The impact of drought in early fourteenth‐century England

Climatic change is currently viewed as one of the main causes of the so‐called crisis of the early fourteenth century. It is well established that England saw increased storminess and heavy rainfall in this period, but this article suggests that the impact of drought—which became a common feature of the English climate during the 1320s and early 1330s—has been overlooked. Based primarily on a detailed analysis of account rolls for over 60 of the best‐documented manors in this period, the article establishes that drought brought devastating harvest failure and caused severe outbreaks of a number of diseases, plausibly including enteric infections, malaria, and winter and spring fevers. As a result, mortality surged and population levels fell in communities in affected regions, which were mainly confined to the southern and eastern counties of England. The article concludes that such regional variation significantly affects our understanding of demographic, agricultural, and even fiscal trends in this period. Although we should not disregard the human factors influencing the impact of environmental shocks, England was plainly struck with indubitable force by extreme weather in this pivotal phase of the medieval economy.     

Prices and real wages in seventeenth‐century Madrid

This article focuses on the evolution of real wages earned by building labourers and craftsmen in Madrid during the seventeenth century. After a substantial rise brought about by the arrival of the Court in 1561, real wages experienced a remarkable fall from 1621–30 onwards. Our thesis is that the fiscal and monetary policies pursued by the Crown to fund its ambitious imperial policy exerted a clear influence on this decline. The currency manipulations of the low‐value petty coin (maravedí) drove serious losses in the real wages of building labourers and craftsmen between 1621 and 1680. In the years around 1665 the real wages of both groups had fallen below the levels of 1561–1600, and the indirect taxes levied by the Crown and the town council contributed to keeping real wages stagnant at around the low levels of 1665–80 between 1681 and 1700. Although this issue merits further research, it seems unlikely that building labourers and craftsmen could have offset the decline in their real wages through an increase in the number of hours worked or a rise in the number of work days.     

Mortality, interest rates, investment, and agricultural production in 18th century England

This paper shows that the exogenous decline of adult mortality at the end of the 17th century can be one of the causes driving both the decline of interest rate and the increase in agricultural production per acre in pre-industrial England. Following the intuition of the life-cycle hypothesis, I claim that the increase in adult life expectancy must have implied less farmer impatience and it could have caused more investment in nitrogen stock and land fertility, the increase in agricultural land, and higher production per acre. I analyze this dynamic interaction using an overlapping generations model and show that the evolution of agricultural production and capital rates of return predicted by the model coincide fairly well with their empirical pattern.     

Gentlemen and shopkeepers: supplying the country house in eighteenth‐century England

The country house is well recognized as a site of elite patronage, an important vehicle of social and political ambition, and a statement of power and taste. Yet we know relatively little about the networks of supply and purchasing patterns of rural elites, or about how their practices related to broader changes in material culture. Drawing on a large sample of bills and receipts of the Leigh family of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, this article recreates the processes through which the material culture of the family home was constructed. These reveal London as the source for many high‐quality goods, although the pattern of supply was not a simple dichotomy of local–everyday and metropolitan–luxury purchases. They also show the large number of shopkeepers patronized as the Leighs spread their purchases through choice, convenience, and expediency. Relating this to wider conceptions of consumption, the Leighs emerge as engaging in layered and sometimes conflicting consumer cultures. They were concerned with fashion as novelty and a marker of rank; but they also valued traditional markers of status. Social distinction was achieved through a continued emphasis on title and lineage as much as fashion or taste—value systems that were unavailable to the middling sorts.     

Cottage industry,migration, and marriage in nineteenth‐century England

There has been considerable debate concerning the impact of the industrial employment of women upon their demographic behaviour in nineteenth‐century England. This article assesses the impact of employment in the cottage industry of straw plait and hat making in the county of Hertfordshire, comparing and contrasting districts where the industry was prominent with those where it was not. It is discovered that in 1851 the availability of straw industry employment encouraged earlier marriage, most notably in those parishes where the industry was particularly heavily concentrated, although overall levels of nuptiality and proportions ultimately marrying were similar in straw and non‐straw areas alike. By 1871, however, the skewed sex ratio that such employment produced among young adults served to offset this positive effect. As the industry waned in the later nineteenth century, the experience of different regions of the county converged, while throughout the period the data suggest that urban/rural contrasts and the suburbanization of London produced more stark contrasts in female marriage patterns than did the availability of cottage industry employment.     

Market structure and the coal cartel in early nineteenth‐century England1

Using counterfactual competitive prices, the effect of the north‐east coal cartel on prices is estimated at 13–17 per cent between 1816 and 1845. Non‐cartel producers were highly responsive to price changes, and their threat to the cartel was made credible by market integration facilitated by canals. The spread of railways had little impact on the cartel's market power. Highly inelastic demand and responsive supply from other regions meant that deadweight losses from the cartel were insignificant throughout this period.     

Explaining the short stature of the poor: chronic childhood disease and growth in nineteenth‐century England1

This article examines the relationship between human growth, final height, and the environment in early nineteenth‐century England. While the reasons for stuntedness are multifactoral and involve lack of nourishment and in utero conditions, we should also give emphasis to respiratory, gastro‐enteric, and bone disease along with the inadequate and sometimes harmful arrangements for convalescence, involving opiates and inadequate rest. Hard work and prevailing social attitudes slowed recovery and affected limb and organ development. While survival chances may have improved, and indeed were enhanced by measures such as targeted poor relief, quality of life for infants and children remained low and had an influence on their height as adults. The bodies of surviving working‐class children showed the burden of hard times.     

Silver production and the money supply in England and Wales, 1086–c.1500

The contribution of English and Welsh lead mines to the silver supplies of mints between Domesday Book and the end of the fifteenth century is assessed in this article, comparing evidence for the size of silver production with mint output data. It is shown that the proposal that northern Pennine mines were the principal source of the silver in the late twelfth‐century English currency is untenable. Welsh mines supplied limited amounts of silver to local mints around 1200. Devon silver made a significant but not predominant contribution to mint output at times of bullion scarcity in the 1290s and the mid‐fifteenth century. Imported silver was usually a greater source of the metal in the English currency than locally mined silver, and gold coins constituted most of England's money supply from the mid‐fourteenth century onwards.     

Turnpike trusts and property income: new evidence on the effects of transport improvements and legislation in eighteenth‐century England1

Numerous Acts of Parliament changed the financing of transport infrastructure in eighteenth‐century England. This paper examines the economic effects of turnpike acts, which greatly improved road infrastructure by introducing tolls. It shows that turnpike trusts increased property income in local areas by at least 20 per cent. The findings shed light on why local property owners promoted and managed turnpikes. They also show that turnpike trusts accounted for at least 20 per cent of the total growth in real land rents between 1690 and 1815, and added at least 1.65 per cent to national income in 1815.     

Bagehot for beginners: the making of lender‐of‐last‐resort operations in the mid‐nineteenth century1

In this article we develop new tools to survey the development of lending‐of‐last‐resort operations in the mid‐nineteenth century. One finding is that free lending and extensive liquidity support against good collateral developed gradually after 1847, and was already a fact of life before Bagehot published Lombard Street. Another is that the extension of the Bank of England's lender‐of‐last‐resort function went along with a reduction of its exposure to default risks, in contrast with accounts that have associated lending of last resort with moral hazard. Finally, we provide a new interpretation of the ‘high rates’ advocated by Bagehot. We suggest they were meant to prevent banks from free‐riding on the safety offered by the central bank, and were aimed at forcing them to keep lending during crises so as to maintain a critical degree of liquidity in the money market.     

Cities,market integration,and going to sea: stunting and the standard of living in early nineteenth‐century England and Wales1

A new source, 1840s Admiralty seamen's tickets, is used to explore three anthropometric issues. First, did being born in a city, with its associated disamenities, lead to stunting? Second, did being born near a city, whose markets sucked away foodstuffs, lead to stunting? Third, did child labour lead to stunting? We find that only those born in very large cities suffered a level of stunting that contemporaries could have observed. Being born near a city, which gave parents opportunities to trade away family calories, and perhaps increased exposure to disease, did not cause stunting. Britain was a well‐integrated market; all families, whatever their locations, had options to trade and faced similar disease environments. Finally, although adults who had gone to sea young were shorter than those who did not enlist until fully grown, going to sea did not stunt. Instead, plentiful food at sea attracted stunted adolescents, who reversed most of their stunting as a result. But child labour at sea was different from other forms of children's work because wages were largely hypothecated to the child as food and shelter onboard. In contrast, where wages were paid to the child or his parents in cash, they became submerged in the household economy and their benefits were shared with other family members.     

Prices and structural response in English agriculture, 1873–1896

This article examines an agricultural dimension of the `entrepreneurial failure' debate. It is often claimed that structural change in agriculture was retarded by the conservatism of agriculturalists in the south east who, allegedly, persisted with corn when price changes signalled a switch to meat and dairying. Existing price series and the price evidence as it appeared to farmers and landlords at the time are re-examined and shown to be neither clear nor consistent. The evidence suggests that contrasts in the fortunes of livestock and arable farmers have been exaggerated and that in this respect, even if not others, arable farmers were less irrational than their critics suppose.     

London creditors and the fifteenth‐century depression

Evidence of debts owed to Londoners, and contested before the royal Court of Common Pleas, allows an examination of the role of London creditors in the English depression of the fifteenth century and a reassessment of its causes. In this article, four main issues are examined. What is the nature of the Court of Common Pleas evidence (section I)? What were the three main forms of credit offered by Londoners—unsecured cash loans, sales of goods on credit, and written instruments called bonds (section II)? What is yielded by decadal analysis of Londoners’ extension of credit in the fifteenth century—making direct comparisons with Nightingale's published Statute Merchant and Staple data (section III)? What defines, in modern economic terms, the claim of so‐called ‘monetarist’ historians that credit was actively withdrawn during the depression, and how is this verified by the actions of London creditors (section IV)? It is concluded that the records of the Court of Common Pleas provide the detailed evidence monetarist historians have previously lacked both to prove that Londoners actively withdrew credit during the fifteenth century and to demonstrate that they employed pure equilibrium credit rationing in order to do so.