present not only in Mediterranean Europe or Northern Europe, as one sometimes tends to find in older literature, but also in its core as exemplified by the development during the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries in Friesland. The differences in levels and growth rates over time for different regions/ countries, and the way these changes are explained by the authors, provide a further possibility of dating and defining the agricultural revolution. Overall, the historical agriculture in Europe shows a cyclical pattern with forerunners experiencing swift growth being overtaken by newcomers to the growth arena, and then returning after a period of stagnation or slow growth. In Flanders, rational management and surplus production already existed in the early Middle Ages; the same was probably true in contemporary Spain, i.e. Al-Andalus, and in the Po Valley. Parts of the Netherlands and England experienced high growth rates in production and productivity as long ago as the sixteenth century. This lasted for a century or two (Knibbe, below; Allen, 1992) but was followed by stagnation or slower growth. In the Dutch case stagnation persisted over the nineteenth century, while for England a major increase in productivity occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Sweden and parts of Germany started to transform into high-productive societies during the eighteenth century and were soon followed by the Mediterranean with productivity and production growth in regions of Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In some cases these growth rates were larger than for the core countries, indicating a catchingup process. As far as this book can tell us, Eastern Europe, represented by Russia,

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lagged behind due to institutional barriers, but when these were lifted production and productivity led to rising income per capita. A striking lesson from the study of productivity development in European historical agriculture is that for the transformation of a low-productive traditional agriculture into a high-productive one, technological knowledge and commercial incentives are not enough. A third prerequisite is an advantageous institutional framework.

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DE

WOLF, E. R. (1966), Peasants, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall. WRIGLEY, E. A. (1985), ‘Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the Early Modern Period’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 15, p. 683728. ZANDEN, J. L. (1999), ‘The development of agricultural productivity in Europe, 15001800’, in E. THOEN & B.J.P. VAN BAVEL (eds), Land productivity and agro-systems in the North sea area (Middle Ages 20th century). Elements for comparison, Turnhout, Brepols, p. 357-375. VAN

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2.

Some aspects of the question of productivity in Early Medieval Europe: the case of Eastern Belgium Alexis WILKIN

I.

Introduction

The question of the productivity of the Early Middle Ages agrarian structures in North Western Europe, especially in the area between Loire and Rhin, has been highly debated since a long time. From the 50’s onward, most of the medievalists shared a pessimistic view of the Carolingian economy, especially in the French speaking areas. Scholars opposed the agrarian organisation before and after the year 1000, moment that was the synonymous of a true agrarian and economical revolution. Before the year 1000, the agrarian organisation was thought as loose, and critically inefficient: for most of the scholars, among whose the most famous were Georges Duby, and Robert Fossier, the Carolingian yields were very low (see Devroey, 2003 and 2008). The main reasons behind this backwardness of the countryside were, according to them, partially technical: lack of efficient tools such as the steel ones, the use of swing-plough instead of the carruca; ignorance of the water mills; absence of the use of more sophisticated techniques, such as crop rotation. This chronic backwardness of the agriculture was inserted in the frame of general demographic considerations about the increasing of the population on the peasants’ holdings. Historians considered, in a Malthusian way, that population’s increase and the lack of available land to install the new generations resulted in the fragmentation of the peasants’ farms, in malnutrition and even starvations as, indeed, some spectacular episodes of famines did occur repeatedly in the Early Middle Ages. These views are now considered as obsolete by most of the scholars, although some of them, such as Fossier, still defend them fiercely (Fossier, 1981). The trend is now to emphasize the rural growth of the Early Middle Ages, and to insist on the fact that some of the big landholdings could be considered as much more efficient structures, that paved the way toward the later and more spectacular development around the year 1000. The will to correct the very pessimistic and exaggerated views of the earlier scholars are indeed praiseworthy; but we have to avoid some brutal simplifications of the question of the productivity and output of Carolingian and Post-Carolingian agriculture, with a debate often hinged on pro- and contraarguments about the efficiency of the rural structures during this period. However,

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as Pierre Toubert (1990) and Jean-Pierre Devroey (2003) suggested very subtly, no overall conclusion can be drew about the agricultural productivity of this period on a general basis. Before we go in deep in our analysis, a quick reminder of the definitions (productivity, output) and of the factors classically known to influence it are necessary. As Bruce M.S. Campbell and Mark Overton (1991) explained, one has to make a distinction between the total output (‘The product produced by the farmers’, Overton & Campbell, 1996) and the productivity itself, which is the ratio between the inputs (classically speaking, quantity of land and/or labour) and the output. The common measures of productivity are thus a ratio between the quantity of land cultivated and the quantity of grain produced; or they are this output calculated according to the extent of the working force. Campbell and Overton (1991) explained how crude, however, these usual estimations were, as some important factors were not included, such as the quantity of crops sown and retained after the harvest for the next year’s crops or the feeding of animals, the inclusion of the crop rotations in the calculation, the extension of the fallow areas and duration of fallow; for the second type of calculation (output per worker), these were not considering, for example, the number of hours performed by the workers. Many of these factors, however, cannot be measured properly or even very roughly for the period considered here. Because the nature of the period and of the evidence does not permit accurate quantification, depiction of the mechanisms of Early Medieval agriculture has been and still is crude, and sometimes very theoretical, particularly as the tools required to offer a more detailed picture have often been lacking. Moreover, the estimates provided by Slicher Van Bath (1963) and Duby (1962) for the Carolingian period, and resting upon a superficial reading of Carolingian documentation, are no longer current (see the criticisms in Devroey, 2003). Our goal is much more modest and is systematically to analyze the factors that were of some influence on productivity in the region between the Loire and the Rhine, especially in the east of what is present-day Belgium, according to the structure and nature of Early Medieval landholdings identified there. In a brief, but necessary, introduction, we outline the often-scrutinized model of landholding exploitation at that time, the classic bipartite system1, emphasizing how the often rigid attention exclusively paid to this model has probably been at the origin of most debate; as explained further, this situation has a lot to do with the nature of the sources used to conduct research, and it is crucial to emphasize the problems posed by these documents, which are far from being statistically reliable. We then move on 1

i.e. the association of a seigniorial demesne with dependent peasant holdings. See below.

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to discuss the core of our problem: the distribution of the (technical) means available to improve productivity on the estates2 of great landowners and on peasant farms; the quantity of land; and the breakdown of labour in respect of time devoted to these two types of landholding. These three factors (technology, land and labour) are the “inputs” used potentially to raise productivity (Campbell & Overton, 1991). We conclude with an examination of the efficiency of this agriculture in terms of results and according to the specific goals pursued by the different actors involved, together with some final qualifications arising from the nature of the sources. We suggest that it is crucial to establish certain distinctions between the scale and nature of the land held, and to determine the personal involvement of cultivators according to differences in the size and legal status of that land; in a similar perspective, generalizations about the use of certain techniques are meaningless without a closer analysis of the tools available to the owners and/or cultivators of land varying in type and legal status. Finally, there is the question of agricultural productivity, which cannot be examined here per se, but must be linked to the different goals pursued by those owners or cultivators, goals that were intimately bound up with the economic efficiency of their estates in an economy that was far from hinging only on market and trade, but where different economic logics could coexist.

II. Property structures and productivity: the question of bipartite estates. Description of the model The way productivity in Early Medieval Europe was described in earlier works was in fact dependent on how the concept of the great bipartite estate was initially shaped and how it came to be understood. The bipartite estate was a very specific way of organizing production that is encountered mainly in the region between the Loire and the Rhine from the Carolingian era on (for a general analysis, see Morimoto, 2008; Devroey, 2008; Devroey 2003). In the nineteenth-century, scholars conceptualized this system, using specific sources that included the surveys of the incomes of rich abbeys located in the area around Paris. The model of the great bipartite estate, which has been seen as the hallmark of the Carolingian rural economy, was created from analysis of those sources. The classic concept of the bipartite estate rested on the existence of a seigniorial demesne directly managed by the landowner, and on the labour forthcoming from 2

We use the word in the sense of the whole rural ‘enterprises’ controlled by the landowner: i.e. the seigniorial demesne, the dependent peasant holdings, the central buildings, and the other constituents of the overall enterprise, such as meadows or woods.

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dependent peasant holdings (the mansi), which were liable for labour service on the seigniorial demesne or for various duties necessary for the proper functioning of the ‘manor’. These labour services were of variable intensity and duration, according to the peasants’ status. Within this framework, it is important to detail the existence of the dependent holdings (the mansi): they were small (sometimes not so small) farms, comprising a family house, a vegetable plot close to the house, occasionally also an orchard, and last, but not least, certain plots of arable land of various extent; some livestock were also raised on them. These mansi were ensembles that were created by the great landowner within his own estates and then granted to couples in exchange for various services or dues; or were originally independent holdings that, for numerous reasons, were incorporated into the large bipartite complexes and placed back into the hands of their original and now dependent owners in exchange for certain set-offs. In the debate about output and productivity in Carolingian times, we can thus already insist on one preliminary idea: i.e. that both have to be quantified in terms not only of the seigniorial estates, but also of the smaller, dependent peasant holdings. It is thus not possible to give a generic appreciation of productivity during the entire Carolingian period, as there could be significant variation, even at local level. Moreover, we have to remember that some holdings could have existed that were independently owned and of smaller extent than those of the great landowners, and that were not recorded in the sources. It is also evident that, where the bipartite model is encountered, the amount of labour available is crucial in answering the above question of productivity and output, since the amount of labour service provided by the dependent peasant on the seigniorial demesne would have directly affected the amount of labour he could perform on his own dependent holding. For the Early Middle Ages, however, the bipartite model is now considered as the exception rather than the rule (see Devroey, 1985): recent investigations have shown that the perfect association of a dependent farm with a seigniorial demesne through systematic labour service was certainly not the sole model of landholding exploitation. Many models coexisted, even among the properties of very important landowners, such as the Carolingian abbeys. One and the same institution, could, in different and sometimes very close geographical areas, make highly variable demands on the peasants in return for the use of the soil: in some cases, there was indeed a seigniorial demesne on which the peasants had to perform light or heavy labour services; in numerous other cases, these services were light or non-existent; in certain circumstances, the seigniorial demesne was of restricted extent or even 38

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lacking; very often, in place of labour, the peasants had to provide certain dues in kind and/or money (see below).

III.

The nature of the sources: a biased point of view

The nature of the sources is to blame for earlier writings having focused on a too systematic model of the economy of Carolingian times, based on the idea of forced labour on the demesne. The most important evidence to indicate the nature of Carolingian agriculture remains the general surveys (often called polyptychons), written under abbatial direction, which present the claims of the master in terms of dues or labour provided by the mansi (see Devroey, 2008). Due to the nature of the polytychons, as well as because of their often isolated character, it is impossible even to try to give, for example, estimates of yield ratio or to draw broad conclusions on the physical configuration of the seigniorial demesne, which the polytychons often ignored. For the region under review, we used mainly the sources listed by Jean-Pierre Devroey, the most important among which were the surveys conducted by the abbeys of Lobbes and Prüm, which listed a number of important agricultural complexes in this area. These two important surveys date from the second half of the ninth-century . The first was ordered by Lothar II around 868-869 (the document contains some additional fragments inserted later). The abbey of Lobbes owned significant estates close to its location in the silty area of Hainaut (to the West of the Condroz on the map) and on the borders of the Fagne-Famenne and Condroz districts; it also owned estates in the silty areas of Brabant (just to the north of Lobbes, to the west of the Hesbaye) and in the silty Hesbaye area. The second survey was written around 893 under the direction of the abbey of Prüm (off the map, in the Eiffel area in Western Germany), but is known only from a thirteenth-century copy. The abbey, although distant, owned a significant ‘complex’ of property in the silty Hesbaye area, close to the town of Liège, and in the less fertile and woodier Ardennes to the south, around Bastogne. This area is of great interest and importance, as it was situated at the core of the Carolingian Empire, close to the centres of power; it is thus particularly interesting to investigate the question of productivity there, as the impact of Carolingian networks of power (of the abbeys and the nobility) has been traditionally linked with the implementation of the classic manorial system.

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Figure 2.1. Eastern Belgium and the Bishopric of Liège

Source. KUPPER (1981).

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IV.

The seigniorial demesne and peasant tenures

A close scrutiny of the nature of the link between dependent peasant farms and the demesne of the great landowners – where these last were not renting their entire property to dependent families – is thus one of the preliminary points to be looked at when trying to consider the question of productivity in the Early Middle Ages and to evaluate the essential issue of how the labour force was organized.

IV.1 Organization of labour: the links between demesne and peasant farms Briefly, the general organization of the estates of the two institutions scrutinized here was a bipartite structure that associated the direct management of a seigniorial demesne with dependent holdings (mansi), although there was compliance with regional diversity, even within the same institution: big differences can indeed be observed in the organization of the various ‘complexes’ of property. Usually, a highly variable number of dependent peasant holdings was grouped around the chief of these local complexes, the centre of the villa, which was also the centre of the seigniorial demesne. However, the number of these dependent farms, as well as the nature of their association with the seigniorial demesne, differed substantially (see below regarding labour service or rents in kind or money). It is impossible to offer even a crude estimate of the surface area of these dependant holdings. However, Jean-Pierre Devroey (1985) offered a number of estimates, according to the number of mansi associated with the chief complex of each regional estate. The mansi totalled around 500 and were distributed on a very unequal basis among the different villae. The immediate complex around Lobbes seems to have been organized in a specific manner, with seigniorial farms and a very significant number (around 123) of another type of semi-urban peasant holding, the sessi (the peasant holding no arable land, but only an orchard and a house). Lobbes owned one very important estate (at least ninety-three mansi and maybe more: the text is ambiguous) and others ranging from – a relative, non-absolute calculation –still significant ones (4: 40 to 53 mansi) to medium-sized ones (5: 25 to 30 mansi) and to small (2: 12 to 16 mansi), besides three very small ones with fewer than 10 mansi (4 to 8). The same variability was observed in Prüm’s estates, where those in Awans and Villance were of a significant size (respectively 48 and 47 mansi), whereas Bastogne and Mabombré showed a different profile with just a few mansi, due probably to their orientation towards cattle breeding. Although there were many dependent peasant farms in various numbers almost everywhere, their connection to the seigniorial demesne was loose (Devroey, 1985).

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The seigniorial demesne managed directly by the landowner was even not everywhere encountered. There was a demesne in most cases, but huge variability existed in the way it was exploited, even within the framework of one and the same institution. Generally, the dependent holdings were not liable for any labour service on the seigniorial demesne: for the most wealthy part of Eastern Belgium (the Hesbaye), the abbey of Prüm – remote in the Eiffel – preferred to take very heavy dues in kind and money from the peasant farms (see Schwab, 1983 and below). This was also the formula usually adopted in most of the estates of the abbey of Lobbes (see Devroey, 1986, and below). It can be seen, however, that the corvée was in force in a few locations in Eastern Belgium, and the exploitation model there could properly answer to the features of the classic manorial system. The amount of labour service owed by the peasant farms on the seigniorial demesne is important, as on some estates owned by Lobbes those farms had to provide a person for such service for a period ranging from two to three days a week, according to the type of labour (see Gozée in Devroey, 1986). In Southern Belgium, in the Ardennes (Villance and Mabompré: see Schwab, 1983; and Bastogne: see Dupont, 1977), the mansionarii of the abbey of Prüm had to provide heavy labour service on the manorial demesne (from three days’ work in Villance, Bastogne and Mabompré up to an unlimited amount of work for unfree peasants in Mabompré, which is classic). Some scholars consider that these numbers are only a theoretical maximum and that the amount of labour service effectively performed by the peasants was much less (see Perrin, 1935). We are not convinced by this idea. If the numbers are accurate, the question is to know whether the entire labour force of a farm (one mansus) would have been put to that service on the seigniorial demesne and thus whether it had no time to work that farm’s own land. It was the head of the family who was responsible for providing the dues demanded, and an imbalance could arise between, on the one hand, the burden of the corvée or dues demanded and, on the other, the ability of the mansus to meet the liability; such situations led thus to adaptation of the dues demanded of the mansi (for the situation in Villance, see Schwab, 1983). However, we have to be careful about too quickly adopting the idea that the entire workforce of dependent peasant holdings was used to perform the labour service required, as it is plausible that this was performed rather by the peasants’ farmhands and/or sons. Thus, very different methods of organizing labour could have been applied by one and the same institution on its estates, according to their location. In some instances, the explanation is to hand. For example, the difference between the various ‘Belgian’ estates of Lobbes and Prüm certainly owes a lot to each one’s geographical situation 42

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and the perhaps more recent stage of development of those abbeys’ estates in the Ardennes, which was a reclaimed woody area where a classic bipartite model was imposed. Moreover, the fact that the abbey of Prüm did not demand labour service of peasants in its remotest estates in the Hesbaye was due to the difficulty of organizing the strict control necessary for such service to function in those faraway places (see Devroey, 1985). However, a strict and systematic logic that could explain the terms and conditions of labour organization is lacking: that organization could not, for example, have rested only on the basis of the geographical position of the property groupings vis-à-vis the administrative, seigniorial centre, or have been determined only by the nature of the soil. Was the presence or absence of labour service on the seigniorial demesne the result solely of the balance of power between peasants and the landowners, the latter being able to impose this service on their estates? The balance of power indeed varied substantially from one place to another3. The discrepancy in charges could also have been the result of the original social status of the peasants incorporated into the ‘manorial’ framework: depending on whether the peasant family was originally of free or of lower status (non-free), or in a more vulnerable economic position, the balance of power swung in one direction or another, which helps to explain the variability of organization in labour service, even on the estates of one and the same institution4. The abbey sometimes lacked the coercive authority to impose heavy labour obligations, especially when it was weaker, and in this respect it is likely that the difficulties the abbey of Lobbes faced in the ninthcentury could have affected its ability to impose its authority (on these difficulties, see Devroey, 1986). A lot of other factors, too, might help to explain the discrepancy in the amount of labour service demanded , including, for example, the nature of the property exploited (recently reclaimed land, etc.) (for these, see Schlesinger, 1987). However, we do not have to focus too much on the characteristics of this classic bipartite model, as the demesne came more frequently to be exploited without the help of the dependent farms, and the abbey finally opted to rely on an indirect management system that consisted in receiving dues in kind and money. The terms and conditions of the demesne’s cultivation where there was no corvée are unclear, although there was an abundant workforce available for the purpose (see Devroey, 1986): at Lobbes, 3

Although the existence of social tensions and the use of social enforcement is undoubtedly here at stake. See TOUBERT (1990). 4 This explanation is, however, highly fragmentary, as it sits awkwardly with the sometimes undifferentiated nature of the demands of the landowner in certain of his estate groupings, taken a as whole: in some places, the same obligations in labour and/or in dues are applied to all occupants of the mansi of the area. Were the variety of the peasants legal or economic situations to explain the variability of labour organization, the resultant would normally be a multiplicity of conditions, including on a local basis, as it is unlikely that all peasants of a particular area were of the same original social status.

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for example, that force was made up of the poorer peasants who worked small pieces of land (sessi) insufficient to sustain them and who performed additional labour on the seigniorial estates.

IV.2.

The productivity of the seigniorial demesne

We can now go further and try to analyze the problem of agricultural output and productivity on seigniorial estates. Unfortunately, the demesne is only occasionally mentioned in the sources, and conclusions about that output and productivity have thus to depend on certain fundamental characteristics drawn from more detailed contemporary sources existing elsewhere, which therefore often entails a degree of hazard. Specifically considered here are a number of important issues: the technical aspects of productivity, including the problem of the availability of draught animals, intimately linked with the issue of labour; the possible technological obsolescence of tools and techniques; the nature of the crops; and finally the results (yields) of the agriculture practised.

IV.2.1. Draughts animals One important question concerns the availability of livestock to the great landowners, a matter that has been one of the central and disputed aspects regarding the productivity of the great estates of the Early Middle Ages. Pointing to the lack of mention of draught animals necessary to perform work on the seigniorial demesnes, scholars have depicted a tragic inability on the part of the landowners to exploit their own lands satisfactorily. Some recent studies (see Devroey, 2003) have explained certain mechanisms that allowed an important number of oxen to be mobilized to perform repeated ploughings on the manorial demesne. Although there is still uncertainty about the quantity of livestock eventually raised by the lord, due to the silence of the records, it is certain that the abbeys could sometimes have recourse to a considerable reserve of oxen requisitioned on the demesne, together with their peasant owners to drive them to carry out the ploughing (this was the case in Southern Belgium on the Prüm estates, where each mansus had to provide two oxen for this task, as well as a quantity of manure: see Schwab, 1983). As has now been demonstrated, several pairs of these oxen were yoked together to pull each plough. Little, too, is know about the raising and management of livestock for demesne ploughing in areas for which no mention of oxen and peasants being mobilized is

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encountered in the source texts. The repeated reference to meadows in the manorial demesnes of the abbeys of the region under review proves that the demesnes certainly had land to provide feed for some of the necessary draught animals, although it is difficult to know if that land was sufficient to cover needs. In fact, the presence of these meadows was almost systematic in areas where no labour service was demanded of peasants (see Devroey, 1986); moreover, the incidental mention of the incremental number of oxen, a mention associated with references to these meadows, permits us to state that the meadows were indeed areas intended for pasture, and not just for mowing. It seems thus that, where no labour service was demanded and where no requisition of peasant yokes is attested, the great landowners could rely partially on their own livestock. In some areas, furthermore, peasant farms had sometimes to provide livestock as dues to the landowner. Finally, it is also certain that these abbeys owned at least one central farm in Flanders specifically to raise oxen and cows (vaccaricia, as indicated in Devroey, 1986. For Bastogne in Prüm, see Schwab, 1983; and Dupont, 1977). Various other means were thus open to landowners to gather traction power in the absence of forced requisition. This is a crucial point, as landowners had to make these beasts available to hired labour to cultivate areas where the corvée was not in force. However, as we shall see, the relatively poor efficiency of the extensive farming practised in the demesnes perhaps implies that some form of competing interest was at play as regards arable and meadow land that diminished the extent of areas where livestock could be raised, leading to, among other things, less efficient preparation of the soil (through the use of manure). Due to the impreciseness of the sources, it is still unclear what technology was used for ploughing in Eastern Belgium. A systematic survey of the archaeological evidence would help to determine whether the symmetric mouldboard plough (the swing-plough or aratrum) or the dissymmetric mouldboard plough (carruca) was used. As some of the soils there ranged from medium-heavy to heavy, the latter plough would have been the ideal solution, but no written reference allows us to establish its use, though the shape of the fields would suggest that it was employed (see Zadora-Rio, 1991). In considering the technical aspects of the traction power and the nature of the plough used, we have also briefly to remind the reader that, although the documents are rather coy in describing the availability of tools partially made of steel, there is no doubt that such tools would have been available to the proprietors of the great estates; the western part of the area studied here, i.e. that between the Meuse and the Sambre, was traditionally involved in the production of steel objects and recent surveys have shown the existence, even in the Early Middle Ages, of a Carolingian steel industry within the framework of the great manor (see Devroey, 2003).

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IV.2.2. Cereals, fertility and yields Other difficult and crucial questions in our debates concern certainly 1° the types of cereal grown on the manorial demesne, 2° the agricultural techniques used to maximize production and to allow the soil to renew itself (soil preparation, crop rotation, etc. ), and 3° the quantity of seed sown and harvest yields. What types of cereal were grown on the seigniorial demesne is a question of high importance, although is not always easy to answer. Within a general perspective, textual and palynologic surveys have shown that in continental Europe the classic cereals cultivated during Late Antiquity, wheat and barley, had been to an extent replaced by other species. Barley had been abandoned, and spelt had started to cover some parts of Germany and the area considered here, although it had been also dropped in numerous locations in favour of other species, rye and oat. Spelt was long appreciated as a crop in the area we are dealing with here, and this deserves some explanation. Devroey (1989 and 1990) showed that the choice of spelt was linked with political coercion on the part of the Carolingian kings to combat famine, as this very resistant cereal was more easy to store for long periods (see below) and was easy to grow, even in the poorest soils; moreover, numerous other advantages (its use in making good quality bread, in brewing and as animal feed, etc.) made it even more attractive. However, spelt has a less important yield ratio than other cereals and was held in lower repute in the medieval world; it nevertheless continued to be long cultivated in the area under review here, sometimes even into the High Middle Ages and the Modern Era, which is difficult to explain (some historians link this to cultural factors; see Genicot, 1943; Devroey, 1989). As Devroey (2003) pointed out, spelt is usually cultivated in areas where regularity of production is preferred to high productivity. Source documents do not usually detail what was produced on the demesne, but certain random references in the polyptychons, due certainly to the composite nature of these last, provide indications of the cereals cultivated. Spelt is indeed mentioned as one of these, concurrently with huge quantities of oat and barley. Predominant in the recently reclaimed area in the woody Ardennes, were oat, wheat and rye (this last especially suitable for that kind of ground newly converted to agriculture; see Schwab, 1983). Oat, barley and spelt are hulled species (i.e. with the grain enclosed in a tight cellulose sheath). The choice of them was certainly not accidental, and is more likely to be proof of the very careful nature of the agriculture practiced on these great manorial estates, as the fact that the grain was protected by the hull allowed

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significantly longer storage; however, this also had important consequences for the overall economic efficiency of the manorial system, as removal of the hull involved a painstaking process. Barley can be sown in winter or spring, but in Medieval times was mostly used as a winter crop (see Comet, 1992). However, the presence of oat on the seigniorial demesnes almost certainly indicates a form of organized crop rotation, and this has been confirmed (for the estate Lobbes, see Devroey 1986; for Villance and Prüm, see Schwab, 1983). Nevertheless, the fact ought not to be exaggerated: although some maximalist and optimistic views suggest that a kind of organized three-course system could have prevailed in the Early Middle Ages (see Derville, 1991), the existence of a truly coercive division of the land is increasingly acknowledged as unlikely. Morimoto (1994) suggested that this three-course system was gaining some slight ground on the estates of Lobbes during the second half of the ninth-century . This could be confirmed by the presence of undetermined species of bean and pea (leguminous plants) (see Devroey, 1986) as it was known that the introduction of these last on land usually fallowed could help it to regain its full potential more efficiently. In other cases, growing leguminous plants in association with oats increased the productivity of the latter (see Verhulst, 1985). We conclude with the question of yields, an issue that has been fiercely discussed within the framework of the minimalist/maximalist debate on growth during the Early Middle Ages. Some unverifiable yields based on the ratio between seed sown and quantity harvested have been proposed: certain historians have proposed a ratio of 1.8 (and sometimes even the minimum of 1 seed harvested for 1 sown); others, more optimistic, have proposed a ratio ranging from 2 to 35. Currently, for the Early Middle Ages, serious scholars propose a general yield ratio of 3-5 to 1 (see Rösener, 1992) or 3-4 to 1 (see Comet, 1992), despite the fact that other historians have opted for higher ratios (see Fumagalli, 1966), looking to prove that the agriculture of the Early Middle Ages was as efficient as that of the High Middle Ages, and proposing ratios of 5-6 to 1. However, these numbers rely on exceptional and very limited sets of data and have been criticized as non-valid standards (see Toubert, 1990). Our sources do not permit even limited estimates to be made for the region under review. However, yields were probably modest there, as they were everywhere, according to the consensus referred to above; but the agricultural model developed on the demesnes was satisfactory for the landowners, due to its extensive nature: in 5

But how are these numbers to be understood? Scholars have proposed yields on the basis of ambiguous texts, but were these texts referring to average returns or individual years? 1,8 is indeed very low for an average return, but could perfectly be encountered during some bad years.

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other words, the overall quantity of the cereals gathered was more important for the landowner than maximizing the intensity of soil exploitation. Although this synthesis is highly ‘impressionistic’ and we have to remain cautious, due to the nature of the documentary sources, we can try to offer some provisional conclusions. The first is about the careful nature of the agriculture practiced in the region under consideration; exact yield ratios are impossible to deduce, but there is no data allowing us to suggest that, on the demesnes there, we encounter a type of ‘high productivity’ farming (in terms of the ratio between output and quantity of land or labour). Whether the demesnes were cultivated by dependent peasants or by hired labour, or both, nothing permits correction of the rather poor yield ratios usually proposed by scholars, since especially the cereals cultivated there were sometimes of a kind offering rather limited yields – and, in the case of spelt, necessitating exhausting additional work – but at the same time offering true security of harvest. It would be impossible to go any further than this and include more complex factors, such as the quantity of seed sown and that kept for the following year, or to give an evaluation of the impact of fallow on productivity (see introduction). Data about the impact of the third factor that could influence productivity, technological input, are also scarce. Texts about the types of plough used are lacking, but we are certain that oxen were always employed, which conforms to the situation observed everywhere in North-western Europe. Although it is crucial to analyze productivity, the total number of livestock is uncertain; livestock were sometimes raised on specialized farms, as well as received as dues or, in particular cases, requisitioned on the few classically organized estates. Finally, emphasis has to be given to the existence of crop rotation. What we are confronted with here is a rather cautious kind of agriculture, one putting the accent on security and of an extensive nature. Another important issue concerns the reason for the such limited extent of the corvée on the demesne. If we set aside the question of Medieval monks being able to exert a degree of coercion on the peasants (cf. the problem of the balance of power raised above), we have to ask ourselves whether, in the model encountered here, the true improvement in landowner revenue did not actually consist in demanding heavy dues from the peasants in exchange for the use of land, i.e. whether that was more remunerative for the landowner than the direct and extensive culture of the demesne. This will be the final thought developed here.

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IV.3.

Productivity and output: the peasants farms

On the typical peasant family farm, the mansus, there was scope for various and complementary activities to be conducted, belonging to both the agricultural and craft spheres (and concerning arable land, vegetable plot and orchard). The nature of the cereals grown on these holdings is to be deduced not from the nature of the dues paid by the mansi to the landowner (those dues are a measure more of the landowner’s demands than of the actual distribution of cereals on the peasant holdings), but from the revenues of the seigniorial mills, to which all peasants were forced to take their own harvested grain, paying a tax for their use. Unfortunately, because they describe only dues vaguely established on the farina, the references found for the region considered here do not allow us to conclude that the cereals cultivated on the peasant holdings were different than those grown on the seigniorial demesne. In a lot of other regions, however – Northern France, for example – the peasants had no interest in growing oat and grew less spelt, but concentrated more on growing barley. Moreover, the leguminous plants referred to earlier were of considerable importance in the daily nourishment of the peasant household, and were exempted from any seigniorial levies, as was the produce of the garden, which, as emphasized by such scholars as B. Delmaire, played a central role in the peasants’ daily diet (that produce was also exempt from any tithe, as Devroey, 2003, noticed)6. Finally, there were certain very specific species of plant that were cultivated almost exclusively on peasant farms, one such being flax, an exacting one to grow, whose fibres, sometimes already separated, were a very common due paid by peasant households (see the Polyptychon of Lobbes; Devroey, 1986: on an annual basis, the abbey could collect 5,103 spindles of textile and 11 ‘pensae’, weight-units of around 75 lb. each). In the region under consideration, a huge number of dependent holdings had to pay the ecclesiastical landlord dues on what they produced. It was probably more remunerative for the central institution to take payment in kind rather than directly exploit its own demesnes (unfortunately, we do not have any estimate of the direct income the demesnes produced).

6 It is important to underline the very significant involvement of the peasants in the production of many crafted goods; that involvement played a determining role in the generation of revenue for the household, and suggests that the labour surplus often indicated by earlier and minimalist writings could have been partially involved in this activity. We have also to remember that, for both peasant and lord, forests played a significant role in the general equilibrium of the time, providing a necessary source of not only wood, but also daily sustenance for those at the bottom of the social scale (see WICKHAM, 1990). Although the exploitation of the forests is even harder to quantify, it played a crucial role in the economy of the Early Middle Ages, and appreciation of this could be hindered by the focus on the productivity of solely the classical agrarian sector, which affected only a part of the general equilibrium.

49

Some aspects of the question of productivity in Early Medieval Europe

Our view is that this was the arrangement the big landowners preferred to apply on their estates, rather than the corvée on the seigniorial demesne. The reason why the demesne on seigniorial estates was often of limited extent was precisely because of the convenience of demanding dues in lieu of labour. It is well known that the corvée was sometimes difficult to organize and necessitated a degree of close monitoring of the quality of the labour provided by sometimes poorly motivated workers (see Campbell & Overton, 1991). The heavy dues in money and/or in kind were thus an easier way for landowners to collect important quantities of cash, cereals, livestock or craft products, without having to rely on a complex system requiring extensive supervision of the labour force. Although the peasants’ labour time appropriated by the landowners was consequently especially light in the region under review, the burden of dues paid by the peasant families was heavy in comparison to what it was in other areas: at Lobbes, dues in kind were even twice what they were in other areas of Continental Europe at the time (as estimated by Devroey, 1986); at Prüm in the Hesbaye, dues in kind were less heavy, but the amount of money levied was much more important7. Table 2.1. Dues levied each year on the mansi Cereals

Cash

16.7 modii = 885 litres

9.1 denarii

Lobbes (868-869)

13.4 modii = 710 litres

12.3 denarii

Lobbes (889)

10 modii = 530 litres

49 denarii

Polyptychon

Prüm (893): Awans and Loncin

Note. * We adopt the value for the modius suggested by COMET (1992). Sources. DEVROEY (1986); and SCHWAB (1983).

Could the peasant farms sustain such heavy assessments? In other words, how efficient were they? Whereas cultivation on the demesnes was of an extensive and less-efficient type, it has been postulated that labour on the peasant holdings was intensive, in order for the maximum to be drawn from their smaller pieces of land and for personal income to be generated, even after payment of dues to the landlords. The more intensive working of these smaller pieces of land would have been made possible by the fact of less, if any, labour service being due to the landowners, or even

7

Dues in kind and/or money were heavy in the Ardennes, too, but variable (according to the number of families installed on each mansus); consequently, the numbers are not easy to compare with those of the board. However, if we keep in mind these precautions, we can consider that dues in the Ardennes ranged from 17 to 56 denarii (for four families on a single mansus).

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Alexis Wilkin

by farmhands/or sons undertaking the corvées, thereby freeing the peasant to work on his own holding. However, the argument for the productivity of these smaller pieces of land having been higher is tenuous, as it is based on different logical factors. The first is producer self-interest in the exploitation of the land, which would explain the peasants’ greater commitment to working their holdings; the second concerns the heavy dues demanded by the landlord, though he would have had no interest in jeopardizing the renewal of the family by levying amounts impossible to provide; the final factor concerns the labour time used by the peasants for themselves and freed as a result of the softened burden imposed by the landlord. Arguments do, of course, exist to conclude that the peasants’ fields were more productive, one of them being the proximity of the livestock raised by the peasant families, who thereby – unlike their lord – had manure at their immediate disposal especially to increase the productivity of their spelt-sown fields. The question of crop rotation being applied on peasant holdings has been also raised by some specialists (see above and Morimoto, 1994). Certain references discovered may suggest that this was the case on the peasant farms of the Hesbaye and the Ardennes (see Schwab, 1983). There remains the highly debatable question of the perfect integration of all the components of the peasant farm. Was the size of the farm optimal? Slicher Van Bath (1963) reminded historians that the equilibrium of a farm rested on an ‘ideal’ ratio between the arable, the number of draught animals, the quantity of dung collected and the household. The question of demography is specifically important, as Campbell and Overton (1991) reminded us that an excessive labour force could also lead to a loss of productivity, as each worker would be underemployed were a certain threshold to be exceeded, in term of the ratio of workers per task and/or surface area of land. The impact of some of these factors on this equation has recently been reevaluated: Devroey has rightly qualified Fossier’s catastrophist views on the weight of demographic pressure on the size of holdings by reminding us that the size of the peasant farm was highly variable as was the intensity of work on it and depended on the family profile of its occupants, their number and their age: it frequently occurred, for instance, that a younger male left the farm to build a new one. Whereas the core of the mansus remained stable, a lot of pieces of land of looser status were available to allow the temporary broadening of the holding. This constant variability in the size of cultivated land is an important factor that has to be included in the study of the productivity of the peasant farm, productivity that was highly dependent on the farm s demographic profile.

51

Some aspects of the question of productivity in Early Medieval Europe

But, despite this more optimistic view, one aspect remains unresolved: the lightening of demographic pressure on agrarian structures does not imply that all the other components of the ideal ratio for the equilibrium of a farm were adjusted commensurately and that the harmonious equilibrium of the farm was always maintained. It is thus uncertain whether the peasant farm was highly productive in terms of of output per worker, or in terms of what was possible.

V.

Conclusion

Although any attempt here at quantification would be meaningless, because of the lack of continuous series of data and indeed the scarcity of data, some observations can be made on productivity during the Early Medieval Ages in Eastern Belgium. However, that productivity can be viewed only within the manorial framework, as this is the sole one documented, no records of the independent rural farms having survived. The minimalist/maximalist debate about Early Medieval productivity and growth is probably outdated now. Scholars have proved that the argumentation of the minimalists relied on badly understood evidence, although the maximalist model continues to require qualification (as it did when proposed by Toubert, 1990). It is evident that, in most of Eastern Belgium, the manorial framework was a profitable one; but the profit it generated for the landowners was less a direct result of highly efficient agriculture, consequent on advanced techniques and intensive labour, than an indirect one. In fact, that profit led to extensive agriculture being practised on the demesne, requiring minimal effort and providing relative security (through the use of spelt, for example), all the while with comfortable dues being drawn from the peasants work. It was, in truth, only the peasants who cultivated their land intensively, albeit doing so according to the particular demographic rhythm of the generations and the cycle of life on the peasant farm. Due to the lack of data, however, that this method of cultivation was efficient is more of an assumption on the part of the historian, rather than being effectively proved; it could even be that these farms were unproductive in terms of output per worker. In this sense, it can be seen that generalizing conclusions about yields during the Early Middle Ages are meaningless, as those yields were highly dependent on the type of farm. Moreover, we cannot conclude that the manorial system was inefficient, as it has to be understood within the framework of the particular logic of the landowners, which was to obtain significant profit, while investing the minimal amount of time

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Alexis Wilkin

and effort in the direct management of their agricultural resources. The superposition of direct management, i.e. putting the accent on practising extensive agriculture and on collecting heavy fixed dues, was a very logical development that rested entirely on the urge to obtain more, while reducing involvement in daily coercion and monitoring to a minimum. This goes to explain the presence of numerous mills, which were reliable and constant sources of revenue that was ultimately almost as important as that produced by the demesnes (see Champion, 1996). It is arguable whether this economic organization had also to do with relative technological backwardness8 (the difficulty in improving yields or the lack of efficient tools on the demesne), as suggested by Toubert, 1990 (who nevertheless rightly emphasized the economic efficiency of the entire system). In our opinion, this economic organization was rather the result of intelligent calculation, which understood what the gain could be, despite reduced effort! Finally, this organization of productivity had a lot to do with the interests and logic of the landowners: medieval ecclesiastical communities indeed looked to secure the regular provision of goods, thereby freeing themselves of certain worries and to focus on their other preoccupations9. The system adopted in the region considered was thus certainly very efficient in respect of the time and effort invested by the landowners, their goals and the results.

8

Devroy suggests rather that almost all the agricultural techniques identified earlier by scholars as motors of the economic growth of the High Middle Ages were already known in the Early Middle Ages, and that it was their distribution and mutual integration that was the main problem here. 9 These preoccupations are not so remote from those ones of the Early Medieval nobles who used to place the management of estates into the hands of professional officers, putting the accent on those estates providing a regular rent and personally having little concern in their administration.

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Some aspects of the question of productivity in Early Medieval Europe

Historical Sources DEVROEY, J.-P. (1986), Le polyptyque et les listes de biens de l’abbaye Saint-Pierre de Lobbes, Brussels, Académie Royale de Belgique. SCHWAB, I. (1983), Das Prümer Urbar, Düsseldorf, Gesellschaft für Rheinische Geschichtskunde, XX, Rheinische Urbare 5.

Bibliography CAMPBELL, B.M. S. & OVERTON, M. (1991), Land, Labour and Livestock. Historical studies in European Agricultural Productivity, New York-Manchester, Manchester University Press. CHAMPION, E. (1996), Moulins et meuniers carolingiens dans les polyptyques entre Loire et Rhin, Paris, Collection ‘Histoire et Patrimoine’, Association pour l’Édition et la Diffusion des Études Historiques/Vulcain. COMET, G. (1992), Le paysan et son outil. Essai d‘histoire technique des céréales (France, VIIIe-XVe siècle), Rome, École française de Rome (Collection de l’École française de Rome,

165). DERVILLE, A. (1991), ‘Villes et campagnes dans la région Nord/Pas-de-Calais de Charlemagne à Charles Quint’, in J.-M. DUVOSQUEL & A. DIERKENS (ed.), Villes et campagnes dans l‘occident médiéval, Brussels, Éditions du Perron. DEVROEY, J.-P. (1985), ‘Pour une typologie des formes domaniales en Belgique romane au Haut Moyen Âge’, La Belgique rurale du Moyen Âge à nos jours, Mélanges offerts à J.-J. Hoebanx, Brussels, Éditions de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, p. 29-45. DEVROEY, J.-P. (1989), ‘Entre Loire et Rhin : les fluctuations du terroir de l’agriculture au Moyen Âge’, in J.-P. DEVROEY & J.-J. VAN MOL (eds), L’épeautre (triticum spelta). Histoire et ethnologie, Treignes, Éditions Dire, p. 89-105. DEVROEY, J.-P. (1990), ‘La céréaliculture dans le monde franc’, L‘ambiente vegetale nell alto medioevo. Settimane di Studio del Centro italiano di studi sull alto medioevo, t. 37, Spolete, p. 221-253. DEVROEY, J.-P. (2003), Économie rurale et société dans l‘Europe franque, Paris, Belin. DEVROEY, J.-P. (2008) ‘Une société en expansion ? Entre Seine et Rhin à la lumière des polyptyques carolingiens (780-920)’, Movimientos migratorios, asentamientos y expansion (siglos VIII-IX), Pamplona, p. 231-260. DUBY, G. (1962), L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval (France, Angleterre, Empire, IXe-XVe siècles), Paris, Aubier.

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DUPONT, C. (1977), ‘Du marché carolingien à la bonne ville du XIVe siècle : l’exemple de Bastogne’, Centenaire du séminaire d’histoire médiévale de l’ULB, 1876-1976, Brussels, Université Libre de Bruxelles, p. 127-146. FOSSIER, R. (1981), ‘Les tendances de l économie: stagnation ou croissance?’, Settimane di Studio, XXVII, p. 261-274. FUMAGALLI, V. (1966), ‘Rapporto fra grano seminato e grano raccolto, nel polittico del monastero di S. Tommaso di Reggio’, Rivista di storia dell agricoltura, 6, p. 360-362. GENICOT, L. (1943), L’économie rurale namuroise au Bas Moyen Âge (1199-1429), Louvain, Bibliothèque de l’Université. KUPPER, J.-L. (1981), Liège et l’église impériale, XIe-XIIe siècles, Paris, Publications de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres. MORIMOTO, Y. (1994), ‘L’assolement triennal au haut Moyen Âge. Une analyse des données des polyptyques carolingiens’, in Y. MORIMOTO & A. VERHUSLT (eds), Économie rurale et économie urbaine au Moyen Âge, Gand-Kyushu, Centre belge d’Histoire rurale, p. 91-125. MORIMOTO, Y. (2008), Études sur l’économie rurale du haut Moyen Âge : historiographie, régime domanial, polyptyques carolingiens, Paris, Bibliothèque du Moyen Âge. Overton, M. & CAMPBELL, M., B.M.S. (1996), ‘Production et productivité dans l’agriculture anglaise, 1086-1876’, Histoire & Mesure, vol. XI, 3-4, p. 255-297. PERRIN, C.-E. (1935), Recherches sur la seigneurie rurale en Lorraine d’après les plus anciens censiers (IXe-XIIe siècles), Paris, Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg, (Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg, 71). RÖSENER, W. (1992), Agrarwirtschaft, Agrarverfassung und ländliche Gesellschaft im Mittelalter, München, Encyclopädie Deutscher Geschichte, 13. SCHLESINGER, W. (1987), ‘Die Hufe im Frankenreich’, in H. PATZE & F. SCHWIND, Ausgewählte Aufsätze von W. Schlesinger, 1965-1969, Sigmaringen, Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für mittelalterliche Geschichte, p. 587-614 (Vorträge und Forschungen, 34). SLICHER VAN BATH, B. H. (1963), Yield ratios, 810-1820, Wageningen, A.A.G. Bijdragen, 10. TOUBERT, P. (1990), ‘La part du grand domaine dans le décollage économique de l’Occident’, La croissance agricole du Haut Moyen Âge. Chronologie, modalités, géographie, Auch, Flaran, 10, p. 53-86. VERHULST, A. (1985), ‘L’intensification et la commercialisation de l’agriculture dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux au XIIIe siècle’, La Belgique rurale du Moyen Âge à nos jours. Mélanges offerts à Jean-Jacques Hoebanx, Bruxelles, Éditions de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, p. 89-100. WICKHAM, C. (1990), ‘European forests in the early Middle Ages: landscape and land clearance’, L‘Ambiente vegetale nell‘alto medioevo. Settimane di studio del Centro

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italiano di studi sull‘alto medioevo, 30 marzo-5 aprile 1989, Spolete, Settimane di studio, 37, p. 479-548. ZADORA-RIO, E. (1991), ‘Les terroirs médiévaux dans le Nord et le Nord-Ouest de l’Europe’, in J. GUILAINE (ed.), Pour une archéologie agraire, Paris, Armand Colin, p. 165-192.

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3.

Agricultural Productivity in England, 1700-1914

John BECKETT and Michael TURNER I.

Introduction

Patrick Svensson and Mats Olsson have argued that ‘the extensive research in progress on British agricultural productivity, from the high Middle Ages until the nineteenth-century so far has left us with interesting but, to a great extent, contradictory results’1. In a European context, this may well be true, but it is the contention in this paper that there are now quantitative data available for England in the period c.17001914 from which to measure productivity with some confidence (data described and first identified in Turner, Beckett & Afton, 2001, hereafter TBA). In the first part of the paper the potential sources for measuring productivity are discussed, and the database on which the findings are based is introduced. This leads to a presentation on productivity for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In part two of the paper and on the basis of these data, the key to understanding industrialisation and urbanisation in post-1750 England is set in the context of a dynamic rural sector, which until the mid-nineteenth-century largely met the food needs of its population. In the third part of the paper the extent to which these quantitative findings can be explained in relation to technology, the rural context, markets and urban life is examined. This leads to the view that it is now possible to draw a firm conclusion about agricultural productivity in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to comment on the critical but often elusive English agricultural revolution.

II.

Creating the database

The main problem of measuring productivity in England is one common to many parts of Europe; the absence of reliable quantitative data. The systematic collection of agricultural statistics began only in the 1860s, after much debate and a good deal of opposition from farmers (TBA, 2001: 2-5). Prior to that time there are only the data collected by enthusiastic commentators such as the eighteenth-century traveller Arthur Young. There are no equivalents to the cadastral surveys found in, for 1

Call for Papers, 3rd Workshop, Working Group 2, COST. We would like to thank Mr. Fred Banks, a practical farmer who shared his views with us and to which views we refer later in this paper.

57

Agricultural Productivity in England, 1700-1914

example, France and the Low Countries. As a result, historians have attempted to use proxies, notably material from estate demesnes for the middle ages (Campbell, 2000; Campbell, 2007), probate inventories for the early modern period (Overton, 1979; Allen, 1988: and the essays by Overton and Glennie in Campbell and Overton, 1991a), the 1801 crop returns and the tithe file data for the 1840s for the first half of the nineteenth-century (Turner, 1981; Turner, 1998; Kain, 1986). Despite the effort expended, the results have been disappointing: historians have accepted the case for a long run increase in productivity, but have had difficulty tying it down to any particular period or periods (Campbell & Overton, 1991b). With no straightforward dataset available, the question of how food supply was maintained as England industrialised and urbanised remains to be answered. There are some ready facts: the farmed area did not significantly increase; and imports until well into the nineteenth-century played only a limited role in the provision of food. Table 3.1 shows that imports became significant only from the 1840s and this conclusion has now been more or less confirmed by Ejrnaes, Persson, and Rich (2008: esp. 146-147). If imports did not become significant until well into the nineteenth-century, there have to be other ways of explaining how food supply responded to demographic change. In turn this suggests a new approach to measuring output, which in the current formulation turns on direct farm measures of productivity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To achieve this requires new data. The only relatively untapped sources are farm records, particularly the accounts and other papers of individual farmers. Many such records are to be found in archive offices, with a particularly strong collection at the Centre for Rural History at the University of Reading, which actively targeted such material in the 1960s. This material was catalogued in the 1970s but has only been properly assessed recently (University of Reading, 1973: TBA, 2001). In identifying such archives, it must be recognized that record keeping at such an early stage in accounting history was probably not all that common, and therefore those farmers whose records have survived may have been exceptional. However, as long as the analysis and resulting conclusions are based on this consistent source, then the trends identified later in the paper should equally be treated as consistent. A total of 2,743 potentially relevant farm records from across the country have been identified, of which 979 are isolated as usable for the task of measuring productivity. This reduction from 2,743 to 979 records results from the application of a number of quality tests. Farmers kept records voluntarily, and in whatever manner they found most useful to themselves rather than in any systematic and therefore comparative manner. They also kept different types of record including account books, labour records and memoranda books (TBA, 2001: 44-65). Trying to make sense of all this

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John Beckett and Michael Turner

material, quite apart from attempting to fit it into a comparative statistical context, means that many of the records have been excluded, but nevertheless it is possible to retain at least one for each of the 39 English counties. This provides a database covering the period 1700-1914. Since the material does not represent a standard dataset such as a census, care has been taken to set out the limitations of the farming records, and also to identify the measurement and weighting problems thrown up by the data (TBA, 2001: chap. 2 & app. 2). Despite the care taken, the quality of the data is at times inconsistent and perhaps not as robust as would have been ideal. It is, even so, the best, indeed the only new material that has become available for many years. While it may be possible to criticise the methodology, it is hard to see how the data and the findings arising from it could be improved in the absence of consistent agricultural census data for comparison. The original research and data were published in 2001 (TBA 2001). This covered a range of productivity measures on all aspects of output, but the quality of the data for carcasses and many other farm gate products was sporadic and uneven in geography. As such it might be unsafe to draw firm conclusions about the course of productivity in non-grain agricultural output such as potato production, and the productivity of eggs, cheese and other relatively minor outputs, quite apart from productivity in the second major sector of the agricultural industry, animal production. In addition, the contribution of the sea to the British diet is wholly neglected. With those omissions and hesitations in mind, nevertheless what remains is a significant proportion of both agricultural production and food consumption. This paper therefore looks again at the evidence for grain production, specifically wheat production, but with a related discussion of the productivity of other grain products and the significance of the figures for an understanding of output more generally. As well as looking at these principal grains in isolation, the opportunity is taken to construct a general grain index based on wheat, barley and oats together, partly in response to constructive criticism at the Lund workshop, but also to allow others to use the data in a comparative framework with overlapping studies from the workshop (Cost Action A35 – Lund Workshop, 12-14 June 2008). The central part of the story relates to wheat output and productivity on its own. Wheat production has been used by historians as a proxy for food consumption more generally, on the grounds that the standard British diet prior to c.1870 was primarily dependent on bread, and for that matter increasingly wheaten bread. As a result the output and price of wheaten bread together became representative of grain productivity more generally. The centrality of bread in pre-industrial and industrialising societies cannot be exaggerated as an index of well being. This may be a debatable assumption, as Joan Thirsk has commented in review. She was ‘uneasy with the current vogue for

59

Agricultural Productivity in England, 1700-1914

measuring agricultural achievement by wheat yields per acre’ and what she called ‘the modish preoccupation with imperfect statistics’, and suggested instead a return to the rather old fashioned method of reading again commentaries of eighteenth and seventeenth-century writers (Thirsk, 2002: 356). We partially share this concern. But with wheat particularly in mind, we also recognise that it was not only the cash crop without equal, but also for some time in the eighteenth-century and then increasingly in the nineteenth, the crop which, through wheaten bread, became psychologically a thermometer gauge of success in production and consumption. Current thinking suggests that by 1800 perhaps 58 per cent of the population consumed wheaten bread. The population of England more or less doubled 18001850 but the numbers eating wheaten bread had increased to 80 per cent. By 1900 something like 95 per cent of an even greater population ate wheaten bread as part of their diet (Collins, 1975: 97-115; Petersen, 1995: 205-6). In the critical half-century 1800-1850 when population change was at its height, the UK provided anything between 75 and 95 per cent of its wheat needs. This was also the period (until 1846) when legislation known as the corn laws supposedly protected British wheat producers from overseas competition. However, prices rarely reached the level of 80 shillings per quarter to encourage home wheat production. This was the incentive price, deriving from the French wartime inflation of prices. In the 1820s the law was adjusted to include a sliding scale allowing wheat to enter the country at a lower price, but incurring a high duty at low prices and more or less no duty at the 80 shilling threshold. Sliding scale or not, corn law or not, there were imports, but the point is that home consumption was largely met by home production, and that a kind of myth was generated at the time that there really were large supplies on the continent of Europe and elsewhere waiting to enter the British market if only home production was not so closely protected (for opinions opposing the story of European plenty see Kitson Clark, 1951; and Moore, 1965: especially 544-5; for the contradictory story of European plenty see Fairlie, 1965). In Table 3.1 and Figure 3.1 the wheat trade balance is demonstrated. The figures are drawn from well known sources, but they provide the best indication that there is of what is already known about English, British and United Kingdom home and foreign supplies of wheat. Table 3.1 shows that, until the close of the US Civil War, Britain supplied upwards of three quarters of its own wheat requirement. It is best read in combination with Figure 3.1, the wheat trade balance derived from Donald Grove Barnes’ early work on trade statistics, which remains the standard source on the corn trade of the long eighteenth-century (Barnes, 1930: 299-300).

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John Beckett and Michael Turner

Table 3.1. UK wheat trade balance, 1831-1915 Total Imports 000 cwt

Home Production 000 cwt

Total 000 cwt

Imports % of Total

Home % of Total

1831–1835

0.8

99.2

1836–1840

12.2

87.8

1841–1845

9.5

91.5

1846–1850

23.5

76.5

1851–1855

16,154

60,353

76,507

21.1

78.9

1861–1865

27,903

66,983

94,886

29.4

70.6

1871–1875

44,141

51,507

95,648

46.1

53.9

1881–1885

58,867

43,502

102,368

57.5

42.5

1891–1895

69,711

31,531

101,241

68.9

31.1

1901–1905

88,935

28,644

117,579

75.6

24.4

1911–1915

101,223

34,902

136,125

74.4

25.6

Sources. Trade Data 1831-50 from, COPUS (1986: 24); Imports 1851-onwards from, MITCHELL (1988: 229-232); Home Production prior to 1885 from, LAWES & GILBERT (1893: 77-133, esp. 132, assuming bushels of 62 lbs); Home Production post 1884 for GB from, Ministry of Agriculture (1968: 108, Table 56).

Figure 3.1. The English wheat trade balance, 1700-1820 1600

000s Quarters

1200

800

400

0 1690

1700

1710

1720

1730

1740

1750

1760

1770

1780

1790

1800

1810

1820

-400

-800

-1200

-1600

Source. BARNES (1930: 299-300).

61

Agricultural Productivity in England, 1700-1914

The broad nation-state geography in this demonstration is not consistent, but the overwhelming importance of England in this story should not damage the basic fact about relative home and foreign supplies. Taken together these data demonstrate how the output of wheat kept pace with the demands placed on the farming sector well into the nineteenth-century. The population of England grew by 46 per cent from 18211851 (Schofield, 1994: 64), but in the early 1850s imports of wheat still represented only just over one-fifth of total consumption in the UK (see also Ejrnaes, Persson, & Rich, 2008: 146). Wheat therefore, relative to population change, was probably a reasonable measure of agricultural productivity change in England. Table 3.2 summarises English wheat yields derived from farm records. The earliest records which report wheat yields in this table come from farms in Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent. They date from 1720-1722. More broadly, for the 1720s wheat yield figures are drawn from farms in various locations in Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent, Hampshire and East Sussex. Invariably they occur only in discontinuous runs of years, though occasionally for some farms it is possible to construct a reasonably long annual series. Consequently the table inevitably includes a changing sample of observations, with an inconsistent geography. At its peak the series is based on over 100 wheat yield observations. By the end of the eighteenth-century there are observations from seven or eight different counties annually for most years. The most intensively and extensively covered years are 1830, 1832, 1848, and the period 1851-1858 inclusive in each of which years there are fourteen or fifteen separate observations from between seven and ten counties. Over the long run from 1720 to 1914 there is at least one observation for each year. In total there are 1,300 separate observations from more than 100 farms or holdings (where a holding may be the combination of more than one farm under the same tenure or management) located in twenty-seven of the thirty-nine English counties. In addition, when the location of counties which make up the bulk of the annual observations is reviewed, we find that they fall on the eastern side of the divide identified by the agricultural journalist James Caird in 1850, that is more generally the mid-nineteenth-century division between the corn and grazing counties, and they also embrace most of the counties that comprise the bulk of wheat growing counties as shown in the annual agricultural statistics that began in 1866 (Caird, 1852; Ministry of Agriculture, 1968). The bulk of the database picks up the counties that most influenced English wheat production. What has been assembled is a continuous series, albeit from different farms and places but consistently based on an identical source type, and provided by farming practitioners themselves. It differs from the usual depiction of agrarian productivity because it does not rely on point specific years from a handful of contemporary

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observers such as Arthur Young, who collected plenty of information but preferred to visit large and vibrant farms, thus almost certainly ensuring an optimistic view of the farming world (Allen & Ó Gráda, 1988: 93-116). That method will work in a long run study but only as long as it can be guaranteed that all other previously quoted yields come from equally large, vibrant, farms and optimistic farmers. One of the reasons for taking a new look at agricultural production is precisely that it is not possible to compare Young or his contemporaries with more or less equivalent reference points (Turner, 1982). In contrast, the new database has a consistent foundation and the findings it reveals are the best that can be derived from what is a difficult source material to use. Economic historians have generally accepted that this is the case (Allen, 2005; Allen, 2004: 102-103; and for a range of views on the database and the source materials on which it is based see Reviews). Table 3.2 is a summary of the database in terms of the decennial averages of yields regardless of location and without any adjustments or weightings. Casual statistical tests show that the standard measures of central tendency more or less coincide, and while the standard deviations vary from decade to decade, they also tend to increase over time. Even so, these standard deviations are quite small relative to the arithmetic means, indicating a tolerably small dispersion of the observations. However, because there are so many influences that control land productivity, especially environmental ones, any exercise in summary statistics is bound to produce some dispersion about the mean. Even so, the statistical summary suggests that reasonable confidence can be applied to these measures of central tendency as indicative of the trend of yields over time. In the original presentation of the wheat profile it was recognized that the data came from disparate places, which produced an indistinctive dispersion about an annual mean. In that circumstance it was resolved to present the data on a decade basis, but using the graphical device of a boxplot both to explain the procedure and describe the outcome. The boxplot combined the mean, median and skewness of the distribution, some measures of which are included in Table 3.2 (TBA, 2001: 128131). For the Lund conference and subsequently, partly encouraged by discussion at the conference and partly by the weighting procedures adopted by Broadberry, Campbell and van Leeuwen in their paper (2008), similar weights have been applied to the original wheat yield observations, initially employing three weighting options. The first mirrors Campbell et al, and uses the distribution of grains as represented in the 1801 crop returns (which they based on Turner, 1981). The second uses the distribution of wheat as represented in the annual agricultural returns which are available from 1866. In this context the year 1875, which is more or less at the end of the period of High Farming, was used as the base (Afton & Turner, 2000: esp.

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Agricultural Productivity in England, 1700-1914

Table 3.2. English wheat yields. Summary statistics, 1720-1910 (with 5 years average) Mean Decade

Bush/ acre

Median

(hectolitres/ ha)

Bush/ acre

Mean Values

Indexed (hectolitres/ Based 100= 1800s ha)

Sample Size

1720s

20.0

(18.0)

18.6

(16.7)

95.3

32

1730s

21.1

(19.0)

20.1

(18.0)

100.8

25

1740s

21.8

(19.5)

21.8

(19.6)

103.7

40

1750s

22.4

(20.1)

21.7

(19.5)

106.9

28

1760s

21.8

(19.6)

21.4

(19.2)

104.0

47

1770s

19.7

(17.7)

20.0

(18.0)

93.8

57

1780s

18.9

(17.0)

17.2

(15.4)

90.0

41

1790s

19.0

(17.0)

18.5

(16.6)

90.4

83

1800s

21.0

(18.8)

22.0

(19.7)

100.0

91

1810s

21.2

(19.0)

20.7

(18.6)

100.9

76

1820s

23.6

(21.2)

23.0

(20.7)

112.5

96

1830s

26.7

(23.9)

25.5

(22.9)

127.1

110

1840s

30.6

(27.5)

31.1

(27.9)

145.9

113

1850s

27.5

(24.7)

28.0

(25.1)

130.9

134

1860s

28.6

(25.7)

27.9

(25.0)

136.2

112

1870s

28.9

(26.0)

28.0

(25.1)

137.8

90

1880s

26.5

(23.8)

25.9

(23.3)

126.2

54

1890s

27.1

(24.3)

25.5

(22.9)

128.9

32

1900s

28.1

(25.2)

28.9

(25.9)

133.8

37

1910s

33.3

(29.9)

33.1

(29.7)

158.9

Total

12 1,30

Note. In bushels per acre (and hectolitres per hectare in brackets) at a conversion of 1 bushel per acre equals 0.898 hectolitres per hectare. Source. TBA (2001: 129).

1814). The third weighting process is based on the distribution of wheat as shown in the Tithe Commutation data arising from the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 (Kain, 1986: passim). There are problems with each of these methods of weighting: the survival of the 1801 crop is not good for a number of wheat and indeed grain growing counties. In particular there is a deficiency with the Norfolk and Suffolk returns though there is the advantage that 1801 falls neatly more or less in the middle of the long-term series; the 1875 distribution is the most reliable in a number of ways but it does fall at the end of the series; and the tithe returns like the 1801 returns are only

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a partial cover, but they are a better cover and were collected in a more systematic way with none of the panic associated with the 1801 returns and the crisis of food supplies arising from the 1790s. For this reason the tithe crop distribution has been used as the method of weighting. Figure 3.2 shows the resulting long run profile of wheat yields. Figure 3.2. Weighted English wheat yields, 1720-1914 45

Bushels per acre

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 05 00 1720

1740

1760

1780

1800

1820

1840

1860

1880

1900

1920

Source. TBA (2001), weighted by county tithe crop distributions of c. 1836 from KAIN, (1986: passim).

What emerges is roughly two plateaux, one from the second quarter of the eighteenth-century until about 1780, and one from the mid-nineteenth-century to the First World War, with a pronounced and more or less continuous rise from the late 1790s to at least the repeal of the Corn Laws in the mid-1840s, becoming steeper from about 1830. These are neither perfectly flat plateaux nor are they punctuated by an intervening continuous rise. The eighteenth-century is more dome-like with a noticeable decline in the 1790s, but this dome in the eleven-year smoothed version is confined between 19 and 22 bushels per acre (for cross-European comparative purposes a bushel per acre is 0.898 hectolitres per hectare; therefore these equate to 17 and nearly 20 hectolitres per hectare). The decline in the 1790s is consistent with the run of bad harvests which provoked government subsistence inquiries and awoke the attention of Malthus, amongst other contemporary commentators (Turner, 1986a; Malthus, 1800).

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Agricultural Productivity in England, 1700-1914

It has been argued that wheat yields accurately proxy demand in English agriculture, and this can be augmented by looking at the equivalent results for other grains. This comes with a caveat however: these grains are different from one another and they were cultivated for essentially different end-product purposes. They may all have produced one form or other of bread or meal, but they also had other uses. They also had different capacities and therefore to compare them purely on the measure of bushels per acre is unrealistic. For example the long-run mean wheat yield was 25 bushels per acre (about 22.5 hectolitres per hectare), but this was confined within the upper and lower limits of 40 to 14 bushels per acre. Barley on the other hand had a greater variation from 13 to 45 bushels per acre (approximately 12 to 41 hectolitres per hectare) with a mean of 32 bushels (nearly 29 hectolitres per hectare), and oats varied even more between 9 and 68 bushels per acre (between 8 and 61 hectolitres per hectare) with a long run mean of 40 bushels per acre (about 36 hectolitres per hectare). To accommodate some of these differences, Figure 3.3 shows not simply the absolute yields for wheat, barley and oats, but rather the 11-year moving averages of their indexes using 1720-1730 as the base. Figure 3.3. Weighted English grain yields, 1720-1914 250

(11 years average - for all crops 1720-30 = 100)

oats

200

wheat 150

barley 100

50

00 1720

1740

1760

1780

1800

1820

1840

1860

1880

1900

Source. TBA, 2001, weighted by county tithe crop distributions of c. 1836 from KAIN, (1986: passim).

To varying degrees Figure 3.3 shows for all grains a productivity rise in the eighteenth-century, which is relatively flat or dome-like for wheat, but displays a significant rise for oats and a rise, though a less significant one, for barley. The 1790s and the harvest crises more or less broke these trends for all the grains, consistent with the real subsistence crisis and attendant food riots which faced the governments

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of the day. But on a resumption of a normal harvest cycle, that is an intermixture of good, bad and average harvests, there was a long-term rise in all indexes up to the late 1840s. In the subsequent uneven downturn to the First World War the wheat trend became more plateau like, the oats trend the same but with greater year to year fluctuations, but the barley productivity trend was much more uniformly downward from 1840 until more or less 1900. In summary, towards the end of the nineteenthcentury neither the oats nor the wheat trends ever declined so low as to approach their eighteenth-century levels; the change over the previous-century or more had become a permanent change, but barley yields by the end of the nineteenth-century were very close to the barley yields that prevailed in the late eighteenth-century. There is one final stage to report in this analysis of crop yields, an attempt to conform to a degree with the methodology of some other participants at the workshop by attempting to integrate the long-run trend of grain crop yields to produce a single index of this most important half of the agricultural sector, a cereals yield index. There is more than one way to do this. One method is to combine the cereals into one index based on their calorific content. O. J. Beilby, in a pioneer study in the 1930s, suggested that there are 1350 calories in every pound weight of wheat seed, and 1280 and 1200 calories in the equivalent pound weight of barley and oats seeds respectively (Beilby, 1939: 72). Going back further to the late nineteenth-century, Primrose McConnell was a writer on all things agricultural and horticultural whose findings and summaries were partly based on the famous agricultural experiments at Rothamsted Experimental Station. These in turn were based on the yields and performance of a number of wheat, barley and oats seeds varieties. McConnell calculated that a bushel of wheat amounted to 62.5 pounds, a bushel of barley to 55 pounds and a bushel of oats to 42 pounds (McConnell, 1922 ed: 195-199). Thus far the data have been reported in terms of bushels per acre, but by combining the calorific content per lb of wheat, barley and oats suggested by Beilby with the weight of wheat, barley and oats bushels suggested by McConnell we derive a single measure of calories per bushel for grain in general. The resulting index of applying these equivalents to the wheat, barley and oats yields is given in Figure 3.4. If the late 1780s and certainly the mid to late 1790s is treated as an unusual time in English agriculture, when there was a greater than average run of bad harvests, what is revealed by this combined measure of grain yields is a long run rise in average yields from about the second quarter of the eighteenth-century to about 1780, at which point those yields flattened until about 1820. There was then a rapid rise to a wholly new level of unit yields by the 1840s during which decade they tended to flatten and remained more or less flat until the First World War. In nuanced terms there was a tendency for a long-run gentle decline comprising two short-run periods

67

Agricultural Productivity in England, 1700-1914

of decline, the first in the late 1850s and the second in the early 1890s at the bottom of the late nineteenth-century depression. Figure 3.4. Combined grain yield index, 1720-1914 180

(1720 = base 100)

160

1720 = 100 5 year average

140 120 100 80 60 40 20 00 1720

1740

1760

1780

1800

1820

1840

1860

1880

1900

Source. TBA (2001), weighted by county tithe crop distributions of c. 1836 from KAIN (1986: passim).

III.

Long Term Grain Yields

Reviewing the new data in the light of established trading patterns leads to the suggestion that if there was an agricultural revolution and if this was recognised as a significant increase in one of the parameters that link the agricultural sector with population trends, then the identified increase in grain yields relative to population growth would make that link. In terms of wheat it was an early nineteenth-century revolution (Figure 3.2). These new estimates of English wheat yields suggest that they actually fell or at best stabilised in the second half of the eighteenth-century from 22 bushels per acre in the 1760s to as low as 19 bushels in the 1790s before recovering to 21 bushels in the 1800s (or about 20 to 17 to nearly 19 hectolitres per hectare). At the same time population rose from 5.6 million in 1741, to 5.8 million by 1751, 6.1 million in 1761 and 6.5 million in 1771. Wheat yields at best stabilised and at worst declined during the last quarter of the eighteenth-century at a time when the English population rose to 7 million in 1781 and to 8.7 million in 1801 (Schofield, 1994: 64).

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The shortfall in wheat supplies before about 1760 was small and was met from imports (Figure 3.1), and, during the war years, a plough-up campaign was instigated to minimise the damaging effects of insecure supplies from overseas. In the worst year of the war, with periodic home supply crises on the back of successive bad harvests as well as the attempts by the French to blockade grain bound for British ports, the insufficiency of home supplies in the single most critical year has been measured as nine weeks consumption (Chambers & Mingay, 1966: 115-116, who based this estimate on Olson, 1963: 65). The trend in Figure 3.1 looks dramatic for the duration of the French wars, but it must be understood in the light of the remarkable recovery in relative home self sufficiency that ensued. Therefore the inadequacy of home supplies in the war years as measured by unit acre yields has to be understood in terms of the contemporary plough-up campaign which necessarily brought relatively inferior land into cultivation. This is another factor in understanding the drop in yields during the 1790s and 1800s. When the other principal corn crops, barley and oats are brought into the picture to assess more widely the grain economy as a whole, there are some important nuances. While there was an apparent faltering in the wheat sector in the late eighteenth-century there were counter balancing improvements in both the barley and the oats sectors (Figure 3.3). Although all three grains demonstrate an important increase in land productivity in the succeeding decades, at the time of most pronounced population change up to the mid-nineteenth-century, it was wheat that seemed to make the sharpest gains (Figure 3.3). The plateau effect that was identified in unit acre wheat productivity thereafter was matched by both barley and oats, and in the case of barley it was more likely a downward trend that became noticeable (Figure 3.2). Finally, when all three grains are combined through appropriate weighting, what has already been described can be confirmed, namely a more or less continuous improvement in grain yields from c. 1720-1780: there was a clear substitution effect taking place between the different grains, a plateau in the French wars and the first decades of demographic revolution, but then a response to that revolution without serious resort to imports down to at least the repeal of the corn laws (Figure 3.1 and Figure 3.4, and Table 3.1). Wheat yields increased to a new plateau level between the 1820s and the 1850s. The English population rose to 9.9, 11.5 and 13.3 million respectively in 1811, 1821, and 1831 (Schofield, 1994: 64). During the same period 24 bushels per acre was achieved in the 1820s (or between 21 and 22 hectolitres per hectare), and the upper 20s and even 30 bushels per acre for the rest of the-century (or nearly 27 hectolitres per hectare). That trend suggests that farmers responded to a potential demographic

69

Agricultural Productivity in England, 1700-1914

crisis and the new rewards from mass industrialisation later rather than earlier than the traditional story maintains. Even when the country was, in a sense, relatively ‘flooded’ with overseas grain, especially wheat, in the second half of the nineteenth-century, the wider grain economy more or less held its own in terms of unit acre productivity, save for a modest though perceptible decline (see the wheat trend from c. 1860 to the 1890s in Figures 3.3 and 3.4). In the face of population growth and then the competition arising from the era of free trade, this was a remarkable achievement. The evidence drawn from the database provides an intensive analysis of wheat productivity, backed up by the corresponding influences of the other major corn crops. The end product was the provision of food for both countryside and town, but also the provision of food more generally. This is especially the case when considering the final destination of so much of the barley and oats, the first as food in the form of beer, and the second as animal feed for the existing rural animal population but more importantly for the developing urban horse society before the advent of the internal combustion engine.

IV.

Factors Influencing Productivity

How did this come about? Demonstrating what happened is easier than explaining why it happened. There is no easy way to show how the high and sustained yields were achieved. In England it seems to have been part of a cumulative incremental effect, which might even have occurred because farming was already so well developed. One possibility is that it was partly to do with the more efficient conversion of seeds into output. This is partially demonstrated in Table 3.3, which is a chronological comparison of seeding rates. It measures the rate at which the seed which was sown (in bushels or hectolitres per acre or per hectare) and was then converted to a crop which was harvested (in bushels/hectolitres per acre/hectare). The harvested crop divided by the seed sown produces a measure of the yield rate. The data summarized in the table is based on a disparate or inconsistent geography, but it is a considerable improvement from the otherwise valiant attempt made by Slicher Van Bath many years ago to establish a history of yield ratios across the European economy. In the case of Britain he was more or less entirely reliant on Arthur Young for the eighteenthcentury. Slicher Van Bath’s summaries show that for the period 1750-1799 – the evidence essentially from Young’s tours of the late 60s and early 70s, and Young’s contribution to the Board of Agriculture General Views of the 1790s – wheat yield ratios were 9.2. The new independent ratios in Table 3.3 for the equivalent period work out at a range from 6.1 to 10.4. In the first quarter of the nineteenth-century

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John Beckett and Michael Turner

Young’s ratio was 8.0 and the independent ratio varied from 7.8 to 8.7 (Turner, 2004: 521-545, esp. 543). On balance the Young data seem to show a decline over time, whereas the new data demonstrate a likely stabilization. A note of caution is needed in relation to the presentation and interpretation of the data in Table 3.3. The seeding rates for the 1820s and the 1850s are not as secure as for the other decades. The whole table is based on only 88 observations with the fewest in those decades. The absence of some decades in the table tells its own story – they are decades for which the farms which feed into the database were either completely silent on seeds or inadequate in terms of presenting consistent measurements or combinations of output and yield from which seeding rates can be derived by an indirect route. One of the most urgent or important tasks for new farm based research will be the collection or derivation of seeding rates and patterns from which a more secure story about the relationship between farm technology, and land and labour productivity might emerge. Table 3.3. Wheat seeding rates, crop yields and yield rates, 1720-1900 Date

Seeding Rate bush/acre

Yield

hectolitres/ha

bush/acre

Yield Rate

hectolitres/ha yield/unit seed

1720s

3.2

(2.9)

20.0

(18.0)

6.3

1740s

2.5

(2.2)

21.8

(19.6)

8.7

1750s

2.4

(2.2)

22.4

(20.1)

9.3

1760s

2.1

(1.9)

21.8

(19.6)

10.4

1780s

3.1

(2.8)

18.9

(17.0)

6.1

1790s

2.5

(2.2)

19.0

(17.1)

7.6

1800s

2.7

(2.4)

21.0

(18.9)

7.8

1810s

2.6

(2.3)

21.2

(19.1)

8.1

1820s

2.7

(2.4)

23.6

(21.2)

8.7

1840s

1.9

(1.7)

30.6

(27.5)

16.1

1850s

1.6

(1.4)

27.5

(24.7)

17.2

1870s

2.4

(2.2)

28.9

(26.0)

12.1

1890s

2.8

(2.5)

27.1

(24.4)

9.7

1900s

2.3

(2.1)

28.1

(25.3)

12.2

Source. TBA, 2001: 167.

Meantime, what more is known about seeding rates and seed quality? In his review of the improvement of seeds in the nineteenth-century Brassley noted a number of

71

Agricultural Productivity in England, 1700-1914

new seed varieties for cereal crops that were developed and introduced into British agriculture, particularly from the 1830s. They included Talavera wheat, Golden Drop wheat, Chevallier barley, Tartarian oats, Poland oats and Potato oats (Brassley, 2000a: 522-526; see also Walton, 1999). All of these varieties appeared in the database of farm records on which the present study is based, but the degree to which they were significant in the improvements that have been established can only be hinted at since farmers did not keep their records in identical or systematic ways (TBA, 2001: 7980). Bearing in mind the note of caution we associate with Table 3.3, the combination of new varieties and greater efficiency at seeding rates nevertheless suggests one link with the productivity story that has emerged, though it appears as a conundrum. Is the measured efficiency in seeding rates the product of one or other of improved seeds or improvements in seeding methods (seeding by drills as distinct from the broadcast method), or indeed a combination of the two? There are insufficient data currently available to resolve this issue one way or the other. What can be established is that the long-run seeding rate declined, marginally for wheat, quite dramatically for barley and oats, but the yield rate – the output of grain per unit input of seed – increased. It may point to an increase in efficiency through a decrease in the (partial) capital to output ratio, but separating seeding methods from seed varieties is not easy. One way or the other, these developments had an effect on the quantity of grain available to the market, and can be measured or probably inferred as greater farm and farmer efficiency allowing farmers more flexibility in mixing and matching their land uses. But how was this achieved if change was incremental and not to be explained in terms of a single factor, such as improved seed selection? Here the anticipated correlations produce problems rather than clear cut answers. There is no indication, for example, that increases in output were achieved by increasing the cultivated acreage. By 1700 or thereabouts all the best quality agricultural land was already under the plough, and on those occasions such as wartime when efforts were made to increase the number of cultivated acres, the main impact was to bring into use marginal lands which were subsequently abandoned once the crisis passed. Sir John Sinclair, the President of the Board of Agriculture, implored the nation in 1803 to wage war on the ‘unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the Kingdom’ (Sinclair’s memoirs quoted by Halevy, 1960 ed.: 230). But the knock-on effect of bringing relatively marginal land for wheat into cultivation was that there was below average yield arising from such land. Linking changes in production directly to technological innovation is problematic. The evidence does not support a straightforward link between the purchase of, for example, a new plough, which is likely to be recorded in the farm accounts, and an increase in output. Yet there are indicators which help to explain shifts in practice which

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must surely have had an impact on output. These include the increased use of clover, which was grown on about 85 per cent of the farms in the sample in the first half of the nineteenth-century; the uptake of turnips and, from the early nineteenth-century, other roots; the increasing variety of fertilisers and manures, perhaps particularly the use of bone manure; an increase in the use of nitrogen fixing crops; and, towards the middle of the nineteenth-century, the introduction of artificial additives and the use of night soil from urban centres (TBA, 2001: 81-8, 107-115). One of the more plausible factors was the increased use of a variety of crops in farm crop rotations, especially those crops which were nitrogen fixing. R.C. Allen has combined biological science with history and theory to establish the importance of nitrogen fixing in the slow, but assured story of agricultural change (Allen, 2008). Undoubtedly nitrogen fixing was a major component of agricultural change but for the entire period before the 1840s or 1850s it was adopted without a real understanding of the underlying science. To that extent the application of substances and the exploitation of crops that happened to be nitrogen-fixing was a long-run process of trial and error. In the database the use of all legumes except for peas and sainfoin, peaked in the period 1800-39, and the continued use of these crops was sustained at a higher lever for the remainder of the nineteenth-century than had been the case in the eighteenth-century. (TBA, 2001: 85-86, but noting also important clarifications regarding the use of traditional crops like peas and beans relative to the new or newer crops of forage legumes like clover, trefoil, sainfoin and lucerne whose efficiency at increasing soil nitrogen is greater). There is another complication which perhaps is not so widely known, or rather appreciated. Crops which help the nitrogen fixing process, in the absence of other soil management techniques, might simply fix that nitrogen for unwanted crops to enjoy. Hoeing of the peas and beans fields to keep weed growth down in traditional agriculture for example was an expensive business and we are still unsure whether it was widely used. As Arthur Young, on observing the growing of beans in Lincolnshire, wrote: ‘As a general fact, it is to be stated that this crop is broadcast, never hoed, full of weeds, and wheat consequently not following them’. A North Yorkshire farmer goes further to suggest that legumes may have encouraged weeds precisely because they supplied those weeds with extra nitrogen (Banks, 2001: 117-118). We cannot measure with any confidence the impact of structural changes such as enclosure, drainage and farm sizes, but unless we argue that they had a negative impact – which is surely unlikely – they must have added something to the increasing efficiency of arable agriculture in the period, particularly from about 1790. In the case of enclosure we might infer that the enormous expenditure that took place

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before 1815, with a great upsurge in enclosure activity between the mid 1790s and c.1815, the busiest period for parliamentary enclosure, much of which was the enclosure of waste, was beneficial (Turner, 1980: 67-71; Allen, 2004: 112). We can assume it was rewarded in the next thirty years through the increase in output. This would be the case in at least two ways. There is a school of thought that suggests that enclosure, which broke the constraint of communal husbandry practices, allowed farmers and their landlords through leasing arrangements to make more personal considered choices rather than simply to follow the traditional communal cropping patterns. That is not to say that the open fields were not flexible; on the contrary, there is ample evidence to show considerable flexibility particularly in terms of choosing crops of a broadly similar nature in the different open fields (Havinden, 1961; TBA, 2003). Even so, the management of the open fields exerted a constraint of sorts. It has been established that freedom of crop choice, the freedom to take or not to take a fallow, and more generally the ability of farmers to act as individuals, raised both unit acre yields and total production and yet allowed a reduction in the arable if necessary and a conversion of that arable to pastoral farming instead. Both total product and unit acre product, and also a greater food choice and variety could result. This may only have been relatively marginal, but it is precisely the margin that we are measuring (Turner, 1986b). Similarly farmland drainage, which was necessary on many soils and drew investment from landlords anxious to raise the output of their land, particularly in times of agricultural prosperity, may also have had an influence, if only at the margin once more (Phillips, 1989). Finally, the rationalisation of farms into bigger and supposedly more efficient units became the holy grail of experienced agricultural commentators, at least until the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth-century (Beckett, 1983). The precise combination of these changes, which brought about the rise in productivity and the inferred rise in output which has been identified, is almost impossible to disentangle precisely, and therefore difficult to measure. There was certainly a significant increase in labour productivity (Clark, 1991). Since agriculture is not susceptible to the economies of scale achieved in industry of bringing disparate processes together, the impact of power was limited at least until the later nineteenth-century, but agriculture may have benefited from some relatively low-key changes such as the introduction of the scythe instead of the sickle for bringing in the harvest. Similarly improvements in the design and operation of the plough and other implements may have had a significant impact, but this does not translate clearly into productivity change (Walton, 1979; Collins, 1969; Collins, 1987; Brunt, 2003). Even the much heralded improvements achieved by artificial means such as drainage from the early years of the nineteenth-century, and the application of

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imported artificial fertilisers after c. 1830, turn out to have been relatively insignificant at least in relation to those observable trends in output, as signalled by crop yields (Brassley, 2000b: 537-547). Finally, external changes encouraged the farmer, particularly shifts in marketing and transport structures arising from the development of turnpike roads, the improvement of rivers, the building of canals, and, from the 1830s, the laying of railways. All of these changes were a feature of the period 1750-1850, and each in their own way aided the process of moving food supplies more efficiently from farms to markets to consumers. In this way the ability of the farmer to raise output was encouraged by the capacity of the transport network to move that output cheaply into the growing urban markets, but also to bring onto the farm from urban and other sources some inputs just as cheaply, especially night soil and industrial fertilisers (Thwaites, 1991; Thwaites, 1985; Scola, 1992; Sheail, 1996). The specialization of land use arising from improved transport systems and wider markets almost certainly played a part in raising productivity. It made sense to use the best grass land for stock rearing and milking, and the best arable soils for wheat and barley production, and declining urban mortality rates after about 1850 point to an increased efficiency of food supply as one of several material factors.

V.

Conclusion

In the absence of any particular innovation which explains the findings, we are bound to conclude that the long-term growth in output has to be explained in more fragmentary ways than might be satisfactory. The observable trends were the result of a series of small changes which collectively contributed to the capacity of the country to support a larger population by the mid-nineteenth-century. This population was increasingly urbanized, and depended on a smaller proportion of people living on and working the land than at any previous period. A further conclusion is that what happened to Britain post-1750 in terms of industrialisation and urbanisation can best be understood in the context of a dynamic rural sector. Productivity grew slowly from a low point in the mid-15th-century through to the eighteenth-century, but yields increased sharply from the 1810s to the 1830s and 1840s, with the result that English farmers largely fed the population until c.1850 or even as late as the 1870s. If there was an agricultural revolution it was not, as others have argued, in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, nor on its own in the eighteenth-century as the traditional historiography suggested, though Figure 3.4 does support that story to a degree. The greatest impact was rather in the middle two quarters of the nineteenth-century, with an impressive show of unit acre productivity

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in the first of those quarters and then a consolidation thereafter (TBA, 2001: ch. 7). This interpretation contrasts sharply with the emphasis placed by some historians on the late sixteenth and seventeenth-century (Kerridge, 1967; Allen, 1992: ch. 1), and with the traditional and imprecise emphasis placed on the protracted eighteenth and nineteenth-century (Chambers & Mingay, 1966). While accepting that the position changed after c.1870, especially in the face of massive overseas imports in a free trade environment, until that time the increasingly industrialised and urbanised British population was largely fed from home-grown resources. This interpretation is entirely consistent with the findings based on the long-run grain yields and their emphasis on the period from the 1820s. The next great spurt in land productivity was delayed until the chemical additive revolution that transformed international crop production after 1945. Thus the contention is that the English agricultural revolution was a real phenomenon, but agriculture’s most impressive responses when population growth was at its most dynamic stage were in the first half of the nineteenth-century. It was in these decades that the farming community raised output to meet the increased demand from that growing urban population. Any other conclusion is, in effect, to return to the older version of events, with its emphasis on the biased and erratic data of contemporary commentators. To accept the new interpretation is to support the identification of a key period in English agricultural history, but on the basis of a database which employs the records created by the farmers themselves. Furthermore, the findings for the other main crops (barley and oats) follow a similar trend. The contention is that the extensive research in progress on British agricultural productivity now has some very positive and not at all contradictory results for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Historical Sources FARM RECORDS, 1700–1914 (see Appendix 1, TBA, 2001)

Bibliography AFTON, B & M.E. TURNER (2000), ‘The statistical base of agricultural performance in England and Wales’, in E. J. T. COLLINS (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. VII, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 1759-1835. ALLEN, R.C. (1988), ‘Inferring yields from probate inventories’, Journal of Economic History, 48, p. 117-125. ALLEN, R.C. (1992), Enclosure and the Yeomen, Oxford, Clarendon Press. ALLEN, R.C. (2004), ‘Agriculture during the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1850’, in R. FLOUD & P. JOHNSON (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume 1: Industrialization, 1700-1850, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 96-116. ALLEN, R.C. (2005), ‘English and Welsh agriculture, 1300-1850: outputs, inputs and income’, available as an unpublished paper at: http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/General/ Members/allen.aspx. ALLEN, R.C. (2008), ‘The nitrogen hypothesis and the English agricultural revolution: a biological analysis’, Journal of Economic History, 68.1, p. 182-210. ALLEN, R.C., & C. Ó GRÁDA (1988), ‘On the road again with Arthur Young: English, Irish and French agriculture during the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History,

48.1, p. 93-116. BANKS, F. (2001), Catalysts of change: constraints on agriculture and their removal, 11th to mid 19th-century, unpublished, (undated copy April 2001). BARNES, D.G. (1930), A History of the English Corn Laws, London, Routledge. BECKETT, J.V. (1983), ‘The debate over farm sizes in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury England’, Agricultural History, 57, p. 308-325. BEILBY, O.J. (1939), ‘Changes in agricultural production in England and Wales’, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 100, p. 62-73. BRASSLEY, P. (2000a), ‘Crop varieties’, in E. J. T. COLLINS (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. VII, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 522-532. BRASSLEY, P. (2000b), ‘Plant nutrition’, in E. J. T. COLLINS (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. VII, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 533547.

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BROADBERRY, S., CAMPBELL, B.M.S. & VAN LEEUWEN, B. (2008), English agricultural output 1250-1450: some preliminary estimates, paper presented at Lund conference, June 2008. BRUNT, L. (2003), ‘Mechanical innovation in the industrial revolution: the case of plough design’, Economic History Review, 56.3, p. 444-477. CAIRD, J. (1852), English Agriculture in 1850-51 (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. CAMPBELL, B.M.S. (2000), English Seigniorial Agriculture 1250-1450, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. CAMPBELL, B.M.S. (2007), Three centuries of English crop yields, 1211-1491 (http:// www.cropyields.ac.uk. CAMPBELL, B.M.S. & OVERTON, M. (eds) (1991a), Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity, Manchester, Manchester University Press. CAMPBELL, B.M.S. & OVERTON, M. (1991b), ‘A new perspective on medieval and early modern agriculture: six centuries of Norfolk farming, c.1250-1850’, Past and Present, 141, p. 38-105. CHAMBERS, J.D. & MINGAY, G.E. (1966), The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880, London, Batsford. CLARK, G. (1991), ‘Labour productivity in English agriculture, 1300-1860’, in B.M.S. CAMPBELL & M. OVERTON (eds), Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity, Manchester, Manchester University Press, p. 211-235. COLLINS, E.J.T. (1969), ‘Harvest technology and labour supply in Britain, 1790-1870’, Economic History Review, 22.3, p. 453-473. COLLINS, E.J.T. (1975), ‘Dietary change and cereal consumption in Britain in the nineteenth-century’, Agricultural History Review, 23.2, p. 97-115. COLLINS, E.J.T. (1987), ‘The rationality of surplus agricultural labour: mechanisation in English agriculture in the nineteenth-century’, Agricultural History Review, 35.1, 36-46. COLLINS, E.J.T. ed. (2000), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. VII, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. COPUS, A.K. (1986), Changing Markets and the Response of Agriculture in South West England 1750-1900, PhD Thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. EJRNAES, M., PERSSON, K.G. & RICH, S. (2008), ‘Feeding the British: convergence and market efficiency in the nineteenth-century grain trade’, Economic History Review, Special Issue, 140-171.

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FAIRLIE, S. (1965), ‘The nineteenth-century corn law reconsidered’, Economic History Review, 18.3, p. 562-575. FLOUD, R. & MCCLOSKEY, D.N. (eds) (1994), The Economic History of Britain Since 1700: 1, 1700-1860, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. FOX, H.S.A., & BUTLIN, R.A. (eds) (1979), Change in the Countryside: Essays on Rural England 1500-1900, London, Institute of British Geographers, Special Publication no. 10. GLENNIE, P. (1991),’Measuring crop yields in early modern England’, in B.M.S. CAMPBELL & M. OVERTON (eds), Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity, Manchester, Manchester University Press, p. 255-283. HALEVY, E. (1960), A History of the English People in the Nineteenth-century, vol. 1: England in 1815, London, Benn. HAVINDEN, M. (1961), ‘Agricultural progress in open-field Oxfordshire’, Agricultural History Review, 9, p. 73-83. KAIN, R.J.P. (1986), An Atlas and Index of the Tithe Files of Mid-Nineteenth-Century England and Wales, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. KERRIDGE, E. (1967), The Agricultural Revolution, London, Allen and Unwin. KITSON CLARK, G. (1951), ‘The repeal of the corn laws and the politics of the forties’, Economic History Review, 4.1, p. 1-13. LAWES, J.B., & GILBERT, J.H. (1893), ‘Home produce, imports, consumption, and price of wheat, over forty harvest-years, 1852-53 to 1891-92’, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 3rd ser., p. 77-133. MCCONNELL, P. (1922), Note-Book of Agricultural Facts and Figures for Farmers and Farm Students, London, Crosby Lockwood & Son, 10th edition. MALTHUS, T.R. (1800), An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions, London, J. Johnson, 1st edition. MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES AND FOOD (1968), A Century of Agricultural Statistics: Great Britain 1866-1966, London, HMSO. MITCHELL, B.R. (1988), British Historical Statistics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. MOORE, D.C. (1965), ‘The corn laws and high farming’, Economic History Review, 18.3, p. 544-561. OLSON, M. (1963), The Economics of the Wartime Shortage, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press. OVERTON, M. (1979), ‘Estimating Yields from Probate Inventories: An Example from East Anglia, 1585-1735’, Journal of Economic History, 39, p. 363-378.

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OVERTON, M. (1991), ‘ The determinants of crop yields in early modern England’, in B.M.S. CAMPBELL & M. OVERTON (eds), Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity, Manchester, Manchester University Press, p. 284-322. PETERSEN, C. (1995), Bread and the British Economy c. 1770-1870, Aldershot, Scolar Press. PHILLIPS, A.D.M. (1989), The Underdraining of Farmland in England during the Nineteenth-century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. REVIEWS: BRASSLEY, P. Journal of Agricultural Economics; WATKINS, C. Albion; Burnette, J. Technology and Culture, 43.2 (2002), p. 416-418; VERDON, N. Eh.Net, 2002, http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/0529; Ó GRÁDA, C. Agricultural History Review, 50.1 (2002), p. 129-130; BRUNT, L. Journal of Economic History, 63.1 (2003), p. 252-254. SCHOFIELD, R.S. (1994), ‘British population change, 1700-1871’, in R. Floud & D.N. McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of Britain Since 1700: 1, 1700-1860, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn., p. 60-95. SCOLA, R. (1992), Feeding the Victorian City: the Food Supply of Manchester, 17701870, Manchester, Manchester University Press. SHEAIL, J. (1996), ‘Town wastes, agricultural sustainability and Victorian sewage’, Urban History, 23, p. 189-210. THIRSK, J. (2002), ‘Review of Farm production in England’, Economic History Review, 55.2, p. 356. THWAITES, W. (1985), ‘Dearth and the marketing of agricultural produce: Oxfordshire c. 1750-1800’, Agricultural History Review, 33.2, p. 119-131. THWAITES, W. (1991), `The corn market and economic change: Oxfordshire in the eighteenth-century’, Midland History, 16, p. 103-125. TURNER, M.E. (1980), English Parliamentary Enclosure, Folkestone, Wm Dawson. TURNER, M.E. (1981), ‘Arable in England and Wales: estimates from the 1801 crop return’, Journal of Historical Geography, 7, p. 291-302. TURNER, M.E. (1982), ‘Agricultural productivity in England in the eighteenth-century: evidence from crop yields’, Economic History Review, 35.4, p. 489-510. TURNER, M.E. (1986a), ‘Corn Crises in the Age of Malthus’, in M.E. TURNER (ed.), Malthus and His Time, London, Macmillan, p. 112-128. TURNER, M.E. (1986b), ‘Crop distributions, land productivity and parliamentary enclosure’, Journal of Economic History, 46.4, p. 669-692. TURNER, M.E. (1998), ‘Counting sheep: waking up to new estimates of livestock numbers in England, c.1800’, Agricultural History Review, 46.2, p. 142-161.

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TURNER, M.E. (2004), ‘Comparative Land Prices in Europe, 1500-1800’, in S. Cavaciocchi, (ed.), Il Mercato Della Terra. Secc. XIII-XVIII, Firenze, Le Monnier, Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica ‘F. Datini’ Prato, ‘Atti delle Settimane di Studi’ e altri Convegni, p. 521-545. TURNER, M.E., BECKETT, J.V. & AFTON, B. (2001), Farm Production in England, 17001914, Oxford, Oxford University Press. TURNER, M.E., BECKETT, J.V. & AFTON, B. (2003), ‘Agricultural sustainability and open-field farming in England, c. 1650-1830’, International Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 1.2, p. 124-140. UNIVERSITY OF READING LIBRARY (1973), Historical Farm Records: a summary guide to manuscripts and other material in the University Library and collected by the Institute of Agricultural History and the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading: University of Reading Library. WALTON, J.R. (1979), ‘Mechanisation in agriculture: a study of the adoption process’, in H.S.A. FOX & R.A. BUTLIN, Change in the Countryside: Essays on Rural England 1500-1900, London, Institute of British Geographers, Special Publication no. 10, p. 23-42. WALTON, J.R. (1999), ‘Varietal innovation and the competitiveness of the British cereals sector, 1760-1930’, Agricultural History Review, 47.1, p. 29-57.

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4.

Agricultural productivity in the coastal and inland area of Friesland, 1700-18501 Merijn KNIBBE

I.

Introduction

This article sets out to estimate, discuss and, to an extent, explain historical and regional differences in agricultural productivity in Friesland, one of the northernmost provinces of the United Provinces (Figure 4.1). Politically, Friesland consisted of three landscapes, Westergo, Oostergo en Zevenwouden, which were subdivided into 30 counties (Grietenijen) and eleven cities with their surroundings. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century Friesland was, after Holland, the second largest contributor to the Generale Middelen, the tax receipts of the Republic of the seven United Provinces (de Vries & Van der Woude, 1995: 126). As Holland contributed more than half of these taxes, this second place indicates a position as the ‘best of the rest’ rather than a position as a serious challenger of the political and economic hegemony of Holland. Even so, Friesland was a prosperous and wealthy part of the Netherlands with some small and medium sized cities and about 130,000 to 160,000 inhabitants. Despite a high level of urbanization, agriculture was the mainstay of the Frisian economy and it also had an extensive transport sector, some financial intermediaries, an important peat digging industry, some brick, tile and pottery factories and a surprising number of gold and silversmiths (Van der Woude, 1998: 83). Agriculture in Friesland was very diverse. Levels of specialization and productivity differed widely among the five agricultural areas into which Friesland was traditionally divided (Spanninga, 1998: 28 and Schroor, 1993). The fertile coastal clay arable and clay pasture areas were characterized by high yields and commercialized agriculture from, at least, the sixteenth century (Knibbe, 2006: 183-193). The fens pasture area in the middle of the province was entirely specialized in dairy farming and the production of hay2. In the east, on the less fertile sandy soils and (former) bogs of the 1

Sander Strating and Hans Bouke Visser of the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden prepared part of the maps and made part of the calculations, for which I owe them gratitude. 2 The English ‘fens’ should not be confused with the Frisian ‘fennen’, the latter word meaning ‘fertile pastures’.

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Figure 4.1. The northern united provinces Friesland, Drenthe and Groningen




Sources. The use of this map was kindly permitted by its author, Joaquìn de Salas Vara de Rey.

northern and southern Wouden, a more mixed type of agriculture was found. In this article, a sixth area has been added to the five areas mentioned above, the Es-area of infield/outfield agriculture, with low rental value of lands and a pattern of ownership and division of lands which differed fundamentally from the Wouden area to which this area was generally supposed to belong (Figure 4.2). Throughout the period covered by this article, no bound labour could be found in Friesland, while the land market was also free and functioning. Though the Es-area was somewhat less commercialized than the other areas, a lively trade in food, animals, consumer durables and farming utensils was omnipresent. When it came to durables, equipment and animals, yard sales of the belongings of deceased farmers (boelgoederen) were not the least important manifestation of these markets. During the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, the cities of Holland were the most important export market for Frisian agriculture, and especially the clay pasture area and the fens pasture area came into some kind of disarray when these cities

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declined in the eighteenth century, in particular when agriculture was also struck by floods, severe winters and cattle plague. After 1813, London became a new important market overnight and for some decades Friesland became the most important foreign supplier of the London market for many livestock products (Boekel, 1929: 218-219). After about 1740, the potato gained increasing importance in the arable areas and the areas of mixed farming. Figure 4.2. Value of land and agricultural areas in Friesland, about 1825

Note. I: Clay arable area; II: Clay pasture area; III: Fens pasture area; IV: Northern Wouden; V: Southern Wouden; VI: Es-area. Sources. Historisch GIS Fryslân, borders by author.

Clay soil agriculture is supposed to have been much more prosperous than agriculture in other areas of Friesland. Around 1580, large differences in prosperity between the countryside of the clay areas and the other areas can indeed be noticed (Figure 4.3). In the Wouden and the fens pasture area, more than 70 percent of the countryside population paid a wealth tax (the personele impositie) of less than one guilder, and in the clay area sixty percent paid more than one guilder. This rather large difference

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clearly indicates sharply diverging levels of prosperity. The same difference in prosperity is also shown by data on land rents. During the 1820s, the first cadastral survey of the Netherlands was carried out. This survey provides us with detailed as well as dependable information on the rental value and use of, literally, every piece of the Netherlands (Knibbe, 2006: 21-23). Recently, the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden has succeeded in incorporating the cadastral information of the 1820s into a GIS (Geographical Information System), aptly called HISGIS Fryslân. Map (Figure 4.2), based on this GIS, shows land rents in the different agricultural areas of Friesland (the pieces of land to the north of Friesland are islands, which are not included in this study). Figure 4.3. The height of the wealth tax and the percentage of the population paying it, different agricultural areas in Friesland, 1578

Sources. VAN DER MEER, MOL & NIEUWLAND (1993: 155-389). Note. Towns excluded.

Clearly, differences in rental value between the agricultural areas were quite large, the main difference being between the maritime clays areas and the rest of the province. These differences in prosperity will undoubtedly have been the result of large differences in agricultural productivity. However, as systematic estimations of productivity are missing, we do not know the extent of these differences and are therefore also ignorant about the extent to which these differences influenced differences in prosperity. This is even more important as Friesland, an ‘unusually prosperous’ place according to Pomeranz, may have to play some role in the discussion

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on ‘The great divergence’ (Pomeranz, 2001). The countryside as well as the cities of the coastal zone of Friesland clearly belonged to the rich core of the Netherlands while at the same time the Netherlands are supposed to have been, before 1800, one of the richest nations in the world. Smits and Horlings even calculate that around 1810, the real per capita income of Friesland was the highest of the entire Netherlands (Horlings & Smits, 1998; Maddison, 2001: 90). Of course, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a time of steep decline for Holland and of favourable terms of trade for (Frisian) agriculture. But this makes it only more interesting to investigate the contribution of coastal agriculture to the fabled wealth of the Netherlands: was the relatively high per capita income of the Netherlands before about 1800 mainly an industrial and trade based, urban phenomenon, or was it also due to a productive coastal agriculture? Before estimating productivity, the different areas will be treated in more detail

II.

Agricultural areas in Friesland

Geologically, Friesland consists of a coastal zone of fertile maritime clays, an inland part consisting of sandy and loamy soils as well as extensive bogs and moors, and the fens pasture area in between3. The clays soils were part of a much larger area of marine clays, stretching along the coast to Denmark (the German Marshgebiet) in the east, and Zeeland, Flanders and even the North of France in the west and south. In England, comparable regions like the Romney Marsh and the area of The Wash and The Fens can be found. The wet, peat soil fens pasture area can be compared with similar areas in Holland and Utrecht while the bogs, moors and the sandy and loamy soils of east Friesland can be compared to areas in the east and south of the Netherlands, northern Belgium and the north and west of Germany. Not coincidentally, all of the eleven cities of Friesland were located in the rich coastal clay zone.

II.1.

The coastal zone

The clay area is generally divided into an arable area and a pasture area. This difference could already be witnessed in 1511 and became more outspoken afterwards (Knibbe, 2006: 194-201). Around 1540 at the latest, markets for labour, (use of) land, final products (butter, cheese, grains, reed, animals), intermediate products (animals, manure, peat, reed) and capital were free and functioning (Knibbe, 2006: 183-193; Nijboer, 2007: 133). The only important exception to this quite exemplary ‘free 3

Fens, bogs and moors are essentially English words, describing situations in Great Britain. In this article, ‘fens’ are flat and reasonably fertile peat soils below or in level with the average water level, and ‘bogs’ are peat soils above the average water level and often located along all kinds of small rivers and brooks. ‘Moors’ are the large, flat and uninhabitable regions consisting mainly of thick layers of sphagnum (SPEK, 2004: 204-227).

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market agriculture’ were some lands designated to the maintenance of local priests and vicars. But even these were often rented out by these clergymen, just like the about one fifth of total clay soil lands owned by religious congregations. In 1580, the lands of the cloisters and other religious congregations were, in a bold and revolutionary move, expropriated by the new, cash strapped protestant government which needed money to pay for the revolt against the Habsburgians and to finance orphanages and the like. Contractual relations between the landlord and the farmers did not change however. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, farmers in the prosperous and government-owned Bildt area strongly advocated hereditary rents. If these farmers (like those in adjacent Groningen) had attained their goals, this would have meant the end of the free rental market. In the end, the Frisian government, as it needing cash to pay for the Dutch Revolt, crushed the farmers with military violence and rents stayed essentially ‘free’. There are several, partly contradictory definitions of capitalist farming (profit oriented investments by farmers, free markets of products and factors of production, substantial use of paid labour). But whatever definition is used – after 1540 at the latest Frisian clay soil agriculture was as capitalist as it could be. The most important changes in clay soil agriculture in the period up to 1650 were improvements in the transport system, drainage and dykes and the replacement of old style buildings of loam, wood and reed by larger new style buildings of bricks, wood and reed. Also, dairy farmers increasingly started to use purchased peat instead of processed manure for heating, cooking and washing as well as for producing cheese, the manure now being used as fertilizer on the drained lands – a clear example of investing, specialization and commercialization. Around 1600, coastal zone agriculture in Friesland had obtained a kind of intermediate position in a ‘Von Thünen’ system with the cities of Holland at its core, farmers nearby these cities specializing in fresh milk, high quality dairy and fat animals and farmers in Friesland specializing in wheat, barley, meagre cows, milk cows and lower quality butter and cheese. When, after about 1670, cities in Holland came into disarray and the number of inhabitants declined, this led to an extensification of Frisian agriculture. Despite this, the position of Friesland within the system did not change; farmers increasingly started to sell ‘intermediate products’ like hay or meagre oxen to Holland instead of fat oxen, butter or cheese. Thousands of labourers from as far as Westphalia went to Friesland to earn high wages during the hay and grain harvests. Major improvements were, after 1650, restricted to the improvement of dykes and dyke maintenance after the 1717 Christmas flood and the large-scale replacement of female labour in butter churning by horse-powered churning mills. The tenfold increase in the number of spinning wheels in clay soil probate inventories after 1600 may indicate an increased importance of spinning (Knibbe, 2006:190).

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II.2.

Inland agriculture

Inland agriculture in Drenthe has recently been analyzed in great depth by Spek (Spek, 2004). As some of the inland areas of Friesland, adjacent to Drenthe, had a comparable kind of agriculture (area VI in Figure 4.2), Spek’s work can be used as a guide to describe the inland agriculture of Friesland4. Following and extending an argument by Bieleman, Spek puts much emphasis on historical demography (Bieleman, 1990). On the higher, drier parts of Drenthe, the Drenths plateau, increasing population density coupled with an increase in the stock of animals caused, after the early Middle Ages, increasing pressure on the environment. Population growth made it necessary for farmers to gather more and more organic fertilizer as well as firewood from the woods and forests, and to process and use this material (or its ashes) as fertilizer on the arable lands located in the infields or Essen. The exploitation of the woods, combined with an increase in the number of animals grazing in and around these woods, caused their slow but continuous degrading. The Es-area in southeast Friesland can be compared to this part of Drenthe. When population densities increased even further and farming became ever more intensive, stocks of organic material in the forests were depleted and just gathering organic material lying on top of the soil did not suffice anymore; farmers in the Es-area were forced to start using the top layer of the soil, which initially had a high content of organic material, to produce fertilizer. Also, sods from the pastures and meadows were used. Rather loamy soils could sustain this overexploitation more or less and degraded ‘only’ into extensive barren lands and heath fields. Some of the fragile sand soils, however, changed into sand drifts, a clear cut example of desertification in the Netherlands. The pressure on the ecology increased even further when, at some time in the fifteenth century, inland farmers took up sheep farming to take advantage of the increasing demand for rough wool. After about 950, population pressure also led farmers to colonize the marshy and wet but relatively fertile bogs and thickets along the downstream parts of the many small brooks descending from the Drenths plateau. The Wouden (area IV and V in Figure 4.2) in Friesland is to a large extent an example of this kind of colonization. According to Spek, a higher natural fertility of the soil in the newly colonized areas did not only permit population densities of this region to become higher than in the Es-area (Spek, 2004: 220-227). It also eased the pressure on the environment, as better pastures could maintain more cows, which meant that more manure was available and less organic fertilizer had to be gathered. The extensive moors in Drenthe and the south east of Friesland stayed virtually uninhabited during the entire period covered by this article. 4

Large parts of inland Friesland did belong to Drenthe up to 1487.

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Agricultural productivity in the coastal and inland area of Friesland, 1700-1850

A considerable part of inland Friesland consisted of fens (area III in Figure 4.2). These were colonized even later than the Wouden, large parts of them not being under cultivation before 1525. Especially the use of small windmills to drain these utterly wet marshes made it possible to turn them into pastures and, especially, meadows – almost no arable land could be found in this area. Draining fens, however, causes their demise; the peat oxidizes and vanishes by up to one centimeter a year, making draining ever more important but also increasingly difficult. After 1770, the peat of the fens was increasingly exploited and large tracts of this area turned into lakes, which, mainly during the first half of the nineteenth century, were poldered. Agriculture in this area was, out of necessity, highly specialized in livestock farming and the (labour extensive) production and sale of hay. Both the size of farms and the size of herds in this area were up on the Frisian average. Below, we will see if specialization and size also translated itself into high productivity.

III. Measuring and analyzing productivity: definitions, concepts, methods and sources This article estimates Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of agriculture in the areas of Friesland. TFP is defined as value added per ‘average unit of production’. An ‘average unit of production’ basically is a weighted average of the amount of labour and capital or, in the case of agriculture, of land, farm buildings, a farmer, servants, animals and the like. This method of calculating TFP in fact boils down to estimating how much value added was produced by a ‘standard farm unit’, consisting of land, farm buildings, equipment, animals and labour, in each of the areas (Hoffmann, 1991). To be able to do this, value added has to be calculated. According to the definitions of accounting, value added of production is equal to income. To state this differently: turnover minus the value of purchased inputs is, by definition, equal in value to the combined value of ‘factor incomes’: wages, interest, rents and profits. This means that we can not only calculate value added by measuring the value of sales and subtracting the value of purchased inputs from these sales, but also by measuring the total value of factor incomes. For agriculture, there are, however, some caveats to this conclusion. Part of income in agriculture is in kind: the production of the vegetable garden, the housing services rendered by the farm, food and lodging for boarding servants and the like. In many eighteenth and nineteenth century boarding labour contracts in Groningen, food and lodging of boarding servants were mentioned explicitly as part of the wage, though no price was put on these services (Gooren & Heger, 1993: 20–24). In this study, the value of board and lodging is loosely based on Paping, who carefully estimates a value of between 61 and 121 guilders for the Groningen clay area between 1770 and 1860, including food, heating, candles and so on (Paping, 1995a: 406-407). His 90

Merijn Knibbe

3,300 calories per day for boarding labourers may, however, have been too high for young women and boys. This non-monetary income has, according to the rules of accounting, to be included into the estimate of value added. Another complication is taxes. In European history, land taxes were common and often quite high. As they were, in the end, paid out of value added, these taxes on factors of production have to be added to agricultural income. Land taxes are included in this study. A comparable remark can be made for taxes on labour. Poll taxes for boarding labour are however excluded for the moment. As the rate of the poll tax was the same across Friesland, this leads to a (slight) overestimation of differences. A problem arises when we compare two or more years. Changes in the value of agricultural production and, hence, agricultural incomes are not only caused by changes in physical production but also by changes in prices. When we try to calculate productivity, defined as the amount of output per unit of input, we have to take into account these changes in prices, for instance by deflating the series in current prices by some kind of deflator, preferably based upon farm prices. In theory and in the long term, an increase of real production estimated in this way necessarily has to be the result of an increase of productivity, as production increases but the amount of land and labour does not. In reality, short and medium-term changes indicate more often a change in agricultural profit than a change in productivity, as the land rents which are used to calculate agricultural income were often fixed for quite some time, and as it is difficult to include profit into the equation. We will return to this when we analyze the data. To be able to calculate the data, we will need to estimate the amounts of land, labour, taxes and capital used as well as the prices of (the use of) these factors of production in different areas of Friesland. These estimates will be discussed in the next section. To be able to calculate productivity, we need to know the amount, use and value of land, capital and labour. Two kinds of estimates thereof are presented: cross section estimates on the amount and value of land for the 1820s and on the amount of capital per farm household and family and boarding labour for 1749. Both estimates are precise as well as dependable and cover the entire province. These will be combined with long-term estimates on the prices of labour and land for more restricted parts of the province for (about) the period 1700-1850.

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Agricultural productivity in the coastal and inland area of Friesland, 1700-1850

III.1. The amount, use and value of land during the time of the first cadastral survey, ca. 1825 The cadastral survey of the 1820s contains data on use, geographical location and the rental value of land. This makes it possible to calculate the rental value of different kinds of land in the different agricultural areas. This data is shown in Figure 4.4. Figure 4.4. Rental value of arable land, pastures and meadows in different regions, around 1825 (guilders per hectare)

Sources. Historisch GIS Fryslân, calculations by Sander Strating and Hans Bouke Visser.

Figure 4.4 clearly shows, like Figure 4.2, the large difference between the coastal area and the inland area. The average value of all lands in the clay area was fl 34.18; in the fens-area fl 12.55 and in the Wouden area (including the Es-villages) fl 10.66. Differences within the inland area were quite large; about 100 percent for arable lands and about 350 percent for pastures. The data strongly confirm the idea of Spek that the productivity of pastures in areas like the Wouden was much higher than in the Esarea (Spek, 2004: 220-227). His idea does not hold up for hay lands though. When we look at the amount of land per area, the Es-villages again stand out (Table 4.1). The data show that the Es-villages were not only characterized by lowvalue pastures but also by a very limited amount of pastures. This not only confirms Spek’s idea but even extends it. The difference between the Es-area and areas like the Wouden was not only caused by the better quality of pastures but also by a much more favourable pasture/arable land area. Without any doubt, the amount of cow manure per hectare of arable in the Wouden was much larger than in the Es-area,

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which must have caused higher yields as well as a higher labour productivity, as less time had to be spent on gathering and processing all kinds of organic material. Table 4.1. Amount of land per area (hectares * 1000) Clay, Arable Arable

22.4

Meadows

Clay, pastures

Fens

Northern Wouden

Southern Wouden

Es-area

4.3

1.2

16.1

7.9

1.3

1.0

37.8

9.6

1.1

1.3

Pastures

15.1

51.1

25.2

37.9

14.3

0.7

Total

37.5

56.3

64.2

63.6

23.3

3.3

0.7

11.9

20.3

2.4

1.8

0.6

Grassland/ Arable ratio

Sources. See Figure 4.4.

Recently, Spek has shown how a process of very gradual increase of population in the Es-area from about AD 700 onwards, and less gradual commercialization (wool, horses) from about 1450 onwards, led to increased pressure on the woods, pastures and meadows (Spek, 2004). This process ultimately led to the gradual but, in the end, almost complete disappearance of woods and the deterioration of many of the once fertile pastures with a high content of organic matter into barren heath fields or, even worse, sand drifts. This process reached its apogee around 1850 but maps of around 1700 already show harde sandige duinen (harsh sandy dunes) in the very south of the Es-area. The most fertile (or least infertile) meadows along the rivers were used for haymaking as well as, from about August onwards, grazing for the horses. The cows and sheep had to find their feed on the extensive heath fields and on the sparse and, considering their rental value, low quality pastures. The surprisingly low amount of pastures in the Es-area is therefore ‘explained’ by the large number of heath fields, which were used for grazing in addition to the pastures. Not surprisingly, this agricultural system led, from an agricultural point of view, to low quality of animals. According to probate inventories, the average value of, for instance, sheep in the Es-area was only about 25 percent of the average value on the clay soils (Knibbe, 2010). The overwhelming importance of grasslands in the fens pasture area and the clay pasture area was not uncommon for the Netherlands – comparable areas could be found especially in Holland and Utrecht. In an international perspective it was, however, rather unusual. Even the number of pastures of the Frisian clay arable area, compared with agriculture in the German Marshgebiet, was unusually high (Knottnerus, 2004: 173). The low number of meadows of the clay area is somewhat

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Agricultural productivity in the coastal and inland area of Friesland, 1700-1850

deceptive. Some of the farmers in this area could use some parcels of meadows in the adjacent fens area and there was quite some trade in hay. The main reason for the absence of meadows in this area is a question of definition; pastures were not only used for grazing but also for making hay. Meadows, on the contrary, were defined in Friesland as lands which were exclusively used for making hay. The total rental value of the clay area was, with 3.3 million guilders, about four times as high as the value of the fens pastures area and five and a half times as high as the value of the Wouden, including the Es-area. The data from the cadastral survey can be matched with data from individual farms (Table 4.2). As it turns out, the level of rents is remarkably close to the data from the cadastral survey (Figure 4.4), while the Es-villages stand out as clearly the poorest area. Again, the largest differences in value of lands (purchase value) are between pasture lands, clay area pastures being twenty times more expensive than Es-area pastures. Table 4.2. Value of 45 farms in the inland and the clay soil area, 1820 Northern Wouden Total rent, guilders Number of farms Total agricultural area, ha.

3,466

Southern Wouden 4,115

Es-villages 1,175

Clay Area 6,765

15

15

7

8

374

413

184

207

Agricultural area per farm, ha.

25

28

26

26

Heath per farm, ha.

4*

76

79

0

9

10

6

33

Arable plus pasture

424

236

122

1,029

Arable

576

238

121

1,208

75

39

865

395

384

335

34

7

10

Rent per hectare Market value of land, guilders per ha

Pastures Meadows Heath

Note. Technical note: for some farms, the source does not make a distinction between arable and pasture. Heath is not included in agricultural area. * Part of this area was measured in ‘schar’, a variable measure indicating grazing rights. I have not yet been able to convert this into hectares.

Sources. Tresoar 325, Archief familie van Harinxma thoe Slooten, nr. 489.

To estimate long-term series on productivity, long-term series on prices of factors of production are needed. Data on the long run development rents in the clay soil

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area (including land tax) are shown in Figure 4.5 (for details on these series see Knibbe, 2006: 88-98). The series show an increase around the year 1600. After about 1620, they were basically stable until about 1755, when a prolonged period of increase started. As far as we know, this last increase, probably due to the favourable development of the terms of trade of livestock products, was the strongest increase of al coastal land rents in the Netherlands during this period (Knibbe, 2006: 121, 130, 135, 137). Figure 4.5. Rents in the clay soil area (including land tax), 1575-1850

Comments. The Bildt area was one of the counties of Friesland, poldered in 1505 and measuring about 5.000 hectares; The Boelema gasthuis was established around 1500 and first called Soete naam Jezus Gilde. After the reformation it was renamed Ritske Boelema gasthuis (120 hectares) after one of its founders. The Popta gasthuis (500 hectares) was established in 1712 by Henricus Popta, a rich, unmarried lawyer.

Sources. KNIBBE (2006: 90, 91, 96).

These series can be compared with data on rents on the sand soil (Figure 4.7). This graph is based on 19 inland farms (or about 500 hectares) of the family Van Harinxma thoe Sloten, one of the founding families of the Opsterlandse Veencompagnie. The graph shows contractual rents as well as rents actually paid. Policy towards the farmers was harsh. When somebody could not pay up, due to, for instance, sickness

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Agricultural productivity in the coastal and inland area of Friesland, 1700-1850

or the death of a spouse, he or she was evicted and the arrears were paid out of the proceedings of the boelgoed, the auction of the possessions of the farmer. Figure 4.6. Rents per hectare (including land tax) in the inland area of Friesland, 1820-1855

Sources. Tresoar, Archief familie van Harinxma thoe Slooten, 325, nr. 506, nr. 489.

As rental contracts had an average duration of five to seven years, large downswings in agricultural prices or production led to payment problems for the farmers. This can be noticed between 1820 and 1825 and in 1830. The difference between contractual rents and rents actually paid, which shows after 1820, was due to the large fall in prices in 1819 and 1820. Remarkably, contractual rents even slightly increased in this period. The high level of rents paid in 1826 and 1827 was caused by the payment of arrears from the preceding years. The large difference in 1830 was due to an extremely bad harvest (on the market in Leeuwarden, less potatoes were available in 1830 than during the potato blight). After 1830, many farmers did not manage to pay back their arrears and were evicted, which caused the dip in 1833. Seemingly, the landlord was forced to decrease rents a little. The level and development of rents in the clay soil area can be compared with the level and development in the southern Wouden and the Es-area. It shows that rents of the inland farms between 1820 and 1855 were about 16 to 20 percent of the level of the Popta rents, possibly showing a slight relative increase. The difference

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in level compares well with Figure 4.4, which suggests that differences as shown by the cadastral data of the 1820s were quite stable in this period. As clay soil rents in Friesland showed the most favourable development of all rents in the Netherlands in this period – this was due to the favourable development of prices of dairy products – the slight rise of inland rents compared with clay soil rents is remarkable.

III.2.

The price of labour, 1660-1850

Data on the use and price of labour are scarce for Friesland. In this section, pretty much all available information will be presented. Though the data do span a long period and a large region, they are not yet complete. Especially information on the use of casual labour in the inland region is scarce. Information on the amount and price of boarding labour, which was as important as or even more important than casual labour, is much better though. The use of labour on farms in Friesland before about 1900 can be divided into family labour (man, women, children over about twelve), boarding servants (male and female) and hired labour, be it casual or seasonal or regular. Also, smaller farms may actually have hired out (family) labour, surely during the hay and grain harvest. The reward of agricultural labour generally consisted of profit and imputed wages (the family), wages, boarding and food (boarding servants) and daily wages (hired labour). Table 4.3. Cost structure of a clay soil farm specialized in arable production and horse breeding, in Barradeel, near Sexbierum, 1799-1810 and an arable farm in Oostdongeradeel, near Anjum, 1845-1859 Sexbierum (wages only) Casual labor

Anjum

23% ( =70% of wages)

70%

Boarding servants and first servant 10% ( =30% of wages)

30%

Animals purchased

22%

Feed, seed, manure

5%

Wood, materials

5%

Services (blacksmith etc.)

8%

Rent

9%

Taxes on wealth, capital and land Total

19% 100%

Sources. Tresoar, Toegang 347, Collectie handschriften afkomstig van de provinciale bibliotheek van Friesland, nr. 1187; Tresoar, toegang 93-34, Archief van de familie Meindertsma te Ee, nr. 3.

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Agricultural productivity in the coastal and inland area of Friesland, 1700-1850

Some information on wage costs as part of the expenditure of clay soil farms can be obtained from the accounts of two farms near the coast of Friesland (Table 4.3). It shows that total wages were about one third of total cash costs. As this farm owned quite a lot of the land it used, the rent was quite low. When we take into account imputed rent and the value of board and lodging for the boarding servants as well as the imputed remuneration for family labour, rents (including land tax) and wages in this area may have been about 70 to 85 percent of total costs, of which 40 percent might have been wages and 60 percent rents (Knibbe, 2006, 144-145). When we take board and lodging into account, the total labour of boarding servants, even on this large farm, would have been about as important as casual labour. Regional data for Groningen for 1862 show that casual labour was generally about as important as boarding labour. In all cases, the amount of boarding plus family labour must have been clearly more important than casual labour (Gooren & Heger, 1993: 169). Figure 4.7. Daily wages, master carpenters in the clay and the inland area as well as all kinds of groundwork, 1658-1824 (Stuivers per day, 20 stuivers to the guilder)

Sources. Tresoar, toegang 92, Archief van het college van de voogden van het Dr. Poptaslot, nr’s 649-780; Tresoar, toegang 105, Archief Opsterlandse Veencompagnie, nr. 168, nr. 309

Wages supposedly differed between areas. Much of the known data on the longterm development of daily wages in Friesland are summarized in Figure 4.7. The data show the highest summer wages for an activity and are only included when at least ten different days could be found on which these wages were paid. Wages for

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master carpenters are included as well as wages for all kinds of digging, dredging and the like. Basically, labourers worked four schoft (shifts) of about three hours a day. There are, however, a few instances of workers putting in five schoft a day in May and June, for a higher price per schoft. Wage differences between different kinds of groundwork were quite stable and within larger projects a clear division of labour, corresponding to wage differences, can be discerned. The data in Figure 4.7 are remarkable for two reasons. They show that, contrary to the ‘received wisdom’, the wages of master craftsmen in the inland area were as high as in the clay soil area. Second, the wage gap between skilled labourers and unskilled labourers seems to have decreased after about 1750 (unfortunately, data on wages are scarce around 1750). The rise of the wages of unskilled labour is not consistent with developments in Holland but does conform to developments in adjacent Groningen (Paping, 1995a: 344-345) though it takes place somewhat earlier than in Groningen. It is tempting to relate this increase to the spread of the ‘highly profitable’ potato in the inland area (Ypey, 1781). For many farmers, boarding labour instead of day labour was the most important kind of paid labour (Figure 4.8). Generally, these servants were male and female youngsters between 12 and 24 years of age, on average staying between one to three years on one farm before moving to another. They were paid a money wage and received some clothing as well as food and lodging. Sometimes, they were allowed to raise a sheep or till some of the farmer’s land. Young girls often cared for the children, while young boys tried to pick up the farming trade. Dairy work was an important chore for the older girls and young women, while the older boys were a jack of all trades. On the clay soil area, the wages of male servants increased from about 15 to 20 guilders per year for the youngsters, enabling them to go to the kermis (the annual local fair), to a level of between 80 to 120 guilders when they were about twenty (the most extensive studies on this: Paping, 1995a and 1995b, see also Collenteur & Paping, 1997). Important to note in graph 6 are the large falls around 1700 and around 1820. The fall around 1700 was caused by crises (floods, low prices, bad weather, cattle plague), and the fall around 1820 by the unprecedented large fall in prices. The 1820 fall can also be found in the Paping’s data for Groningen. This clearly shows that farms on the clay soil area had a short-term (one year) downward flexibility in factor prices of around 100 guilders due to decreases of the wages of boarding servants. In the medium term, rents were also adapted, though this could take some time because of the multi-year duration of contracts. Interestingly, however, the rent series of graph 3 do decline around 1700 and 1820.

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Agricultural productivity in the coastal and inland area of Friesland, 1700-1850

There are, to my knowledge, no studies on the wages of boarding servants in the inland area. For the Frisian inland area of Netherlands, no such data have as yet been unearthed. For a somewhat comparable area in the eastern Netherlands, the Achterhoek, recourse can be taken to the large number of probate inventories in the boedelbank of the Meertensinstituut. Scanty as these data may be, they do show that before about 1755 the wages of boarding servants were very low; the larger part of their wage (sometimes even the only) consisted of food and boarding. One of the probate inventories however states that no hoofdgeld (poll tax) had to be paid by the servant; this was paid by the farmer. From an accounting point of view, this means that this poll tax should be added to the wage of the servant. Figure 4.8. Money wages of boarding servants in the Frisian clay soil area and of male servants in Lichtenvoorde, guilders per year, 1697-1824

Sources. Tresoar, toegang 347, Collectie handschriften afkomstig van de provinciale bibliotheek van Friesland nr. 387; Meertens instituut, Boedelbank

Though some inland wages did reach a somewhat higher level towards the end of the century, perhaps due to the increase in grain prices, even the highest were still quite a bit lower than the coastal wages, there were still some exceedingly low wages.

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III.3.

The amount of labour, 1749

To be able to measure productivity, we do need to know how much and what kind of labour was used in agriculture. The total amount of labour used in agriculture consisted of family labour (the farming couple, their older children), boarding servants who generally stayed on a farm for one whole year and day labourers. Information on the use of boarding as well as family labour on farms can be obtained from the quotisatie of 1749. In 1748, a tax revolt led to the temporary abolishment of the taxes on food, drink and fuel and a very serious attempt to establish a wealth tax was made. Part of this attempt was an investigation of every household in Friesland, the quotisatie. The number of individuals aged twelve and above, the number of children under that age, the occupation of the head of the household and wealth were noted. After one year, however, the new system seems to have led to even more discontent than the old system and the old system was reinstated. This source has already been used to investigate the occupational structure in Friesland (Faber, 1972: table III.8; Knibbe, 2006: 194). It can also be used to investigate household size and wealth (Table 4.4). The table is based upon about 4,200 of a total number of 7,000 farms in Friesland. It is likely that all children above twelve took part in farm work. I therefore assume that the number of members in a farm household above twelve years of age is an indication of the amount of people available for agricultural work and household production. Not all people above twelve years of age will have been family members. Some of them will have been boarding servants. The amount of boarding servants can be calculated by comparing the farm households with the households of fresh milk farmers. These farmers lived inside or close to villages and cities and specialized in the production and sale of fresh milk. The quotisatie data list these farmers as a separate group. On the relatively small farmsteads (often consisting of little more than a stable and some cows) of these farmers there were, as far as we know, no boarding servants. As the minimum age of boarding servants was about thirteen to fourteen years, the number of people of twelve and above can be seen as the average number of people of farm households without boarding servants. This means that the number of boarding servants was on average between 0.6 (the fens pasture area) and 1.9 (the clay arable area). The pattern is according to expectations, though the relatively low number in the fen pasture area, where farms were on average quite large, seems somewhat low (but see Ypey, 1781). The number of boarding servants is, however, lower than the numbers mentioned in surviving farm accounts and nineteenth century censuses (Collenteur & Paping, 1997; Knibbe, 2006: 145-146). The 1862 agricultural census of Groningen gives, for comparable areas, numbers which are about 0.5 higher than the 1749 data for Friesland (Gooren & Heger, 1993:169). As the average size of farms in the quotisatie will have been smaller than the average size of farms

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Agricultural productivity in the coastal and inland area of Friesland, 1700-1850

which kept accounts (invariably average to large farms), this difference regarding accounts can be explained. The difference concerning the 1862 Groningen census might be explained by an intensification of agriculture (Paping, 1995a: 120-129). The amount of labour available for agriculture has been calculated by subtracting 0.7 full time units from the number of adults to account for household labour other than agricultural activities. Table 4.4. Household size, composition and wealth and farm size in different agricultural areas of Friesland, 1749 and farm size, 1794 Household members by age

Wealth, guilders Total

Farm

>12