English Agrarian Labor Productivity Rates Before the Black Death: A Case Study (forthcoming in the Journal of Economic History, 2004) Please do not cite conference version without author’s permission. by Eona Karakacili Department of History University of Western Ontario [email protected] This paper is dedicated with much affection and respect to J. Ambrose Raftis. I thank him for his patience and encouragement during the writing of my dissertation and beyond. This work also has benefited greatly from suggestions made by R. Albert Berry, Bruce M. S. Campbell, George Grantham, C. Knick Harley, Peter H. Lindert, Joel Mokyr, as well as anonymous reviewers, and I thank them. All errors, of course, are my own. Funding for this research was made possible through a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. ABSTRACT Historians debate whether or not population growth hindered or promoted development in the pre-industrial period. A crucial issue in this debate are the labor productivity rates of workers in the arable sector. It is often suggested that an agricultural revolution, currently defined as a rise in these rates, was a necessary precursor to industrialization and improved living standards. The first country to industrialize, England, therefore underwent such a revolution sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. This paper provides the first direct measurement of arable workers’ average labor productivity for pre-industrial England. Rates are assessed for those production conditions which it is thought resulted in the lowest agrarian labor productivity rates in the pre-industrial period: c.1300-48. The agrarian labor productivity rates for English workers before the Black Death either surpassed or met the literature’s best estimates for English workers until 1800. Introduction Development economists’ debate over whether population growth hinders or promotes growth in poor countries is echoed among economic historians interested in pre-industrial 1 European. A key issue is whether the productivity of agrarian labor is and was low, thus acting as a potential barrier to development. It is often suggested that the western European nations, who were the first to industrialize in the nineteenth century, overcame this barrier through an agricultural revolution, which dramatically raised output of food per worker. This freed product and producers for new sectors, permitting industrialization, fostered economic growth, and eventually raised living standards. Solving this debate and the related question of pre-industrial global divergence is complicated by the lack of good aggregate data, which becomes available only in the mid- nineteenth century or later. The debate on the state of the pre-industrial western European economy and living standards hinges upon agrarian labor productivity rates but direct measurement of such rates are not feasible. For most of the pre-industrial period, researchers lack data on population numbers, employment numbers in different sectors and GNP. For example, estimates of England’s population c. 1300 range vary by as much as 3.6 million, from a 2 low of 3.4 million to a high of 6 or 7 million. Even more problematic are determining the numbers employed and the aggregate output of various sectors. Researchers therefore employ indirect clues, such as real wages and urbanization rates, to shed light on labor productivity levels. Researchers with opposing views, however, dispute such indirect evidence and find that alternative frameworks lead to divergent perspectives on 1 .For an introduction to the debate between economic historians over the relationship of population growth and development, see, for instance, Livi-Bacci’s, A Concise History, pp. 80-111. 2 .Russell, “The Pre-Plague Population,” pp. 1-21. See also, Hallam, “Population Movements,” pp. 508-93; and 3 development. This paper focuses on pre-Black Death England. The schools of thought here on the impact of population growth are representative of those for other countries and/or periods. Michael Postan argued that population growth led, in a Malthusian/Ricardian framework, to diminishing returns to land and labor productivity over the course of the thirteenth century. By 4 the early fourteenth century, labor rates fell to the point that Malthusian crisis ensued. In contrast to this mainstream perspective, advocates of the potential gains in labor productivity resulting from technological progress cause scholars such as Karl Gunnar Persson and H. E. Hallam to argue that the output of food per worker was growing until 1300 and until 1348, respectively. Population pressure drove up productivity by encouraging innovations; in 5 addition, more people meant more brains and ideas. Yet another school maintains that a growing population means a larger market. Increasing commercialization would promote the specialization and division of labor—driving up labor productivity. Along these lines, Richard Britnell argues that English economy and living standards improved over the thirteenth century. Labor productivity rose mostly in the industrial sector; the agricultural sector captured the static and dynamic gains of growth from other sectors. But by 1300, population pressures were such Smith, “Demographic Developments,” pp. 25-78. 3 For example, E. A. Wrigley and Phillip Schofield contend that the later sixteenth century experienced a decline in labor productivity. They argue that this decline is suggested by a fall in the real wages of construction workers; they correlate this change and its causation to a rise in population. Robert Allen has recently produced a new real wage series which often differs from that if Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, the real wage series employed by Wrigley and Schofield. Allen argues that labor productivity rose in the late sixteenth century, as illustrated by the slight improvement in the real wages. See, Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History; Allen, “Real Wages”; for criticisms of the statistical analyses of Wrigley and Schofield, see Lindert, “English Living Standards.” 4 . Postan, “England,” pp. 549-632. 5 .Hallam, “Population and Landholding,” pp. 966-1008. Persson, Pre-Industrial Economic Growth. that the tiny industrial sector could not compensate for the low and declining rates found in the 6 huge agricultural sector. Adding fuel to this debate are the pioneering research findings of Bruce Campbell and Mark Overton on pre-industrial English land productivity. It was thought that medieval land productivity was significantly lower than that found in later centuries; in earlier research, the agricultural revolution was defined as a significant improvement in land and labor productivity rates. Although yields fluctuated, Campbell and Overton find that the high yields per acre in English open fields before the Black Death, surprisingly, were not surpassed until the late 7 seventeenth or c.1700. Campbell argues that pre-Black Death England, despite its high population, clearly was not experiencing Ricardian declines to land productivity, an important component in the argument that diminishing returns to labor emerged as a response to population growth. Campbell lacks data on labor and capital inputs but he speculates, in a Boserupian fashion, that good yields per acre before 1348 were achieved with massive inputs of hand labor, similar to the situation often found in less developed nations today. Thus, while land productivity is discounted as a barrier to growth, presumably agrarian labor productivity should have declined 8 and it remained a dilemma in pre-industrial England. This paper sheds light on this question by providing the first direct measurement of average agrarian labor productivity at the disaggregate level for medieval England—indeed, 6 .Britnell, “Commercialization.” He has recently qualified his optimistic view of the pre-1300 period based on the belief that agrarian labor productivity was low. See, “Surveys,” pp. 1-16. For a critique of these perspectives, see Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling, pp. 21-65 and 121-74. 7 .For example, Campbell and Overton, “A New Perspective on Medieval and Early Modern Agriculture,” pp. 38- 105. 8 .Campbell, “Agricultural Progress in Medieval England,” pp. 26-46. Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. these are the first such rates produced for any pre-industrialized European country. Because of England’s success story, her development path has served as a yardstick against which the experiences of other countries and periods are measured. Historians often argue that she experienced the first agricultural revolution in labor productivity sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Explanations for this revolution vary and include enclosures of open fields (efficiency gains garnered by a shift to private property or economies of scale with bigger farms), improvement in the quality of labor inputs (elimination of serf labor and an improvement in wage labor), changes in the agrarian social structure (the elimination of serfdom and the emergence of capitalist tenant-landlord relations), and technological improvements. Labor productivity rates are therefore assessed here for the period between c. 1300 and 1348 when researchers predict that the output per arable worker would be at its lowest level. Although there is some debate over a possible population decline during the half century before the Black Death reached England in 1348, it is still thought that the early thirteenth century population was not achieved again until the early modern period, perhaps as late as the 9 eighteenth century. Population strain on food resources was therefore at its peak, and the mainstream view is that a Malthusian crisis was either in progress or threatened and so the average output of a farm worker did not suffice or scarcely sufficed to feed him or herself. The production took place in open fields, and on the demesne, the landlord’s share of the open fields, much of the work was performed by serf labor. Farmers, obviously, employed medieval agricultural techniques. 9 .The exact century in which English population numbers for the first half of the fourteenth century were surpassed depends upon which estimate for this period is employed. See Wrigley and Schofield for estimates of English population numbers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, The Population History, especially, pp. 563-87. The analysis, outlined in the methodology section below, employs disaggregate data (aggregate data are not available for this period). In any case, as discussed in the Findings section, aggregate sources, even centuries later, offer at best only rough approximations of output and inputs while medieval local farm records provide fairly precise information. The data here are drawn, for reasons given in the methodology section below, exclusively from records belonging to Ramsey Estates. The focus is on the arable sector since it is here that researchers predict a dramatic rise in the output of workers in the early modern period. Researchers agree that the labor productivity of pastoral workers was always high. Furthermore, grain and legumes were the major staples in the pre-industrial diet so the output of arable workers would profoundly effect living standards. The volume and real value of the average labor productivity of workers in the open fields on the Ramsey manors before the Black Death (depending on how the comparison is made) either surpassed, met or was not much below the literature’s best estimates for free wage workers employed on enclosed farms in early nineteenth century England. These estimates indicate, at best, agrarian labor productivity in the arable sector rose above these pre-Black Death rates sometime after 1800, well after industrialization was under way. Because these findings will surprise some researchers (initially, they surprised even me), this paper focuses on a detailed outline of the source and methodology employed to calculate medieval average labor productivity. Rates are then presented and discussed in reference to comparable estimates made in the literature. Additional data on average medieval labor productivity, and the implications of these findings for development, will be presented in another paper. Source: Ramsey Estates’ Manorial Account Rolls Manorial farm account rolls, employed in this study, supply more than enough information to measure agrarian labor productivity directly. The rolls document in great detail the inputs and outputs of land, labor and capital for the landlord’s share of the open fields on the manor, known as the demesne. They are truly, as noted by Postan, the best source on the English 10 agricultural sector available to historians until nineteenth century records. P. D. A. Harvey points out that the information supplied in these English records is unique and permits the study 11 of agricultural practices in a way not possible for any other country during this period. One could extend this observation to encompass the entire pre-industrial period. The account rolls offer an almost unique opportunity to study the labor inputs in arable and pastoral sectors separately. The managerial practice was to hire full and part-time workers who were generally employed exclusively in one sector. Estimating inputs from an estate complex in which tenants’ labor was widely employed on its demesnes offers another significant advantage : each arable job performed by a tenant on Ramsey Estates’ manors could not exceed 12 one day of labor but might well require less. Thousands of manorial account rolls, dating mostly from the late thirteenth to early fifteenth centuries, survive. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many English landlords deviated from the normal practice of leasing their demesnes and instead directly 10 .Stated by Postan in a conversation with J. Ambrose Raftis. 11 Harvey, “Introduction,” p. 14. 12 At harvest time, certain tenancies in a few locales owed multiple works or workers per day. 13 cultivated some or all of their manors. E. A. Kosminsky estimated that in six English counties 14 an average of about 32 percent of arable was demesne. The account rolls were drawn up for the 15 yearly audit made of each landlord’s manor in his or her estates. The reeve, the local tenant who managed the demesne, presented an itemized list of all receipts and expenditures for the 16 manor over the course of the year. The earliest surviving rolls date from 1208 and belong to the estates of the Bishop of Winchester. Until the 1270s, with the exception of Winchester’s records, relatively few account rolls are extant. The earliest such records for the Ramsey Estates are the summary accounts from 1243. As on most manors, the rolls contain information on demesne inputs and outputs for the fiscal year from 29 September (the feast day of Michaelmas) 17 to 28 September of the following calendar year. Complete accounts are available in large 13 For some views as to why direct cultivation of the demesne became widespread in these centuries, see Harvey, “The English Inflation”; Miller, “Farming of the Manors,” and Raftis, Ramsey Estates, esp. pp. 76-91 and 96-128. 14 The manors analyzed in this paper lay in four counties, three of which were employed by Koskminsky in his study: Bedford, Cambridge, and Huntingdon. He notes that this estimate is not necessarily representative for the rest of England. See, his Studies in the Agrarian History, pp. 89-94. 15 On the development of manorial farm accounts, see Harvey, “Introduction.” On this matter and for a discussion of auditing procedures, also see Oschinsky, Walter of Henley, especially, pp. 213-60. 16 The reeve received free rent and sometimes some perks for this job. The demesne might also be managed by a “baliff,” who worked for wages. As a rule, reeves managed the demesne on Ramsey Estates before the Black Death. 17 Account rolls were drawn up at the end of the fiscal year. For example, a fiscal account roll year of 29 September,1323 to 28 September, 1324 was produced in September of 1324. A crop was harvested in the summer of 1324 but there was no possibility of processing the entire crop fast enough to record its output in the fiscal year of 1323/4. Instead, this crop was threshed and winnowed over the course of 1324/5 and appeared in the accounts for this fiscal year. On this medieval accounting practice, see, Titow, p. 35. The labor inputs, therefore, expended on the harvest recorded in the fiscal year of 1323/4, with the exception of threshing and winnowing, appeared in the fiscal accounting year of 1322/3. Interpolation of labor inputs can be safely employed. Farmers did not change their labor inputs per acre in the arable sector significantly from one year to the next; nor did sown acreage vary much from one year to the next year. Changes were made gradually, over time, and farmers did not change their practices dramatically within two years. Changes in labor inputs found in consecutive years, extant for the post-1350 period, were usually an insignificant 10 percent a year. Even for fiscal years spaced widely apart in the pre-1350 period, labor inputs, as shown in Table 6, are still fairly consistent between years. Of the 7 account rolls which differed in their labor inputs per acre by an amount over 10 percent, 4 were from the exceptionally poor harvest year of 1297/8. Unusually higher inputs per acre in this year resulted from many more tenants attending the reaping and plowing numbers from the late 1290s until the early fifteenth century, when Ramsey Estates began to 18 lease demesnes which had been directly cultivated. Documenting all labor inputs on the demesne in the account rolls was a particular concern for the landlord, since he wanted to keep labor costs to a minimum. For example, a contemporary agricultural treatise on accounting methods for these rolls, the Husbandry, advised that when full-time wage workers were occupied with jobs which were also performed by others, for example, threshing jobs, the work of such full-time employees was to be carefully distinguished in the accounts from that of the others (usually part-time pieceworkers and tenants) 19 “because the lord ought not to pay anything for their [the full-time employees] threshing.” In fact, the Husbandry even gave expected efficiency rates for the expensive labor of harvest 20 workers, as an index for the auditors on such expenditures. The careful accounting of all jobs (labor rents and boonworks) performed by tenants was 21 of special concern to the landlord. The Seneschaucy, another medieval agricultural treatise, boonworks. This was likely a charitable gesture on the landlord’s part, since large amounts of food were distributed to workers at these gatherings. There was a difference of 20 percent found between extant account roll years in Lawshall but these were spaced 66 years apart. See, Karakacili, Peasants, Table 1.5, p. 81 and 80-4, 140-01. 18 The date at which these individual demesnes were leased varied from the late fourteenth to the early fifteenth centuries. 19 Oschinsky, p. 421. On the possible dating of the Husbandry to c.1300, see Ibid, p. 201. For instance, in Ramsey Estates’ account rolls, the grange section, which recorded the output and the yearly expenditures of crops, very carefully distinguished the amount of each cereal or legume type threshed by pieceworkers and tenants. Full-time demesne employees rarely threshed until after the Black Death. 20 Ibid, p. 445. 21 Loveboons or boonworks were works required in addition to the regular work week. They were usually performed at time of peak demand for labor, such as harvesting. Although strictly defined in number and type, they were theoretically performed only when requested by the landlord. That is, they were somewhat arbitrary in nature. On the Estates, such loveboons were standardized in number and type and incorporated into the regular labor rent system. On the standardization of loveboons, see also, Jones, “Harvest Customs and Labourers,” (1978), p. 106.