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The economy of England 1450–1750
220
REVIEWS
For this reader at least, the most interesting pages are those touching on the wealth of observations recorded by nineteenth-century writers and practitioners of landscape improvement, such as Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson; through use of such sources a fascinating story is vigorously unravelled from the era of fermes ornkes and pleasure farms through successive incursions into the county of urban society with its demands for housing space and leisure pursuits. The golf course, a major social and landscape feature in Surrey, is not mentioned, but there is a fascinating map of the country houses designed by Shaw and Lutyens in the Home Counties. In contrast to the fuller treatment of the period after about 1750, the author has to contend in his earlier chapters with a lack of basic antiquarian and archaeological literature which makes his attempt to write a comprehensive chronological account difficult. The chapters on the prehistoric and Saxon periods are consequently more generalized than the later chapters in the volume. At times, too, the landscape is overpowerful. Ruskin might have seized upon phrases such as the “youthful Weald” (somehow developing itself, p. 38); or that “terrible antagonist” the Bagshot Sands, as good examples of his pathetic fallacy which accorded human attributes to Nature. Also interesting is the correlation made between the pace of house-building in Surrey and English coal production (p. 96), which is seemingly self-evident since no explanation of the relationship is offered. To what extent, also, would there be general agreement with the statement that “only the Green Belt concept saved Surrey from being just a vast commuter dormitory” (p. 121)? Has it saved the county, and, if the county has been saved, was this due merely to the Green Belt legislation? The format of the book may prove irritating to some readers: it omits references and the marginal captions, a feature of the series, are sometimes misleading (the picture of a harrow from the Bayeaux Tapestry should not have been placed against a paragraph dealing with heathen place-names such as Peper Harrow !). Generally, however, the book is to be welcomed because it fills a major gap in the history of the South East, a gap made the more glaring until now by the relatively greater inputs of scholarship devoted to neighbouring countries. University of Sussex
BRIAN SHORT
LEJLIECLARKSON,Death, Disease and Famine in Pre-industrial England (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975. Pp. 188. g8-75) D. C. COLEMAN,The Economy of England 1450-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Pp. viii+223. &3-75 and El.75 softback) B. A. HOLDERNESS,Pre-industrial England: Economy and Society from 1500 to 1750 (London: Dent, 1976. Pp. ix+244. f2.95) The early modern period continues to fascinate economic historians and while the flow of monographs and articles increases, the interval between textbooks diminishes. The reasons for this fascination are not hard to discover. Seen as a preamble to the first Industrial Revolution, the period poses the tantalizing problem of “why England?” and in its relatively more abundant evidence seems to offer us a greater chance of being able to answer that question. These attractions present potential pitfalls to the textbook writer : he must avoid adopting a teleological approach to the analysis of economic change in the period preceding the Industrial Revolution and he must resist the temptation of offering too-firm generalizations on the evidence of a statistically innocent age. The two textbooks here under review avoid these traps. Without feeling the need to assign dates or attach labels to what were slow and cumulative changes, Professor Coleman and Dr Holderness yet manage to provide a clear guide through the maze of recent studies. There emerges a certain consensus about the nature of economic change in the period. Neither book adopts terminal dates that challenge current orthodoxy, although Professor Coleman’s earlier start perhaps suggests that important
REVIEWS
221
reasons for England’s later precocity are to be found outside the early modern period, traditionally defined. Both emphasize that change occurred within an economy marked by strong elements of continuity. Demographic developments provide the main dynamic. After the lengthy late-medieval stagnation, there followed a long period of population growth into the seventeenth century. This stimulated an expansion in agricultural output which averted a general crisis of subsistence but could not prevent the inflation of prices. Population growth prompted the increasing polarization of rural society between a group of rural capitalists and a much larger body of landless labourers, and promoted increasing urbanization. Paradoxically, in these developments lay the seeds of England’s successful response to the demographic stagnation which dominates (at least nationally) the period 1650-1750. By a process of regional specialization-the development of new patterns of husbandry in light soil areas with access to urban markets, underwritten, in part, by the provision of capital within the landlord-tenant relationship-bringing increasing agricultural productivity, England managed to escape the retreat into subsistence which low prices precipitated in peasant-dominated European economies. The resulting gain in the real wages of a large labouring population formed the basis of an expanding home market for the products of a diversifying manufacturing sector. As Professor Coleman observes, these differences in agricultural productivity and home market are perhaps among the most important reasons explaining England’s divergence from the fate of continental economies. Within this overall consensus, there is some difference of emphasis and approach. Professor Coleman is perhaps the more rigorous. He makes explicit his model of the early modern economy at the outset; Dr Holderness’s model comes late in the book and is essentially descriptive. Professor Coleman divides the period into two halves falling either side of 1650, devoting a separate chapter to each of the sectors of the economy in both of his sub-periods-a device which has the merit of allowing him to emphasize important later developments which set England increasingly apart from continental economies; Dr Holderness presents a series of chapters examining each sector of the economy over the whole of the period. Professor Coleman writes with concise authority and offers a sure analysis without straining the evidence, qualities which will recommend him respectively to student and teacher. Dr Holderness offers more detail and explores some important areas at greater length (such as the home market, in a chapter which suggests how much there is stiIl to research), but his interesting material perhaps lacks an effective framework to point up the interrelationships between changes in the various sectors and to pick out the chronology of change. Happy the student who could afford the time and money to read both. Today’s student market, however, is not unlike the nascent consumer society of early modern England in its behaviour; the relative prices of the two books suggest that it is Professor Coleman’s publishers who best understand this particular history lesson. That demography plays such a prominent role underlines the need for a demographic history of the period. This is not Dr Clarkson’s aim; nor could a book concentrating on the debit side of the demographic equation provide such a history. Himself the author of an earlier textbook on the period which deserves to continue to be read, he writes here for a lay audience, his purpose in part edification, but mainly entertainment. He has perhaps underestimated the level of informed lay knowledge (uide the lively journal Local Population Studies). While the first half of the book presents a synthesis of fairly recent studies of mortality (with a useful discussion of the relative role of various diseases), the later parts devote too much space and dubious numerical ingenuity to causes of death which, it is finally conceded, had little or no relevance to English experience. Though the book is not without (unintentional?) humour“Before the mid-seventeenth century, at least one in twelve of the English aristocracy endured the anguish of the stone”, Dr Clarkson informs us-for edification we must await the riches of the Cambridge Group’s promised volumes. University of Essex
JOHN WALTER
REVIEWS
For this reader at least, the most interesting pages are those touching on the wealth of observations recorded by nineteenth-century writers and practitioners of landscape improvement, such as Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson; through use of such sources a fascinating story is vigorously unravelled from the era of fermes ornkes and pleasure farms through successive incursions into the county of urban society with its demands for housing space and leisure pursuits. The golf course, a major social and landscape feature in Surrey, is not mentioned, but there is a fascinating map of the country houses designed by Shaw and Lutyens in the Home Counties. In contrast to the fuller treatment of the period after about 1750, the author has to contend in his earlier chapters with a lack of basic antiquarian and archaeological literature which makes his attempt to write a comprehensive chronological account difficult. The chapters on the prehistoric and Saxon periods are consequently more generalized than the later chapters in the volume. At times, too, the landscape is overpowerful. Ruskin might have seized upon phrases such as the “youthful Weald” (somehow developing itself, p. 38); or that “terrible antagonist” the Bagshot Sands, as good examples of his pathetic fallacy which accorded human attributes to Nature. Also interesting is the correlation made between the pace of house-building in Surrey and English coal production (p. 96), which is seemingly self-evident since no explanation of the relationship is offered. To what extent, also, would there be general agreement with the statement that “only the Green Belt concept saved Surrey from being just a vast commuter dormitory” (p. 121)? Has it saved the county, and, if the county has been saved, was this due merely to the Green Belt legislation? The format of the book may prove irritating to some readers: it omits references and the marginal captions, a feature of the series, are sometimes misleading (the picture of a harrow from the Bayeaux Tapestry should not have been placed against a paragraph dealing with heathen place-names such as Peper Harrow !). Generally, however, the book is to be welcomed because it fills a major gap in the history of the South East, a gap made the more glaring until now by the relatively greater inputs of scholarship devoted to neighbouring countries. University of Sussex
BRIAN SHORT
LEJLIECLARKSON,Death, Disease and Famine in Pre-industrial England (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975. Pp. 188. g8-75) D. C. COLEMAN,The Economy of England 1450-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Pp. viii+223. &3-75 and El.75 softback) B. A. HOLDERNESS,Pre-industrial England: Economy and Society from 1500 to 1750 (London: Dent, 1976. Pp. ix+244. f2.95) The early modern period continues to fascinate economic historians and while the flow of monographs and articles increases, the interval between textbooks diminishes. The reasons for this fascination are not hard to discover. Seen as a preamble to the first Industrial Revolution, the period poses the tantalizing problem of “why England?” and in its relatively more abundant evidence seems to offer us a greater chance of being able to answer that question. These attractions present potential pitfalls to the textbook writer : he must avoid adopting a teleological approach to the analysis of economic change in the period preceding the Industrial Revolution and he must resist the temptation of offering too-firm generalizations on the evidence of a statistically innocent age. The two textbooks here under review avoid these traps. Without feeling the need to assign dates or attach labels to what were slow and cumulative changes, Professor Coleman and Dr Holderness yet manage to provide a clear guide through the maze of recent studies. There emerges a certain consensus about the nature of economic change in the period. Neither book adopts terminal dates that challenge current orthodoxy, although Professor Coleman’s earlier start perhaps suggests that important
REVIEWS
221
reasons for England’s later precocity are to be found outside the early modern period, traditionally defined. Both emphasize that change occurred within an economy marked by strong elements of continuity. Demographic developments provide the main dynamic. After the lengthy late-medieval stagnation, there followed a long period of population growth into the seventeenth century. This stimulated an expansion in agricultural output which averted a general crisis of subsistence but could not prevent the inflation of prices. Population growth prompted the increasing polarization of rural society between a group of rural capitalists and a much larger body of landless labourers, and promoted increasing urbanization. Paradoxically, in these developments lay the seeds of England’s successful response to the demographic stagnation which dominates (at least nationally) the period 1650-1750. By a process of regional specialization-the development of new patterns of husbandry in light soil areas with access to urban markets, underwritten, in part, by the provision of capital within the landlord-tenant relationship-bringing increasing agricultural productivity, England managed to escape the retreat into subsistence which low prices precipitated in peasant-dominated European economies. The resulting gain in the real wages of a large labouring population formed the basis of an expanding home market for the products of a diversifying manufacturing sector. As Professor Coleman observes, these differences in agricultural productivity and home market are perhaps among the most important reasons explaining England’s divergence from the fate of continental economies. Within this overall consensus, there is some difference of emphasis and approach. Professor Coleman is perhaps the more rigorous. He makes explicit his model of the early modern economy at the outset; Dr Holderness’s model comes late in the book and is essentially descriptive. Professor Coleman divides the period into two halves falling either side of 1650, devoting a separate chapter to each of the sectors of the economy in both of his sub-periods-a device which has the merit of allowing him to emphasize important later developments which set England increasingly apart from continental economies; Dr Holderness presents a series of chapters examining each sector of the economy over the whole of the period. Professor Coleman writes with concise authority and offers a sure analysis without straining the evidence, qualities which will recommend him respectively to student and teacher. Dr Holderness offers more detail and explores some important areas at greater length (such as the home market, in a chapter which suggests how much there is stiIl to research), but his interesting material perhaps lacks an effective framework to point up the interrelationships between changes in the various sectors and to pick out the chronology of change. Happy the student who could afford the time and money to read both. Today’s student market, however, is not unlike the nascent consumer society of early modern England in its behaviour; the relative prices of the two books suggest that it is Professor Coleman’s publishers who best understand this particular history lesson. That demography plays such a prominent role underlines the need for a demographic history of the period. This is not Dr Clarkson’s aim; nor could a book concentrating on the debit side of the demographic equation provide such a history. Himself the author of an earlier textbook on the period which deserves to continue to be read, he writes here for a lay audience, his purpose in part edification, but mainly entertainment. He has perhaps underestimated the level of informed lay knowledge (uide the lively journal Local Population Studies). While the first half of the book presents a synthesis of fairly recent studies of mortality (with a useful discussion of the relative role of various diseases), the later parts devote too much space and dubious numerical ingenuity to causes of death which, it is finally conceded, had little or no relevance to English experience. Though the book is not without (unintentional?) humour“Before the mid-seventeenth century, at least one in twelve of the English aristocracy endured the anguish of the stone”, Dr Clarkson informs us-for edification we must await the riches of the Cambridge Group’s promised volumes. University of Essex
JOHN WALTER