British economic growth : 1270 - 1870

We provide annual estimates of GDP for England between 1270 and 1700 and for Great Britain between 1700 and 1870, constructed from the output side. The GDP data are combined with population estimates to calculate GDP per capita. We find English per capita income growth of 0.20 per cent per annum between 1270 and 1700, although growth was episodic, with the strongest growth during the Black Death crisis of the fourteenth century and in the second half of the seventeenth century. For the period 1700-1870, we find British per capita income growth of 0.48 per cent, broadly in line with the widely accepted Crafts/Harley estimates. This modest trend growth in per capita income since 1270 suggests that, working back from the present, living standards in the late medieval period were well above “bare bones subsistence”. This can be reconciled with modest levels of kilocalorie consumption per head because of the very large share of pastoral production in agriculture

English economic growth, 1270-1700

We provide annual estimates of GDP for England over the period 1270-1700, constructed from the output side. The GDP data are combined with population estimates to calculate GDP per capita. Sectoral price data and estimates of nominal GDP are also provided. We find per capita income growth of 0.20 per cent per annum, although growth was episodic, with the strongest growth after the Black Death and in the second half of the seventeenth century. Living standards in the late medieval period were well above “bare bones subsistence”, although levels of kilocalorie consumption per head were modest because of the very large share of pastoral production in agriculture

Occupational structure in the Czech lands under the second serfdom

A shift in occupational structure towards non-agricultural activities is widely viewed as a key component of European economic growth during the early modern ‘Little Divergence’. Yet little is known about this process in those parts of eastern-central Europe that experienced the early modern ‘second serfdom’, the massive increase in the institutional powers of landlords over the rural population. We analyze non-agricultural occupations under the second serfdom using data on 6,983 Bohemian villages in 1654. Bohemia resembled other eastern-central, nordic and southern European economies in having a lower percentage of non-agricultural activities than western Europe. But Bohemian serfs engaged in a wide array of industrial and commercial activities whose intensity varied significantly with village characteristics. Nonagricultural activity showed a significant positive relationship with village size, pastoral agriculture, sub-peasant social strata, Jews, freemen, female household heads, and village mills, and a significant negative relationship with arable agriculture and urban agglomerations. Non-agricultural activity was also positively associated with landlord presence in the village, although the relationship turned negative at higher values and landlord presence reversed the positive effects of female headship and mills. Under the second serfdom, landlords encouraged serf activities from which they could extort rents, while stifling others which threatened their interests

Agricultural wage labour in fifteenth-century England

This dissertation is researching the employment of different types of agricultural labourer in the ending phase of the middle ages. The purpose is to question the method of using casual wage evidence to interpret changes in the labourer’s income in the current study of late medieval economic history. My criticism of the traditional method is that, since casual wage evidence is composed of the price of finishing a piece of work, it is inappropriate to use that evidence to interpret incomes without the information of how many pieces of work done by the labourer. The said information is, indeed, mostly unavailable. My proposition to solve this problem is to use the salaries paid to the permanent farm worker, who was hired by year. The approach of this research is, firstly, to demonstrate the limitations of the traditional method and, secondly, to demonstrate that the salary paid to the permanent worker is a useful tool for understanding the changes in the labourer’s income. In particular, the discussion is separated into five chapters. At first, I intend to illustrate that casual wage evidence illustrates only one aspect of the fifteenth-century agricultural labour market and that from the same source material more information apart from wage data is available and allows us to examine other aspects of wage labour. With the information, I shall argue that job opportunities in the casual sector were limited by farming seasons; and that, except for a few villagers, casual employment only accounted for a minor part of the yearly income. It shall be illustrated that apart from casual labourers, the manorial demesne employed the other two types of labourers, who were potentially more important than casual labourers in terms of the cost and the labour input. Between the two, labour services were persistently employed, but their important were dwindling, whilst the permanent workers were the main labour force purposely maintained on the demesne. This finding proves that the employment of casual labour was relatively insignificant. It also illustrates that the permanent posts were a more secure source of income than casual hire. In this context, casual hire was paid higher daily wages, but its availability was limited; the permanent contract was poorly paid, but it guaranteed a secure livelihood across the year. This explains why, when job opportunities were relatively expanded in the casual sector during labour shortage, labourers would turn down permanent contracts for casual hire, in the hope for a better income. Following this context, we would expect to see that during our period, when depopulation was continued, the employer of permanent workers was forced to improve the job offer to match the potential income a labourer could earn in the casual sector. The trend in the value of the permanent labourer’s salary, therefore, should reflect the changes in the agricultural labourer’s income in general. An index of the permanent labourer’s salary will be presented to illustrate this rising trend

The management of working horses on the Battle Abbey manor of Barnhorn, 1325-1494

This aim of this paper is to examine how a single English demesne (the personal farm of a seigniorial lord, as opposed to the land of their peasant tenants) managed its stock of working horses over a period of almost 170 years. It leverages the exceptionally rich body of surviving manorial accounts from the Battle Abbey manor of Barnhorn to look very closely, not only at how the demesne managed its horses, but how it operated within the context of the larger Battle Abbey estate

Agriculture.

Agriculture;