Demesne Farming Research Articles

Barns, granaries and security: crop storage, processing and investment in medieval England

ABSTRACT Increased storage capacity was an essential part of demesne farming in England, as many surviving barns indicate. Their size facilitated their use also as winter workplaces for threshing grain and pulses. Another use, although undocumented, was probably wool storage. Church estates in particular invested in them, but the later Middle Ages saw many, mostly smaller, barns built by prospering tenant farmers. They therefore had considerable social as well as commercial significance.

The Demesne Farm at Inch, 1738–56

During the 1770s, Arthur Young dismissed demesne farming as a source of income for Irish landlords, and instead he observed how such farms were geared towards supplying domestic requirements. This article provides a more nuanced consideration of demesne farming during the first half of the eighteenth century through a case study of the example belonging to the Tipperary estate of Daniel Ryan of Inch from 1738 to 1756. It will be shown that this farm acted as an important source of income for its owner, while also highlighting the responsiveness of the farming practices at Inch to price signals and changing market conditions.

Manors and states: the distribution and structure of private manors in early modern Scandinavia and their relation to state policies

ABSTRACTThis article explores the development of private manors in Scandinavia between the reformation and the eve of the great agrarian reforms in Denmark ca. 1770 and their relation to state policies. It compares Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Skåne and Schleswig-Holstein. Firstly, it analyses the amount of land held by private landlords and the internal structure of the landholding class. It shows that it changed considerably over time, but in very different ways in the different territories. This is explained by the interaction of the nobility or landholding classes with the state power. Secondly, the article looks at the economic and spatial structure of manors with specific attention to the degree of demesne farming based upon corvee. It is discussed to which degree these manors came to follow the path of Gutsherrschaft or demesne lordship associated with the lands south of the Baltic. Demesnes of Scandinavia were erected and enlarged out of a mixture of agricultural economic considerations, tax evasion and status needs. Also this differed with territory. Part of the explanation is a different structure of the nobility emerging from massive ennoblements in Sweden, but also in other direct or indirect ways the state furthered, hindered or checked the development.

Manorialisation and demographic pressure in medieval England: an analysis of the Hundred Rolls of 1279–1280

This study uses quantitative measurements, to examine the diversity of relationship between manorialisation and demographic pressure by landlord type and landscape region in thirteenth-century England. Classical manors have been considered to have classical structures, that is large scale and manor-parish coincidence, and to be dominated by demesne and customary tenements. However, factor analysis of the data from the Hundred Rolls of 1279–1280 shows that the two features were not always associated and that manorialisation was a two-dimensional process consisting of the development of classical structures and the dominance of demesne and unfree tenements. Therefore, the analysis reveals four types of parishes. First, there were highly manorialised parishes in both aspects where earlier-established ecclesiastical estates prevailed. Second, there were parishes that were occupied by one large manor but dominated by free tenements where earls' estates were prominent. Third, there were parishes divided into small manors comprised mainly of demesne and villein tenements as a result of the advance of demesne farming in lesser estates after 1066. Fourth, there were non-manorialised parishes separated into small manors dominated by free tenements. Many of these parishes had already been split into small manors in 1086. Further analysis shows that demographic pressure was independent of manorialisation. Although the eastern champion Midlands and western champion Midlands were similarly manorialised, demographic pressure was higher in the eastern part. Furthermore, in woodland, population growth and manorialisation were related in several ways. Demographic pressure was highest in East Anglian Heights while the level of freedom was highest in Arden Forest.

The Pipe Rolls and the Adoption of Demesne Farming in England

The Pipe Rolls and the Adoption of Demesne Farming in England

The Pipe Rolls and the Adoption of Demesne Farming in England

IT iS generally accepted that the management of landed estates in England changed radically between the mid-twelfth and the mid-thirteenth century with the introduction of demesne farming: manors were run by the landlord's local officers, answerable to him for all receipts and expenses, instead of by lessees who paid a predetermined annual rent. But even detailed studies of individual estates have failed to reveal much of the chronology of the change. Where they exist, private estate-accounts provide indisputable evidence; it is through these, for example, that we know that the estates of the bishop of Winchester were mostly under direct management by I208.1 But probably very few estates produced such written accounts in the early thirteenth century, and of these fewer still have survived: there is no other estate from which we have complete accounts before I 240 covering all the manors in its possession.2 A good deal of scattered evidence from individual places certainly survives. A document in the cartulary of Beaulieu Abbey, for instance, provides for an agreement over tithes of Little Faringdon (Oxfordshire) to come into effect when its demesne lands there, leased to men of the vill from Michaelmas 12I3, come under the abbey's direct management once more.3 But evidence of this sort, although valuable, is too haphazard to give us an overall picture. The present article attempts to provide this from the published Pipe Rolls of the Royal Exchequer from I I 55 to I 2 I 6.4

An Economic Explanation of English Agricultural Organization in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

IN a recent article in this journal, Edward Miller focuses on the curiously paradoxical development of class structures in twelfthand thirteenthcentury England.2 Despite a rising population and an expanding money economy in both centuries, the growing separation between landlord and entrepreneurial classes reversed itself for the duration of the thirteenth century. In Miller's words, the twelfth-century demise of manors to lessees for fixed returns3 was followed by a century in which managed their estates as speculative enterprises geared to expanding markets . . .4 Prof. Miller views the lord's choice of occupations-landlord or farm entrepreneur-as determined by the expected profitability of farming and/or his to economic enterprise. After presenting the evidence, Miller concludes that twelfth-century farm profits were not exceptionally low or variable.5 Hence logical necessity leads him to argue that the thirteenth-century behaviour of the manorial lords might well have been rooted in the policies and attitudes of landlords rather than in the basic economic situation 6 This approach suffers from two major weaknesses. The first is that neither changes in the landlord's preferences nor twelfthand thirteenth-century farm profits are observable in available records.7 As a result, neither hypothesis can be refuted and thereby eliminated as a possible explanation of the landlord's behaviour. The second weakness is the failure to make clear the link between profits and demesne farming.8 Traditionally, economic historians have equated low farm profits with demesne leasing. However, if farm profits are in fact low for all producers, why should anyone wish to lease the demesne? A more relevant

The Decline of Demesne Farming on the Estates of Durham Cathedral Priory

The Decline of Demesne Farming on the Estates of Durham Cathedral Priory

A Tuscan Monastic Lordship in the Later Middle Ages: Camaldoli

The rural economy of late medieval Italy displays many features and obeys many tendencies common to western Europe at the time. In the age of fully developed communes and nascent despotism it is customary to emphasise that peasant unfreedom and dependent tenure had as good as disappeared, demesne farming and labour services were forgotten, and seigneurial rights diminished or suppressed; where these things have been discovered to persist they are noticed as curious survivals from a different society. Income from land consisted of rents, which on the older estates of church and nobility were commonly fixed rents in money or kind, paid in perpetuity or to an increasing extent for a term of years or at pleasure. New landlords however were displacing the old, men of the urban oligarchies and middle class, who were harsher than their feudal predecessors and pursued an active agriculture by way of grants in mezzadria (sharecropping), protected in their interest by municipal statute. Among ecclesiastical lordships many monasteries succumbed to debt or moral decay, and ecclesiastical property fell victim to a fresh wave of lay encroachment, proceeding from the towns. In Lombardy and the north all classes of society sought their advantage in taking church land at nugatory rents to sublet for high profits or even in time to possess outright. A new cupidity was in the air.