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Fourth Anglo-American Seminar on the Medieval Economy and Society, Leicester, July 1992
Jozrrnal of Historical
Geography,
18, 4 (1992) 461463
Conference report Fourth Anglo-American Seminar on the Medieval Economy and Society, Leicester, July 1992
When, in 1936,H. C. Darby published his pioneering An Historical Geography of England b&ore A.D. 1800, four of the fourteen chapters were devoted to the period 1000-1500,comprising 30% of the entire volume. Just over fifty years and a lot of historical geography later this same 500-yearperiod merited only two of the nineteen chapters in R. A. Dodgshon and R. A. Butlin’s revised 1990 edition of An Historical Geography of England and Wales, a mere 14% of the total. Moreover, in the most recent register of researchof the Institute of British Geographers’ Historical Geography Research Group (HGRG), topics on the lat.e-medievalperiod are outnumbered nine to one by those on later periods. Seemingly, interest in the Middle Ages by British historical geographers has waned dramatically since its hey-day in the middle years of this century. It is therefore something of a paradox that the triennial Anglo-American Seminar on the Medieval Economy and Society-as Paul Glennie (Bristol), current chairman of the HGRG, acknowledged when welcoming those attending-has become one of the most successfulof all the HGRG’s activities, eagerly awaited by the inter-disciplinary and multi-national band of academics who regularly attend it. On this occasion 61 scholars from nine different countries stretched the seminar’s now traditional round-table format to its limits. The point of a round-table, as King Arthur long ago recognized, is to eliminate all distinctions of rank and status. This is a conference with no organising committee, no inner cabal, and no respect for conventional disciplinary boundaries. It takes place in a hotel, since people are more relaxed and positive when well fed and given comfortable beds, and over the course of a weekend features only six papers plus a symposium and half-day excursion (the last, invariably sun-drenchedand on this occasion expertly led into deepestCounty Rutland by Charles Phythian-Adams and Harold Fox of the Department of English Local History, Leicester). What, however, made it so peculiarly successful was the quality of the participants. People came becausethey know they would meet many of the most active scholars in the field and the challenge of that audience put speakers on their metal, thus ensuring an exceptionally high standard of presentation and discussion. The seminar opened and closed with papers on urban topics, although viewed from opposite ends of the urban and social hierarchies. Caroline Barron (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College), in the difficult post-dinner slot on the first evening, roused her audience from their potential slumbers with a witty and 030-7488/92/040461+
03 $08.00/O
461
0 1992 Academic
Press Limited
462
CONFERENCE
REPORT
erudite exploration of the changing economic and social relationships between the aristocracy and London’s merchant class as revealedby household accounts during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two nights later Anne and Edwin Dewindt (Detroit) brought the seminar to a resounding close with a report on their long-running researchesinto the small fen-edgeHuntingdonshire town of Ramsey and someof its more humble inhabitants. The dilemma in their casewas how to distinguish real from apparent changeover a long interval of time when the sources themselves are changing. Common to both papers was a concern with the extent to which urban prosperity was dependentupon the consumption patterns of the landed elite, but sustainedand wide-ranging discussion took both far beyond their initial agendas. Medievalists, as Barron and the Dewindts demonstrated, tend to relish their sources, and rightly so since these are often remarkable in their detail and quantity. Nor are the requisite skills of Latin and palaeography lightly gained. Paul Harvey’s (Durham) exposition of the origins and development of one of the most remarkable and celebrated of those sources-the manorial account-was therefore guaranted to fascinate.Altogether rarer are the lists of landless tenants maintained by Glastonbury Abbey in the late-thirteenth century, which allowed Harold Fox (Leicester) to probe behind the artificial screenof tenurial fictions on three Somerset manors in as polished and ingenious a piece of historical detection as one could ever wish to hear. These were both very much empirical papers, firmly rooted in specific documentation, and elicited a ready response from an audienceplainly far more at easewith the particularities of period and place than the challenge of grand theory and speculation. Yet it was precisely the latter that Paul Bairoch (Geneva) offered in his guest paper on European urbanisation in its world context before and after 1492.Many were clearly ill at easewith the assumptions, methodology and wide margins of error entailed in estimating urbanisation at the level of entire continents, which was a pity, for the paper offered a valuable corrective to traditional views on the superiority of European urbanisation at the close of the Middle Ages. If European hegemony was a relatively late and decidedly post-medieval phenomenon, the years of European economic and demographic expansion between 1000 and 1300 neverthelesswitnessed significant progress. A major symposium on “Commercialisation 100&l 300”, chaired by Derek Keene (London) and primed by precirculated papers from Richard Britnell (Durham), David Farmer (Saskatchewan), Nicholas Mayhew (Oxford) and Graeme !snooks (Australian National University), focused upon what has become an important t.hemein much recent writing on this period. The juxtaposition of contributions by theorists and empiricists exposedthe difficulty of establishing a genuine dialogue betweenthem. It is a rare historian who can match the kind of fusion between theory and evidenceachieved by the late M. M. Postan, whose ideas and interpretations continue to haunt medieval debate. While all now agree that market transactions, commercial activity, and the amount of money in circulation increasedat a faster rate than population between 1000and 1300 there is considerable debate as to the magnitude of the change effected,whether or not rising per capita gross national product resulted, and, if so, the extent to which this was translated into improved living standards. One key area clearly requiring closer investigation concerns the growth of factor markets, in land, labour and capital. In this respect Robert Stacey’s (Washington) paper on Jewish lending and the English economy provided a fine example of the kind of
CONFERENCE REPORT
463
insights that can still be achieved using conventional historical methods. It also served as a salutary reminder that medieval monarchs, like many of their subjects, sometimes acted in ways which were at variance with their economic be;stinterests. The Queen’s University of Berfast
BRUCE M. S. CAMPBELL
Geography,
18, 4 (1992) 461463
Conference report Fourth Anglo-American Seminar on the Medieval Economy and Society, Leicester, July 1992
When, in 1936,H. C. Darby published his pioneering An Historical Geography of England b&ore A.D. 1800, four of the fourteen chapters were devoted to the period 1000-1500,comprising 30% of the entire volume. Just over fifty years and a lot of historical geography later this same 500-yearperiod merited only two of the nineteen chapters in R. A. Dodgshon and R. A. Butlin’s revised 1990 edition of An Historical Geography of England and Wales, a mere 14% of the total. Moreover, in the most recent register of researchof the Institute of British Geographers’ Historical Geography Research Group (HGRG), topics on the lat.e-medievalperiod are outnumbered nine to one by those on later periods. Seemingly, interest in the Middle Ages by British historical geographers has waned dramatically since its hey-day in the middle years of this century. It is therefore something of a paradox that the triennial Anglo-American Seminar on the Medieval Economy and Society-as Paul Glennie (Bristol), current chairman of the HGRG, acknowledged when welcoming those attending-has become one of the most successfulof all the HGRG’s activities, eagerly awaited by the inter-disciplinary and multi-national band of academics who regularly attend it. On this occasion 61 scholars from nine different countries stretched the seminar’s now traditional round-table format to its limits. The point of a round-table, as King Arthur long ago recognized, is to eliminate all distinctions of rank and status. This is a conference with no organising committee, no inner cabal, and no respect for conventional disciplinary boundaries. It takes place in a hotel, since people are more relaxed and positive when well fed and given comfortable beds, and over the course of a weekend features only six papers plus a symposium and half-day excursion (the last, invariably sun-drenchedand on this occasion expertly led into deepestCounty Rutland by Charles Phythian-Adams and Harold Fox of the Department of English Local History, Leicester). What, however, made it so peculiarly successful was the quality of the participants. People came becausethey know they would meet many of the most active scholars in the field and the challenge of that audience put speakers on their metal, thus ensuring an exceptionally high standard of presentation and discussion. The seminar opened and closed with papers on urban topics, although viewed from opposite ends of the urban and social hierarchies. Caroline Barron (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College), in the difficult post-dinner slot on the first evening, roused her audience from their potential slumbers with a witty and 030-7488/92/040461+
03 $08.00/O
461
0 1992 Academic
Press Limited
462
CONFERENCE
REPORT
erudite exploration of the changing economic and social relationships between the aristocracy and London’s merchant class as revealedby household accounts during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two nights later Anne and Edwin Dewindt (Detroit) brought the seminar to a resounding close with a report on their long-running researchesinto the small fen-edgeHuntingdonshire town of Ramsey and someof its more humble inhabitants. The dilemma in their casewas how to distinguish real from apparent changeover a long interval of time when the sources themselves are changing. Common to both papers was a concern with the extent to which urban prosperity was dependentupon the consumption patterns of the landed elite, but sustainedand wide-ranging discussion took both far beyond their initial agendas. Medievalists, as Barron and the Dewindts demonstrated, tend to relish their sources, and rightly so since these are often remarkable in their detail and quantity. Nor are the requisite skills of Latin and palaeography lightly gained. Paul Harvey’s (Durham) exposition of the origins and development of one of the most remarkable and celebrated of those sources-the manorial account-was therefore guaranted to fascinate.Altogether rarer are the lists of landless tenants maintained by Glastonbury Abbey in the late-thirteenth century, which allowed Harold Fox (Leicester) to probe behind the artificial screenof tenurial fictions on three Somerset manors in as polished and ingenious a piece of historical detection as one could ever wish to hear. These were both very much empirical papers, firmly rooted in specific documentation, and elicited a ready response from an audienceplainly far more at easewith the particularities of period and place than the challenge of grand theory and speculation. Yet it was precisely the latter that Paul Bairoch (Geneva) offered in his guest paper on European urbanisation in its world context before and after 1492.Many were clearly ill at easewith the assumptions, methodology and wide margins of error entailed in estimating urbanisation at the level of entire continents, which was a pity, for the paper offered a valuable corrective to traditional views on the superiority of European urbanisation at the close of the Middle Ages. If European hegemony was a relatively late and decidedly post-medieval phenomenon, the years of European economic and demographic expansion between 1000 and 1300 neverthelesswitnessed significant progress. A major symposium on “Commercialisation 100&l 300”, chaired by Derek Keene (London) and primed by precirculated papers from Richard Britnell (Durham), David Farmer (Saskatchewan), Nicholas Mayhew (Oxford) and Graeme !snooks (Australian National University), focused upon what has become an important t.hemein much recent writing on this period. The juxtaposition of contributions by theorists and empiricists exposedthe difficulty of establishing a genuine dialogue betweenthem. It is a rare historian who can match the kind of fusion between theory and evidenceachieved by the late M. M. Postan, whose ideas and interpretations continue to haunt medieval debate. While all now agree that market transactions, commercial activity, and the amount of money in circulation increasedat a faster rate than population between 1000and 1300 there is considerable debate as to the magnitude of the change effected,whether or not rising per capita gross national product resulted, and, if so, the extent to which this was translated into improved living standards. One key area clearly requiring closer investigation concerns the growth of factor markets, in land, labour and capital. In this respect Robert Stacey’s (Washington) paper on Jewish lending and the English economy provided a fine example of the kind of
CONFERENCE REPORT
463
insights that can still be achieved using conventional historical methods. It also served as a salutary reminder that medieval monarchs, like many of their subjects, sometimes acted in ways which were at variance with their economic be;stinterests. The Queen’s University of Berfast
BRUCE M. S. CAMPBELL