Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture

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Abstract
This book uses manorial account rolls innovatively to reconstruct the economic mentalities of medieval farmers and, by so doing, argues that they have been unfairly stereotyped. It overturns the traditional view of medieval countrymen as economically backward and instead reveals that agricultural decision-making was as rational in the 14th and 15th centuries as in modern times. It investigates agricultural mentalities first in a detailed case study of the exceptionally well-documented demesne farm of Wisbech Barton, analysing the sale and consumption of produce, cereal-cropping strategies, crop rotations, the use of agrarian techniques, and livestock husbandry in four periods between 1313 and 1429. The last third of the book then tests the findings of this case study across medieval England as a whole. The book argues that human action shaped the course of the rural economy to a much greater extent than has hitherto been appreciated, and challenges the commonly held view that the medieval period was dominated by ecological and economic crises. In particular, it argues that rational decision-making rather than soil exhaustion or climatic change lay behind declining arable and pastoral yields at this time, and that the change in demesne management from direct cultivation to leasing during the later Middle Ages was partly the result of a managerial crisis. Although focused chiefly on well-documented farms of great landlords, the book also has crucial implications for our understanding of medieval peasant farming, not least the yield of their land, which may well have been significantly higher than is generally assumed.

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