Fri Dec 8 09:48:26 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (December 2006)
Richard Britnell, _Britain and Ireland, 1050-1530: Economy and
Society_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xvi + 562 pp. $45
(paperback), ISBN: 0-19-873145-0.
Reviewed for EH.NET by John Langdon, Department of History and
Classics, University of Alberta.
Richard Britnell, emeritus professor of history, University of
Durham, has produced a superb textbook covering the economy of the
British Isles from 1050 to 1530. It has a simple but effective
organization. After a short introduction, the book starts with four
preliminary chapters. The first of these involves basic physical
matters such as the climate and topography of the islands; the second
deals mostly with religious and ethnic divisions over the islands;
the third with the nature of power relations between the various
classes; and the fourth with the basic economic contours over the
entire period, including a discussion of the various models which
seek to explain them. Thereafter, the bulk of the book is divided
into two time periods. The first stretches from 1050 to 1300 and,
despite having a thinner evidentiary base, clearly evokes a time of
overall economic expansion. The second period, richer in
documentation, presents a much more complicated story of economic
stagnation and decline with at best fitful recovery towards the end
of the period in the early sixteenth century, perhaps not surprising
since the later middle ages was punctuated by the disasters of the
Great Famine of 1315-18 and the Black Death starting in 1348, not to
mention the monumental conflict between the crowns of England and
France known as the Hundred Years War. Each of these
chronologically-based sections is comprised of ten chapters outlining
various aspects of the urban and agrarian economy, including
settlement, mercantile activity, the relationship between lords and
tenants, government action, and the management revolution of land and
resources that occurred over the twelfth and thirteenth century in
particular. The book concludes with a survey of the economic and
social situation in the British Isles in 1530, comparing it with that
which existed in 1050, and how the economy of the British Isles is to
be judged within its European context at the start of the sixteenth
century.
What makes this book so valuable, even though it is more narrowly
economic than other recent surveys of a similar sort (such as
Christopher Dyer's excellent _Making a Living in the Middle Ages_
(2002)), is its comprehensiveness and sure-footed approach
throughout. Consonant with the book's length, Britnell covers
virtually every important issue dealing with the medieval economy and
society of the British Isles. Its strengths are not only that it very
effectively synthesizes a mass of secondary literature, but that it
also highlights the author's own contributions to the field,
particularly in the chapters dealing with "procedural routines and
literacy." Altogether, the book is likely to be the standard work on
the topic for many years to come.
It does have one major limitation. Inevitably, given the overwhelming
preponderance of English evidence compared to that for the rest of
the British Isles, the comments about Scotland, Wales and Ireland,
sizable as they are, often seem like add-ons rather than providing an
integrated view of the economy of the islands as a whole. Perhaps
this is an inevitable consequence of having an expert whose work is
primarily in English history to write this book. Britnell certainly
tries mightily to overcome this Anglo-centric view, but the study
still seems somewhat unbalanced in favor of England. In this regard,
to provide something closer to a truly integrated view might require
someone whose primary expertise lies in one of the other parts of the
British Isles, as has been shown recently in volumes dealing with
other topics in the medieval period (one can point here to the late
R.R. Davies's _Domination and Conquest_ (1990) and _The First English
Empire_ (2000), which furnished a truly pan-British Isles view of
medieval power relations and ethnic identities).
Even with this qualification, the book remains a tour de force of
intelligent assessment and penetrating insight. Britnell is not
content simply to provide a survey of existing knowledge, checking
his personal opinion at the door, so to speak, but -- with suitable
circumspection -- often supplies his own take on things. He certainly
goes well beyond the traditional view that the performance of the
medieval economy was determined mostly by the balance between
population and resources and makes a cogent argument for seeing
things like investment and employment opportunities as playing a much
stronger role than formerly indicated in the literature (see
especially Chapter 4 and pp. 310-15). He also takes what many might
feel is an overly pessimistic view of the impact of war on medieval
economies, expressed on many occasions in the book (esp. pp. 322-25
and 453-55). Certainly, one might be able to say that over the long
run of the later middle ages war had a deleterious effect on economic
development of the islands (one surprisingly lightly considered area
in the book along these lines were largely internal conflicts like
the Wars of the Roses), but there were times when war might have
buoyed up the economy, particularly during the 1350s and 1360s when
ransoms and other generally favorable outcomes of the Hundred Years
War for the English might have provided important countervailing
tendencies to the impact of the plague. As with virtually everything
else in this book, however, the reader might in places question a
particular point of view, but still has to give it immense respect.
Finally, as with all important books, Britnell leaves the reader with
the excitement of major things yet to be divulged. Perhaps the most
crucial of these is what happened to the economy as it entered the
upswing of the sixteenth century. In this sense, the endpoint of the
study, for all that it makes sense in marking off the medieval from
the early modern period, is strikingly ambiguous. As Britnell says,
"there was no very well-defined divide between slow recovery from the
major economic recessions of the fifteenth century and a subsequent
period of more rapid development" (p. 501). A better understanding of
the mechanisms through which the British economy emerged from its
sluggishness of the later middle ages is thus becoming more urgent in
the field. It may be, as Britnell indicates in an excellent
comparison of the performance of the British Isles versus the
Continent at the time (pp. 521-22), that the islands eventually
coat-tailed on more vigorous activity originating elsewhere. The
essential question remains, though, as to who in the British Isles
were most directly responsible, as individuals or groups, in
translating these more favorable circumstances into new and sustained
economic growth.
John Langdon is Professor of British Medieval History in the
Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Canada. Two of his more substantial publications in recent
years are _Mills in the Medieval Economy: England, 1300-1540_ (Oxford
University Press, 2004) and [with James Masschaele] "Commercial
Activity and Population Growth in Medieval England," _Past and
Present_ (Feb., 2006).
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