Wages and labour relations in the Middle Ages: it's not (all) about the money

For long periods of history, a significant proportion of the labour force has received all or part of their wages in non-monetary in-kind payments. Despite its historical ubiquity, this form of labour remuneration remains poorly understood. This paper presents a framework which allows for the valuation and interpretation of in-kind wages. We apply our method to a new dataset of agricultural wages for labourers in medieval England (1270-1440), most of whom received a composite wage for which in-kind payment was the largest share. Assessing the market value of the wages these workers received, we find an increase in the relative importance of cash payments in the latter decades of the 14th century. We show that this was connected to a fundamental shift in labour relations, providing new empirical insights into the so-called ‘golden age of labour’ that followed the Black Death

The Feudal Origins of Manorial Prosperity in 11th-century England

Does the prosperity of medieval manors depend on their position in the feudal system? How large are these effects? And what are the economic mechanisms behind it? To answer these questions, we estimate an econometric interactions model on data derived from the Domesday Book, a unique country-wide survey conducted by William the Conqueror two decades after the Battle of Hastings. Domesday Book presents researchers with a unique insight into the feudal structure of a medieval society and the functioning of manorial economies. Using this source, we reinterpret the 11th-century English feudal system as a network in which manors are linked to one another based on their common ownership structure. Our results reveal the existence of external economies of scale: manorial prosperity was closely intertwined with the fortune of their feudal peers, even after including rich agricultural and geographic controls. We decompose these significant, positive interaction effects into two mechanisms: scale and productivity spill-overs. The latter are interpreted as common management structures and knowledge transfers in an information-constrained feudal world

The Feudal Origins of Manorial Prosperity in 11th-century England

status: Published onlin

(In-kind) wages and labour relations in the Middle Ages: it’s not (all) about the money

This paper explores the prevalence of in-kind wages in medieval labour markets and the underlying reasons for their use. Using a new dataset of agricultural labourers in medieval England, we demonstrate that, until the late fourteenth century, wages were recorded anonymously and most remuneration was done through in-kind payment. From the 1370s, however, labour remuneration shifted increasingly to cash and workers began to be named individually in the accounts which recorded their wages. We argue that these changes reveal a fundamental shift in labour relations in late medieval England, providing new empirical insights into the ‘golden age of labour’ that followed the Black Death