Risk, transaction costs, and the organization of medieval agriculture

Explorations

in Economic

History

13,129-

I5 1 (1976)

Risk, Transaction Costs, and the Organization of Medieval Agriculture* STEFANO

Department

FENOALTEA

of Economics, Amherst College, Amherst,

Massachusetts

I. INTRODUCTION After generations of research by qualified historians, medieval agriculture has of late received the attention of qualified economists as well. In the best tradition of neoclassical economics, these “new” economic historians have set out to explain the rationality-the efficiency, if one prefers-of the prevailing forms of organization; and‘in silent tribute to economic doctrine they have specialized in different empirical problems. McCloskey (1972) examines the organization of peasant holdings, which were typically fragmented into many separate plots. Fragmentation, he argues, implies high costs of travel, external effects, and forced coordination; the increase in rent associated with enclosures places the cost of scattering at about 7% of output. After pointing out that the traditional arguments for scattering-from partible inheritance, egalitarianism, and the like--all imply inefficiency, McCloskey concludes that “the one explanation of scattering . . . that withstands this simple criticism is that strips were scattered to reduce risk. It withstands it because villagers did not have cheap access to markets in risk, that is, insurance, as they did in land, labor, and output” (p. 19). North and Thomas (197 1) instead analyze the “classic” manor, in which the lord’s demesne was cultivated largely by the unpaid labor of peasants who lived off the produce of their own land. This labor-sharing system was costly to enforce, they explain, because the workers on the demesne had an incentive to shirk unless they were supervised; it was justified all the same, they argue, because it was so much cheaper to negotiate than any feasible alternative. In point of fact, however, that saving in negotiation costs appears almost negligible, so labor services cannot be explained by transaction costs alone (Fenoaltea, 1975a); an alternative explanation is indicated by North and Thomas themselves, as they also claim for labor sharing “the possible advantage of spreading the risk between parties according to their relative shares” (p. 789). While they do not develop this argument any further, it clearly represents a second string that might effectively accomplish what *This paper owes much to discussion by the Greater Cambridge Economic Historians, the Ralph Beals, John Lambelet, Waiter participants at the 1975 Cliometrics Conference, Nicholson, Gary Walton, and especially Don McCIoskey and Frank Westhoff. I also wish to repeat my thanks to those who commented on the long essay from which the present and its companion pieces are derived, and ask them to forgive this collective acknowledgment.

129 Copyright @ 1976 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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their first could not; and its logic is wholly analogous to, and perfectly congruent with, the parallel explanation advocated by McCloskey. Here, then, are all the elements of a unified explanation of medieval agricultural organization: Both the peasants’ lands and the lords’ were exploited in a way that effectively reduced the output obtained from given inputs; this loss of productivity represents not inefficiency but a cost the peasants willingly bore in order to reduce the variation of their incomes from year to year. The argument is close kin to much analysis of more recent agricultural systems; it is a direct application of economic theory; it is simple yet comprehensive; it is immensely attractive; and it is wrong. As the fwttowing pages will endeavor to show, considerations of risk and transaction costs have altogether different implications for the organization of medieval agriculture. The proposed argument from risk aversion is in fact exactly on a par with its predecessors in the literature: The significant loss of productivity still implies inefficiency, since labor sharing or scattering within the village’s consolidated arable did not stabilize aggregate output at all, and individual households could cheaply redistribute any given aggregate output among themselves (Section II). A review of the available opportunities to reduce risk suggests rather that the reluctance to disperse the arable and stabilize aggregate output was justified by the relative cheapness and effectiveness of insurance by storage (Section III). While the evidence on inventories is admittedly fragmentary and inchoate, the surviving buildings especially suggest that storage was indeed considerable; for all that, of course, repeated harvest failures and income inequality would still cause widespread hunger (Section IV). There is also reason to believe that the open fields did not sacrifice productivity at all: Social consolidation with central regulation minimized negative externalities, and the diversification of individual portfolios saved transaction costs in the allocation of labor (Section V). The plausible origins of the system support the view that private scattering was thus designed to maximize productivity by optimizing self-employment; and its demise does not contradict it, since the rent increase with enclosures in no way measures the productivity cost of scattering before the agricultural revolution (Section VI). In sum, aversion to risk seems to have determined not the organization of the arable but the allocation of real income between saving and consumption; and while labor services appear to require a different model (Fenoaltea, 1975b) the organization of peasant tenures, at least, can be adequately explained by the pursuit of productivity in the presence of transaction costs. II. THE RISK ECONOMIC

HYPOTHESIS EFFICIENCY

AND

The interpretation of medieval agrarian institutions as behavior toward risk argues that peasants accepted a significant reduction in their productivity in order to stabilize their output. In the aggregate, however, neither

MEDIEVAL

AGRICULTURE

131

labor services on the demesne nor the scattering of strips within the open fields altered the portfolio of land under cultivation. The stabilization of individual incomes by exchanging rights to given property stabilized not aggregate output but only individual shares in aggregate output; and that benefit was hardly worth a significant loss in productivity, since it could have been cheaply obtained through interpersonal credit.’ Consider first the insurance benefits of scattering. Had plots been consolidated, peasants could have brought individual availabilities into line with average (“permanent”) shares of aggregate availabilities by suitably extending or repaying consumption loans among themselves; and such loans would have been only a marginal addition-and, as we shall see, a particularly inexpensive one-to an already flourishing loan market. In France, for instance, peasants borrowed to undertake investment projects; they bought goods on credit from merchants; they borrowed from usurers, typically through a forward sale of their crops; they borrowed from each other to buy durables or consumables; and they even issued negotiable perpetuities (Duby, 1968, pp. 252-255). In England, “money was borrowed left and right,” albeit relatively infrequently from professional moneylenders: The sums required to purchase land (or to pay an entry fine, which similarly capitalized future yields) appear to have been obtained in the main from within the village society (Postan, 1972, pp. 136-137; also Hilton, 1966, p. 164). The real costs of this counterfactual substitute for scattering appear almost negligible. The typical imperfections of capital markets-the lender’s concern over, and ignorance of, the borrower’s solvency and reliability-are here almost nonexistent: ex hypothesi, the parties to the loan are settled peasants with strong ties to the land and to each other, fellow members of that close-knit middle class that held most of the village arable (Hilton, 1966, pp. 113 ff., 161 ff.; also Maitland, 1897, pp. 38 ff.).z Unlike loans to default-prone “bad risks”3 or loans “for investment projects” (which do not just smooth consumption but anticipate it), ’ In fact, the stabilization of output would not appear to warrant a significant productivity loss even if it did nor disappear upon aggregation, and this for two reasons. The first is that the risk of hunger-the probability that output will be below a critical subsistence threshold-is increased by the reduction in average output even as it is decreased by the reduction in the variance of output; and the former effect may well dominate the latter, particularly if average output is not far above subsistence to begin with. The second, which we shall develop below, is that risk-the prospect of unstable or inadequate consumption-could be cheaply reduced without stabilizing output, simply by storing reserves. *This market thus appears analogous to that between colleagues in (say) an academic department. On the importance of social bonds to the smooth working of markets and self-interest see, for instance, Banfield (1958); note that village solidarity would make loans more, not less, risky for an alien usurer. 3To cover this risk, it may be noted, present-day bail bondsmen will receive 10% on a loan of from I to 3 months; but rates on loans to “bad risks” are atypical, and usurers’ rates need not be a “sign of the economic vulnerability of the entire peasantry” (Duby, 1970, p. 38). Fossier (1968, p. 453 n) reports a land sale which capitalized income at about 7%: see also pp. 603 ff.

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moreover, the loans in question here are relatively unaffected by the interest rate. Since the sequence of deviations from average shares of aggregate output is essentially random, ex ante each individual’s expected net borrowing is zero in each period whatever the interest rate, and a higher interest rate is as likely to make one richer as a lender as to make one poorer as a borrower. Since expected lifetime consumption is thus invariant to this interest rate, and since these loans are rationed not by price but directly by the deviations from permanent relative income, this market would “clear” even with an interest rate of zero. On this count also, then, these counterfactual substitutes for scattering appear socially cheaper than many of the loans that did take place: not because interest payments within a community are a social cost as such, but because the prevailing ethical norms encouraged “charitable” loans even as they condemned the taking of interest.4 Unlike comprehensive output insurance or agrarian communism, finally, lending redistributes current output without affecting incentives to work, since lifetime consumption is still bound by one’s own wealth and diligence. Redistribution by interpeasant credit is thus perfectly compatible with the maximization of productivity, allowing all the insurance benefits of scattering without reducing average consumption at a11.5 The villagers’ relation to the lord could of course affect the aggregate availabilities of the peasant community; but as a means of shedding risk labor sharing appears to have accomplished little, and even that little could be better accomplished in other ways. The first reason labor sharing accomplished little is that the lord exercised his prior claim to labor at the busy times of the agricultural cycle.6 The risk of time running out (e.g., of a heavy rain spoiling part of the harvest before it could be brought in) was thus borne almost exclusively by the peasants; and it is even conceivable that the increase in their risk from this asymmetry of labor sharing more than offset the decrease in their risk from not owing a fixed rent. The second and more fundamental reason is that the impact of land-tenure arrangements on the distribution of risk was limited directly by the differences in status and power which were at the heart of medieval social organization. In normal times, the lord may have limited his depredations, if only to preserve his peasants’ incentives to work;7 but who can doubt that when food supplies ran ‘The

injunction

to lend

without

usury

may

be seen

as useful

pressure

to avoid

costly

self-in-

surance; as in other cases (Fenoaltea, 1975a, n. 20), medieval moral precepts do not appear to deserve all the opprobrium later centuries have lavished upon them. 5Even though community pressure (including the threat of violence) would discourage those who might find it momentarily profitable to withdraw from the credit pool, internal credit provides no insurance against general harvest failures; but neither of course does scattering. eThis appears to be a constant feature of medieval labor sharing (see Ault, 1972, pp. 28-29; Bloch, 1966, p. pp. 190 ff.). The nomic efficiency ‘This was not been the typical

73; Duby, 1968, p. 210; Fossier, 1968, p. 407; Hilton, 1966, p. 158; Raftis, 1957, lord’s prior claim to labor (as to manure) does not seem incompatible with eco(see Fenoaltea, 197513). always the case, however, at least in more recent times; and it may not have case in the early Middle Ages (see Kula, 1970, p, 46; Fenoaltea, 1975b).

MEDIEVAL

133

AGRICULTURE

low the lord’s table was the last to be denuded? Within such a framework, any attempt by the peasants to shift the risk of hunger and privation to the lord, by labor sharing or otherwise, would have been palpably futile. To the extent that lord and peasant did live off their own, moreover, the consumption-stabilizing benefits of labor services could have been achieved by combining credit with a system of fixed rents that avoided the incentive and supervision costs of dependent labor on the demesne. In fact, such credit was central to the bond between lord and man, as the manor was ab initio a unit of insurance as well as exploitation;s and the sources show it was resorted to as a matter of course.g At times, the transfer from lord to peasant appears gratuitous: At Whitchurch, for instance, we find that rents were halved because the harvest failed, and remitted outright-some for 5 years-in the wake of a destructive raid (Pollard, 1972, p. 560). But the lord who thus stood ready to bear the cost of acts of God (which he could do without damaging incentives) would retain his tenants at higher rents than he could otherwise collect; so this ostensible charity is perhaps best understood as insurance in the strictest sense of the term. The truly charitable institution of medieval Europe was of course the Church. Through (or as) the parish church, the village took care of its own, the tithe being designed precisely to relieve misfortune (Hilton, 1966, p. 149; Slither van Bath, 1963, p. 53); and the monastic foundations routinely fed many hundreds of beggars (Fossier, 1968, pp. 204, 228; Knowles, 1940, pp. 482 ff.). Of course, poor relief was directed at the poor, and it was thus normally of little relevance to the relatively prosperous village landowners (except to the extent that it might reduce the supply of labor from the ablebodied poor, a contingency these petty capitalists took pains to avoid; Ault, 1972, pp. 81 ff.); but entire communities would seek help from the monasteries when great adversity brought them face to face with hunger (Duby, 1968, p. 123; Lucas, 1930, p. 362).‘O It is thus clear that medieval society allowed interpersonal redistributions of current output through a variety of means normally compatible with the *See, obtained

for instance, from them,

discussion

on this

Bloch (1961, his insurance

theme

see Hicks,

Parts IV, V). Since did not make them 1969;

North

and

the lord insured better off than Thomas,

1971;

the villagers free peasants Fenoaltea,

with (for

surplus further

1975a).

8“In years when corn was scarce and prices high the villeins would borrow wheat from the demesne granary, to be repaid either in cash or in kind after the harvest” (Harvey, 1965, p. 129; note also the role of the reeve as financial intermediary between the estate and the tenants, p. 66). On the great estates, individual manors were often in arrears (see Raftis, 1957, pp. 253-256,292-301,324-328). “‘In a small community where granted to those in need because their own negligence: To preserve

production takes place in the open, charity could readily of an act of God and yet be denied to those in need because incentives, only the halt and the lame would be entitled

be of to

support without the quid pro quo of diligent effort. Of course, the monasteries insured whole communities not merely as charitable collectors of current surplus but as holders of vast stores; this is returned to below. (For a sobering estimate of their charity in ordinary times, see Dickinson, 1961, p. 125; and recall the argument in note 8 above.)

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preservation of incentives and productivity. Had medieval agriculture really been so organized as to sacrifice productivity merely to stabilize individual shares in aggregate income, it would have been a monument of inefficiency-just as if aggregate output had been pointlessly sacrificed in order, say, to maintain equality. The proposed argument from risk aversion is thus no more attractive than the hypotheses popular decades ago: As an attempt to advance beyond them and explain labor services or scattering within the open fields without implying inefficiency, it cannot be considered a success.

III.

SOCIAL

STABILIZATION:

THE ALTERNATIVES

The village community as a whole could shed risk by diversifying its portfolio of arable land;” by exchange with other communities; and by judiciously saving and dissaving. The direct manipulation of risk and return appears to have been relatively unimportant: While some stabilization of the village’s output could no doubt have been obtained by fragmenting and scattering the arable fields themselves, social consolidation was generally preferred.12 At the same time, the opportunity to smooth the consumption of individual villages by redistributing current output over broad regions seems very restricted: The external loan market was relatively imperfect, except perhaps between manors joined in a single large estate; and in any case slow communications and high transport costs so limited the area over which such exchange could take place that the aggregate output of even the largest possible trading unit was inevitably highly variable (Raftis, 1957, pp. 178-179; see also Kula, 1970, pp. llOP1ll). Saving and dissaving, in contrast, were certainly relied upon to smooth consumption within each year, as the bounty of late summer was saved to supplement the niggardly harvest of the other seasons;and there is every reason to believe that this familiar mechanism would have helped offset the variations in output from year to year as well. Between harvests, of course, saving takes the form of storage; but from one harvest to the next the surplus over current consumption could be either kept in storage or returned to the land as seed. Now seed returns itself manyfold, so long as it is accompanied by a complementary doseof land and labor; but since these complementary inputs could not readily be “To an extent, of course, the village was diversified into other assets (animals, forest), but as a rule the arable was by far the principal source of output. ‘*In fact, social consolidation seems more valuable than private scattering: the isolated (and strictly self-insured) pioneer would hold his lands together as did the village, not in a few dozen little parcels as did the individual villagers. The ridge-and-furrow system no doubt reduced the sensitivity of output to rainfall; but it was justified simply as output-augmenting drainage (Slither

van Bath,

1963,

pp. 63, 174; also

Chambers

and

Mingay,

1966,

p. 64).

MEDIEVAL

AGRICULTURE

135

expanded,13 the return to increased seed was rapidly diminishing. Marginal yields were thus well below average yields; and we can believe that an extra quantity of seed might fail to return itself even though average seed yields were still well in excess of one. The return to storage, in contrast, was ab initio less than one, since hoarding could preserve grain but not multiply it; but it does not appear to have been far below one even with wholly traditional techniques. According to the 16th-century ThPdtre d’Agriculture, for example, grain could be kept in an ordinary granary “tant qu’on desire”: With adequate ventilation and three or four winnowings a year to prevent damage by damp and insects, and repairs to the walls as needed “pour bannir les rats,” true wastage would apparently have been of no more concern than the few percent “lost” through evaporation (Serres, 1804, Vol. I, pp. 161-166). The editors’ notes (pp. 181- 182) reinforce the impression that the direct loss of grain in storage was very slight indeed;14 and the opportunity grain output of the labor required to sift the grain or repair the granary would similarly be small, since that work could easily be performed in those periods when there was little if any profit to working the land instead. For that very reason, moreover-and in further contrast to seed-the cost of (or return to) storage would be relatively constant over the entire relevant range. The peasant who saved the surplus of a good year could thus distribute it between two production processes with very different characteristics. A pure maximizer of average availabilities would plant his grain until the expected marginal (not average) seed yield was down to the “rate of return” in storage; and an ordinary fellow sensitive to the lower labor cost and greater security of storage would switch from sowing to hoarding rather before that. “Barren” storage was thus perfectly compatible with high average seed yields; and since the return to storing was virtually constant while that to sowing was sharply diminishing, the seeding rate would tend to remain constant (Titow, 1972, p. 21), and variations in the surplus would show up as fluctuations in stocks. Storage thus appears to represent the premier risk-shedding device available to a medieval community. The village’s compact arable suggests that the cost of scattering it was deemed to outweigh the stabilization of agraThe major constraint appears to have been that on harvest-period labor (see Kula, 1970, p. 53; also Chayanov, 1966, pp. 74 ff., 107 ff.); a constraint on the land that could be prepared for sowing would of course have the same effect. 14The editors argue that grain is best stored in sacks, among other reasons because “ceux auxquels la direction et la manutention des magasins sont confites, n’auront plus de prCtextes pour compter des frais d’entretien et de dbchets, qui montent souvent B deux pour cent du prix d’achat des grains.” Serres also discusses long-term storage underground, as described by Varro and Pliny; the editors note that the grain thus cached in Metz in 1528 was in excellent condition when rediscovered nearly 2 centuries later, and claim to be familiar with a host of other examples. (For further reports of long-term preservation by traditional means see Loudon, 1844, pp. 8099810; Tull, 1762, p. 131 n; and of course Genesis 41.)

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gregate output that could thereby be obtained; and this judgment can readily be reconciled with risk aversion, despite the limited opportunity for interlocal grain transfers, by the relative cheapness and effectiveness of intertemporal ones.15 If this interpretation is correct, risk preferences would have little impact on the organization of the arable, but would manifest themselves to the full in the allocation of output between saving and consumption. IV. THE

EVIDENCE

OF STORAGE

The presumption of risk aversion thus leads us to expect significant storage; but the evidence on this point is curiously insubstantial. To be sure, Heckscher stressed that the medieval economy was “a storage economy,” in which “normally no food was eaten fresh:” in a society marked by the “constant fear of a grain shortage,” the rule of prudent husbandry was to store current output in the fall and “live on the produce of yesteryear during the following twelve months” (1963, pp. 20 8.). But Heckscher was exceptional, in this as in so much else; and in other works the subject of storage is almost invariably neglected. Some authors exclude storage a priori: “when our fancy is catering for thriftless barbarians,” wrote Maitland, “we must remember that the good years will not compensate for the bad. Every harvest, however poor, must support the race for a twelvemonth” (1897, p. 5 18). Duby does not allow the smoothing of consumption even within the year, and sees each summer season as “le temps des grandes privations et des nourritures de hasard” (1962, p. 87);i6 he also characterizes 13th-century lociety as one “which did not know how to store grain or accumulate reserves” (1968, p. 135), though he notes the urban hoarding subsequent to the 14th-century famine (1968, p. 345). At the other extreme, Raftis considers the reliance on “huge storage granaries” to offset harvest failures obvious and unworthy of detailed comment (1957, p. 179; note similarly the passing reference to the Teutonic Knights’ “ immense granaries” in Lucas, 1930, p. 364). Most often, in fact, inventories are discussed, with little concern for their primary function, merely as evidence relevant to quite separate topics: the organization of the Vonsumption

opportunities

are

here

defined,

production possibilities (trading off average output ing opportunities for exchange (as current output insurance hoard). While the degree of independence

in the

usual

way,

by the

interaction

of given

and freedom from risk) and the correspondmay be used to maintain, i.e., “purchase,” an between production and consumption deci-

sions, the degree of specialization in production (approximation output-maximization), and the like cannot here be specified with ditions are well known. I wish to thank Frank Westhoff for his ing a numerical simulation of these issues, and Scott Cardell for lBHere as elsewhere the translation is an imperfect guide 1968, p. 27).

to the “corner solution” of pure any precision, the relevant conhelp in constructing and explorusefully extending the results. to the original (compare Duby,

MEDIEVAL

AGRICULTURE

137

manor (Vinogradoff, 1908, pp. 364-365), nutrition (Slither van Bath, 1963, p. 84), peasant wealth or the composition of output (Fossier, 1968, pp. 403,428, 572-573); and even to Duby the inventory data in a Carolingian fragment were evidence only of yields (1968, pp. 25-26,363-364). This document warrants a further look. As Duby interprets it, “the only reasonable hypothesis to explain the astonishingly low figures for output [in all, 1.7 times the amount sown] is to assume that the inventory was compiled after an exceptionally bad harvest. In fact, when it was drawn up grain harvested the previous year was still stored in the barns of these estates in quantities much greater than the insignificant surplus of the current year. The surveyors found at Annapes 1,081 muids of old spelt, as against 600 of new, and 1,200 muids of old barley, as against 700 of new. These important savings prove that the output of seed was clearly much higher the previous year” (1968, p. 26). A preliminary problem concerns the stock of old barley: The document itself reads “spelta vetus de anno praeterito corbes LXXXX, . . . ) ordeum modios C” (Boretius, 1883, p. 254); and Duby’s own translation of it (1962, p. 28 1; 1968, p. 364) similarly quotes 100 muids of old barley, not 100 baskets (= 1200 muids). I7 The source thus suggests that grain inventories were roughly comparable to current output, not nearly twice as much;18 but what is their significance? It can be argued, against Duby’s interpretation, that the recent harvest was not subnormal at all: Duby himself gives ample evidence from other estates that yields ran from one and a half to two times seed, and he explains that threshing obligations on an estate “in the specially fertile countryside of the Ile de France” also implied a normal yield of 1.6 to 1 (pp. 26-27).lg In the same vein, the spelt in the barns need not be “grain harvested the previous year” at all. The reference is to “spelta vetus de anno praeterito,” and the most natural reading of the de, as its typical use in this text makes clear, is not of but from. 2oAnd what of the adjective vetus? Is it, as Duby assumes, a wasted word in an otherwise sparing account? Or is the reference not just to “grain from the previous year” but to “old grain from the previous year” meant precisely to convey that it was grain produced in years past and only carried over from the previous year; that it was not simply the grain of last year’s harvest, but the grain of last year’s inventory? Both the inventory and the harvest could thus be perfectly “In addition, the English translation does not mention current barley output at all; but the source of error is obvious. Where the English reads “98 muids of oats” (1968, p. 364), the (correct) French translation it was taken from reads “Quatre-vingt-dix-huit muids de seigle, on a tout semC. Mille huit cents muids d’orge, mille cent ont it& semes, nous avons trouvt le reste. Quatre cent trente muids d’avoine” (1962, p. 281). ‘*Of course old barley may have been stored as beer; but of that there is no mention. i8Fossier (1968, p. 237) suggests that these yields are net of wages in kind and the like. 201n this exemplum de typically underscores the distinction between assets (stocks: “Vesti” “De censu”); compare the Cupitumenta, ” “Utensilia”) and yields (flows: “De conlaboratu, law de Vi/h. c. 62 (Roretius, 1883, pp. 88-89,254).

138

STEFANO

FENOALTEA

normal, suggesting an average reserve roughly equivalent to a full year’s output. Of course, other documents show very small inventories; and the exemplum preceding the one just discussed (Boretius, 1883, pp. 250 ff.; Duby, 1968, pp. 364 ff.) is a case in point. Duby notes “the insufficiency of the reserves of grain (no more than could feed the servants until the Feast of St. John; what did they eat during July?).” The answer, it would seem, is that they would eat grain that had not yet been delivered to them. That estate, after all, was devoted in the main to pastoral activities, and there is no reason to believe the servants there ate only grain they produced themselves; in fact, the language of the document-“De annona nihil repperimus, except0 quod dedimus provendariis”-clearly suggests that the grain that was there was itseIf brought in from outside. This argues that those with little stored on the premises did not lack access to inventories located elsewhere; but it also means that the large inventories we find on some estates should be compared to levels of output and consumption that may considerably exceed those of the estate’s home farm. In the absenceof superior information on aggregate inventories, at least in currently accessible form, some insight into the orders of magnitude appropriate to mid-medieval England may be tentatively obtained from the available evidence on monastic storage buildings and the distribution of religious foundations. The Cistercian Abbey of Beaulieu, established in the early 13th century, included in its original establishment an estimated 12 barns (Horn and Born, 1965, p. 58). Two of these-at Great Coxwell and Beaulieu-St. Leonard’s-were monumental barns enclosing a useful volume of approximately 350,000 cubic feet between them; the other 10 barns, judging from the dimensionsof the one at Shilton, provided perhaps another 370,000 cubic feet, for a total of 720,000 cubic feet for a single monastery.*l In the mid-13th century, England possessed close to 800 religious houses (Dickinson, 1961, pp. 75,85); on the basisof their distribution by income prevailing at the Dissolution, and noting that Beaulieu was a rich house but for all that far below the richest, it is plausible to assumethat the total storage space of England’s monasteries was some 320 times that of Beaulieu alone, or approximately 230 million cubic feet, equivalent to 185 million bushels.22 z’The useful volume of the barn at Beaulieu-St. Leonard’s is estimated as equal to that between the aisles and below the tie beams (7 cubes with 33-foot sides: Horn and Born, 1965, p. 53), or 30% of the product of its external dimensions (p. 41). This same ratio is applied to the external dimensions given for the barns at Great Coxwell (p. xvii) and at Shilton (p. 57; I assume its height and width were equal). **Beaulieu prospered 1965, p. 58); and it was pp. 473-474), which like distribution of monasteries following distribution of

only “after slow beginnings” (Knowles, 1948, p. 5; also Horn and Born, still of the second rank in the 1535 Valor Ecclesiasricus (Knowles, 1959, other Valors reported income but not assets (compare Jack, 1965). The in 1535 (Dickinson, 1961, p. 124) thus suggests, conservatively, the religious houses by wealth and storage capacity 3 centuries earlier: with

MEDIEVAL

139

AGRICULTURE

At that time, England’s population numbered perhaps 6 million, and most probably rather less, 23 for a monthly consumption of perhaps 9 million bushels,24 suggesting that the monastic barns alone could hold enough grain to feed England’s human population for over a year and a half. Of course, these monastic barns were rarely close to full;25 they held the current harvest as well as the carryover; and animals, too, were fed from the barns’ contents.26 On the other hand, nonbarn storage capacity may also have been considerable; and no allowance has yet been made for the storage capacity of the secular clergy, crown, and lay landowners, who between them held over 85% of the land,27 or that-more questionable-of the menu peuple.28 A final, reliable estimate may elude us; but there is no doubt that storage capacity was considerable, and that desired inventories at least were correspondingly high. Beaulieu = 1, 100 at 0.02 each, 275 at 0.10 each, 275 at 0.40 2.00 each, for a total of 320. At the time of the Dissolution, houses had “between on former lay estates, tercians (compare even a conservative cubic

feet

2,000 and and may the barn average

for the Cistercians

2,900 barns” (Horn therefore have been

at Wickham-St. of 20,000 cubic alone.

Allowing

123, 124) raises the likely 16th-century 23See Postan (1972, pp. 29-30) and from the mid-l4th-century plague. Z4This

estimate

allows

energy needs reported tion given high birth

2500

in Bogert and death

total note

calories

per

(1949, rates

each, 120 at 1.OO each, and 30 at we may note, the IO1 Cistercian

and Born, 1965, p. 59). Most of these were rather srn#fIer than those built by the Cis-

Paul’s, Horn feet per barn

and Born, 1965, brings the total

for the 700-odd

other

to 300 to 400 million Shrewsbury (1970, capita

per day,

pp. 141,550-551) (cf. Mitchell and

houses

25With barn

teriorating. 2eThe

the possible would need lease

17) specified would feed

exception of relatively to be shared between

agreement

that horses

*‘The monasteries’ acres out of 20 in

it was as well

of the barn

short grain

based

on the age-

at Wickham-St.

landed p. 421);

and

Paul’s

(Horn

and

full of summer of hay.

wealth has been and that share

centuries (Postan, 1972, p. 162). 28Recent excavations of peasant houses show considerable these may have been devoted mainly to fodder, as peasants grain in centralized (village, manorial, or monastic) facilities

1961,

pp.

mortality

activity-specific

and on a plausible population Deane, 1971, p. II); 1200

distribucalories per

bushel (Hilton, 1966, p. as there is no indica-

periods of time, indeed, and the air passages

to be returned three-quarters’ as men; one notes the absence

share of England’s 1436 (Cooper, 1967,

(Dickinson,

cubic feet. p. 36) on the plausible

pound of bread (Bogert, 1949, p. 555); and 40 to 45 pounds of bread per 112; the medieval corrodies reported therein, pp. 110 IT., are ambiguous, tion of the size of the household each was meant to support). the

pp. 1 I-13, 17); but up near 50 million

the useful volume that kept it from

of de-

Born,

1965,

pp.

1 I, 13,

wheat

and

oats,

which

estimated had grown

at perhaps 3 million in the preceding

2

storage areas; on the other hand, may have found it profitable to store with solid walls of brick or stone.

Surviving chattel lists rarely mention stocks of grain; this is understandable, even though peasants surely held in inventory at least that part of each harvest’that they would sow or consume themselves before the next one, in the first instance because most such lists are inventories only of principalia provided by the lord and to be returned to him at death. The lists of chattels felons stocks

confiscated from felons tend to be complete inventories; but many (and perhaps most) were not peasants at all, and we would not expect a wage-earning laborer, say, to hold of grain as a peasant might (see Hilton, 1966, pp. 99 ff.; also Fossier, 1968, p. 573).

140

STEFANO

FENOALTEA

A storage economy can of course be a hungry economy as well. The one by no means excludes the other. In a world of endemic social disorder, marauding bands could destroy granaries as well as standing crops; and a run of bad harvests could leave one equally denuded.2g In modern Ireland, for instance, the potato blight produced in 1845 a harvest failure of unprecedented severity: Through the next year, “the Irish peasants . . . could manage well enough by eating into their reserves”, but the renewed disaster of 1846 spelled starvation (Slither van Bath, 1963, p. 270).30 Again, in 17thcentury Burgundy “six an&es pluvieuses, de 1646 i 1652, provoquent au printemps de 1652 une terrible mike” (G. Roupnel, quoted in Le Roy Ladurie, 1967, p. 53). In early 14th-century England, “for at least several years before 13 15 the harvests were not very good. . . . There was much rain in 1314; and it was only with great difficulty that corn could be properly garnered. . . . [But] the rain of the summer of 1314 was as nothing compared with the torrential floods which came in the summer of 1315 . . . [and] the crisis became increasingly severe until the harvests of 1316 made a new supply of grains available” (Lucas, 1930, pp. 345-346, 376). In parts of Europe, in fact, such random disasters were superimposed on problems of secular overpopulation that made inadequate harvests totally unexceptional: in Forez, for instance, there were between 1277 and 1343 no less than 34 harvest “failures” in 66 years (Fournial, 1967, p. 275; see also Le Roy Ladurie, 1966, p. 141; Slither van Bath, 1963, p. 134). As in the Free World today, moreover, in medieval Europe the problem of hunger was one of social distribution as well as of production; and in the presence of inequality storage can cause hunger as well as relieve it. Stores stabilize prices, but only so long as expectations are unaltered; if expectations deteriorate, desired inventories increase to match. Much as in the sugar shortage of recent memory, a crop failure severe enough to affect expectations would add an increase in demand to the decline in supply, forcing prices even higher than if grain could not be stored at all; and the inventory accumulation of the better off is obtained by reducing even further the current consumption of the lower strata of society. The unprecedented harshness of the weather that ushered in the great famine of the early 14th 2sWithout

inventories,

one

critical

harvest

failure

will

cause

starvation;

with

reserves

enough

to survive a single crop failure, starvation will result from two successive failures; and so on. If the probability of a critical harvest failure is 20%. for instance, the probability of surviving year t having survived through year t - I is .8 with no reserves, .96 with I year’s reserves, and ,992 with 2 years’ reserves, assuming harvests are serially independent; but even that apparently safe .992 each year implies nearly a one-third chance of starving within 50 years (.99250 = .67), and a better than even chanceof starving within a century (.992r00 = .45). 30Their reserves might have been greater had their staple been grain: Adam Smith notes that “it is difficult to preserve potatoes through the year, and impossible to store them like corn, for two and three years together” (1937, p. 161; see also Slither van Bath, 1963, p. 269).

MEDIEVAL

141

AGRICULTURE

century, and even more the price collapse that marked its end (in Paris, a 75% drop in 1 day, and that in June; Lucas, 1930, p. 376), clearly suggest that the hardship of the lower classes was aggravated by “speculative” price movements: As the poor who rioted for bread understood only too well, high prices and widespread hunger do not mean that stocks have been exhausted at a11.31 V. A TRANSACTION-COSTS

MODEL

OF THE

OPEN

FIELDS

Risk aversion thus appears to have warranted abstinence and storage; it does not appear to have warranted the stabilization of aggregate output, or of mere individual shares in aggregate output, at a significant sacrifice in productivity. But while it is thus difficult to trace either scattering or labor sharing to considerations of risk, the very considerations of transaction costs which make labor sharing puzzling suggest how private scattering within consolidated fields might have served to maximize agricultural productivity. It is a measure of the propaganda success of England’s agrarian reformers that this simplest possible rationale for the open fields is typically excluded a priori; but if we only approach it without prejudice we will find it eminently serviceable. In the first place, it may be noted, the basic distinction between scattering within the open fields and scattering of the open fields themselves is central to the analysis of the institution’s costs, as it is to that of its benefits. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of travel costs: Given the pattern of nucleated settlement-the reasons for which need not detain us here-total travel time to and from work is clearly minimized by grouping the arable around the village; but within that arable there are no comparable gains to the total consolidation of private holdings, since even extensive scattering need require no socially unnecessary movement.32 The pattern of external effects seems essentially similar: A fellow cultivator may be the source of negative externalities, but he will rarely be as grasping an encroacher, as prolific a source of weeds and pests, and as utterly undiscouraged by pleas or punishment as Nature itself. Internal borders within the arable appear altogether less costly than the borders of the arable as a whole; and if each 31Contrast expectations,

Lucas (1930, p. 352). Charitable and even they not completely

institutions (Lucas, 1930,

alone were immune from this cycle in p. 363 n); and it is no doubt their will-

ingness to dishoard even as the laity was hoarding that made them so important to the poor. After the Dissolution, the English Crown urged the erection of public granaries: not, it would seem, to provide storage capacity for ordinary farmers, since the granary was to be filled by buying grain, but to provide a public “stabilization fund” in relief of the poor (see Emle, 1936, pp. 256-251). 32The (wasted) themselves, day’s sowing,

movement

of oxen

whence presumably the weeding, or harvesting.

was

no doubt

definition

far more of unit

plots

expensive by a day’s

than

that

plowing

of the peasants rather

than

a

142

STEFANO

FENOALTEA

peasant grows more than one crop they may even be beneficial, as negative spillovers are clearly minimized by grouping not properties but crops. In the presence of central regulation, indeed, the multiplication of internal borders does not signify an increase in interdependencies that are not properly internalized; and a reading of village bylaws suggests that the obvious theoretical rationale for centralized decision making is in fact the historically correct one (Ault, 1972, e.g., p. 24).33 Scattering ofthe open fields may well have been avoided as socially costly; private scattering within regulated open fields need not have reduced productivity at all. If private scattering were merely costless, of course, it might well be warranted to save even the low transaction costs of interpeasant lending, and its relevant benefits might be the stabilization of individual output shares after all. In fact, however, the significant benefits of private diversification appear to be those that actually increased aggregate output; and these are to be found along a different dimension altogether. As noted above, the conditions suitable for a variety of agricultural operations last only briefly; this constraint is partially but significantly loosened by diversification into a balanced mixture of fallow, winter crops, and spring crops-and, within each cropping unit, by the heterogeneity of the land itself.34 Of course, scattering within given open fields spreads the labor needs of individual holdings only, not those of the village as a whole; but it had social consequences all the same. In the absence of private diversification, each unaided peasant would have to work his land largely at suboptimal times, and output would suffer accordingly; alternatively, the distribution of labor could be optimized if each landholder enlisted the help of other peasants, differently endowed, who would be repaid in kind when their own holdings were most profitably worked.35 In the latter case, however, each individual would spend much of 33The suggestion that central regulation was a social burden because it was imposed without regard to the “comparative advantage” ofdifferent parts of the arable (McCloskey, 1972, p. 17) can safely be discounted. There is no evidence for it; a priori, it is as unlikely as operating a factory without regard to the nature of different machines; and the broader divisions between arable, meadow, and waste-and even between arable fields under different rotations (Hilton, 1966, p. 122twere certainly dictated by recognition of differences in the land. The further suggestion that such differences could dominate private landholding choices and yet be ignored in determining land use is of course even less plausible. 34“A single tenant’s holding all on one kind of soil would often require to be worked quickly, when the soil was in the right condition, and harvested quickly. Plots with different soils are ready for working at different times” (Parain, 1966, p. 138). In this context, “one kind of soil” is to be understood as a unique combination of composition, drainage, exposure (including that created by the direction of the ridges in each furlong), and so on. One may surmise that in the Mediterranean area the greater variety of crops that could be grown reduced the need to diversify by soil types (see Stevens, 1966, p. 104); and for some operations, at least, timing was there less critical than in the colder, wetter North. 351 am assuming, for simplicity, a community consisting exclusively of peasant cultivators. This assumption will be relaxed forthwith.

MEDIEVAL

AGRICULTURE

143

his time working for his neighbors rather than for himself, and all the problems associated with working for others would significantly reduce the effective input of labor. 36 A system of homogeneous plots would thus have forced a choice between maximizing the effective labor input and optimizing its distribution over time and space; scattering that gave each holding its proportionate share of each type of land (Dodgshon, 1975, p. 21) avoided this auraut and allowed the simultaneous achievement of both these conditions for maximum output. Seen in this light, the open fields appear designed to reap all the incentive benefits of self-employment while conserving the labor-distributing advantages of the large estate: If on a particular day the land most profitably worked was all in a particular corner of the open fields, all the villagers would be found there working side by side; but since that area had been divided into strips each household would in fact be working for itself on its own land. If scattering is to be viewed as a substitute for market exchange, then, the relevant market is the one in labor. The fact that such a market certainly existed is no objection: Transaction costs cannot be considered low merely because the market exists, and the use of nonmarket substitutes for existing markets is an everyday occurrence. Automobiles, for instance, are expensive; many if not most are idle at any given point in time; the rental market is well developed; yet the overwhelming majority of automobile-miles are produced not through the rental market but by owner-drivers. The reason is precisely that the rental market is burdened by heavy transaction costs: Mechanical damage is often hidden, and it is difficult to induce the nonowner to behave as he would if the machine were his, or if information were perfect. So, too, is the labor market burdened with information and incentive problems; so, too, is it profitably avoided, other things being equal, in favor of self-employment and self-service. 37 Medieval peasants were thus wise to work each for himself; and while mutual and direct exchange of labor might at times be warranted by the accidents of life, it was surely best excluded from the normal configuration of the system. In fact, most of the labor-time that was bought and sold in the medieval village was not that of the peasants at all, but that of smallholders or landless laborers used in particular at the peak of the agricultural season. Scat%Though obviously pushed to excess by noncompetitive pricing and tax legislation, the tendency of homeowners to make their own repairs rather than hire an expert repairman (paid by the hour) is symptomatic of the burden of negotiation and especially incentive or supervision costs in the labor market; note that the transaction costs incurred in working for others exist whether labor is cooperative or receives a wage. 37The similarity of the peasants’ backgrounds and the extensive consultation (“cooperation”) that went on within the village community suggest that at least among peasants, differences in expertise would normally not be such as to warrant specialization. The same may not be true between peasants and demesne officials or laborers (see Fenoaltea, l975b).

144

STEFANO

FENOALTEA

tering thus did not eliminate the unilateral purchase of labor as it did its bilateral exchange; but by extending the busy season on each holding to the full length of the busy season in the village as a whole, it made that purchase significantly cheaper. The savings were twofold: Each employer could supervise a small number of workers over this extended peak far more effectively than the much larger number of workers that would work through a homogeneous holding in a fraction of that time; and each worker could retain a single master for the entire season, avoiding the cost of negotiating with a number of successive employers. 38The presence of a labor market thus does not affect the argument at all: The reason scattering is to be considered a means of stabilizing individual labor needs rather than individual output is not that some particular market existed and some other did not, but simply that the transaction costs of purchasing or exchanging labor are so much higher than the transaction costs of lending fungible goods among settled neighbors and colleagues. The ideal degree of scattering is that which maximizes its net benefits; at that maximum, the output-augmenting effect of a further improvement in the size or allocation of the effective labor input would be just offset by the output-reducing effect of a further increase in travel time, externalities, and the like.3g These equilibrium marginal costs and benefits may be large or small, depending on whether the incremental costs rose to meet the benefits or the benefits fell to meet the costs; in the latter case, the average gross cost of scattering will also be low. In either case, however, the relevant benefits of scattering are the reduction of labor-market transaction costs; and the criterion of efficiency is simply the maximization of agricultural productivity. VI. THE OPEN FIELDS AND PRODUCTIVITY: THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT The hypothesis that the open fields were thus designed to achieve economic efficiency by optimizing the distribution of labor is an attractive one. It appears to account for the presumed origins of the institution, and for its persistence, more readily than the alternative explanations available in the literature; neither is it contradicted, widespread opinion to the contrary, by the evidence of the system’s demise. 38These negotiation costs would be relatively significant, since they would generally be incurred during the peak season itself, when passing from one employer to theother. 3gThis marginal equalization of output benefits and costs is of course to an approximation corresponding to possible minor considerations. To save the (low) cost of lending among peasants, for instance, scattering might marginally possible cost of (off-season) lawsuits undershoot that point; and so on.

overshoot pure among troublesome

output-maximization; neighbors it

might

to save the marginally

MEDIEVAL

AGRICULTURE

145

The origin of the open fields is of course shrouded in mist; but the most plausible hypotheses attribute them either to the fragmentation of an initially consolidated estate or to the intermingling of initially compact plots.40 The first scenario, then, is that of the proprietor of an estate “hutting” his servi (e.g., Bloch, 1966, pp. 67768), in an effort, no doubt, to increase the surplus he could collect. The gain from this procedure is to be found in the improvement in incentives to work: Rather than spend all their time working for their master, the “hutted” slaves are working for themselves as they produce their own subsistence (if the surplus is collected as labor) and perhaps the surplus as well (if the surplus is collected as a fixed rent in money or goods). The servile tenancy is thus created so as to increase the tenants’ self-employment; and it is reasonable to assume that on exactly the same principle the master would so dispose the tenancies as to minimize the exchange of labor among his men. It is less reasonable to suppose, on the other hand, that in hutting his slaves the master would pursue the equalization of their endowments, or their individual self-insurance, at a net cost to the estate: If the scattered tenancies were imposed from above, their purpose and result was surely the maximization of agricultural productivity.4’ Others have found evidence of open fields growing out of the assarts of relatively independent peasants (e.g., Bishop, 1935, pp. 20 ff.). The arable of the isolated assarter was relatively consolidated, no doubt for the very reasons that warranted consolidating the arable of the village as a whole; how then, after new arrivals had made human neighbors the rule rather than the exception, were these holdings intermingled, and cultivation in severalty abandoned in favor of “common” open fields? The proposed model supplies a ready answer: We can imagine that the new neighbors would initially call on each other’s help to increase output by improving the temporal distribution of labor on each consolidated plot of land; that they would slide naturally into dividing responsibility for the cultivation of shares of each consolidated plot; and that they would simplify the arrangement, and improve incentives, by dividing the land itself.42 Little changes if we imagine that subdivision took place over a longer time span, through inheritance rather than transfers inter vivos: Benevolent parents would no more divide each large 40A most useful critical review of the literature is provided by Dodgshon (1975). Note that the progressive extension of the arable would lead to scattered holdings wirhout fragmenting and intermingling initially consolidated plots only if each household began by cultivating a single strip-and, for that matter, if the village grew not by multiplying households but by increasing the size of a constant number of households; all of which is most unlikely. 41The obverse of this point has a long history, as the alleged fact that scattering did reduce output was taken to imply that the open fields could not have been laid out by the owner of a consolidated estate (Maitland, 1897, p. 337). 42in fact, Bishop himself attributed the open-field system to the attractiveness of self-employment (1935, p. 21); but his analysis on this point is not made explicit.

146

STEFANO

FENOALTEA

plot among their heirs if this reduced the land’s aggregate product than they would physically divide each animal among them; the benefits of stabilizing individual labor needs provide the motivation that is otherwise missing from the account.43 In either case, scattering would be produced by the microeconomic decisions of individual households; and a community meeting need only crown the process, taking advantage of the final opportunity to increase output by synchronizing the rotation over broad areas44 and thus reducing both negative externalities and the cost of temporary fencing to protect the growing crops. At other times, however, the open fields appear entirely systematic, with collective decision making at their very root; and it is here that the transaction-costs model sketched above is perhaps most useful. By bringing out the agricultural gain from making each individual’s arable representative of the village’s as a whole, it explains why a village might be divided into shares, instead of relying on a tradition of agricultural shareholding to explain the division of the land; and it severs the link between shareholding and a putative egalitarianism that was somehow sensitive to the quality, but not to the quantity, of each peasant’s land (Dodgshon, 1975, pp. 15 ft.). By appealing directly to agricultural efficiency, it explains how the open-field system might appear full-blown as the deliberate result of village reorganization without appealing to irrationality or peculiar preferences;45 and it similarly accounts for the system’s longevity within a context of centralized decision making that would naturally have weighed social costs and benefits as well as purely private ones. To be sure, the demise of the open fields in the enclosure movement is generally taken to prove the agricultural inefficiency of that organizational type (e.g., Chambers and Mingay, 1966, p. 3); and a number of authors would view the rent increase with enclosure as a direct measure of the output cost of scattering (McCloskey, 1972, pp. 32-35, and references therein). In fact, however, this rent increase is not such a measure at all: because rent could increase even if output did not, because the increase in output followed technological change, and because the new techniques could be used in open fields as well. %ee

Dodgshon

(1975,

inheritance, see Habakkuk heirs is of course analogous

pp.

13- 14); also,

(1955) to that

and Pitkin of dividing

against

the view

that

scattering

(1961). The problem of dividing it among one’s tenants.

results land

from among

partible one’s

“It is worth noting, in this connection, that the strips in the open fields were initially cultivated without a common regulation of the crop rotation (see Slither van Bath, 1963, p. 61). 45Were the system dictated by considerations of risk despite a net agricultural cost, for instance, we would face the paradox of a collective decision to reduce output-all else remaining constant-in an effort to escape hunger. Egalitarianism, selective or not, is an appeal to ad hoc preferences; and Dodgshon’s own hypothesis of reorganization (in response to an unspecified “need”) that preserves “the accepted pattern” of landholding (1975, p. 28) is enigmatic at best.

MEDIEVAL

AGRICULTURE

147

The first point is well known, and is indeed at the root of the traditional analysis of enclosures from the perspective of equity rather than efficiency. The “rent” that rose was the return not to the land but to the landlord; and parliamentary enclosure allowed the landlord to alter the distribution of property rights in his favor and appropriate a larger share of the return to the land (thus the case history summarized in Cohen and Weitzman, 1975, p. 323). Since the distribution of income is shifting, the gainers’ gain is clearly no measure of aggregate productivity change. Of course, the productivity of agriculture did increase, as we know from less inappropriate evidence; but we also know that the agricultural revolution involved the application of new techniques as well as new organization. If these new techniques were incompatible with open-field agriculture, the output increase which required enclosures would indeed measure the cost of scattering, but it would be the cost of scattering given the new techniques. The calculation has absolutely no implications for the agricultural efficiency of the open fields before the change in technology, exactly the way the profitability of large ships given today’s technology does not imply that large ships would have been profitable with yesterday’s. What is perhaps most significant, however, is that the new techniques were not at all incompatible with open-field agriculture. It may be true that “the best use of the land could be obtained only in enclosed and reasonably large farms” (Chambers and Mingay, 1966, p. 52); but as we have seen, the open-field village, with its central regulation of cropping decisions and the like, was nothing other than a large collective farm (with optimized labor incentives), operated at least ideally as a single estate. Large scale may have been necessary to implement the new techniques; but the division and enclosure of open fields reduced the scale of the organizational unit. Open-field villages did introduce improvements; but what is noteworthy is the obvious difficulty with which they did so. Unlike the factory or the enclosed farm ruled dictatorially by its master, the village community operated on plutodemocratic lines (Ault, 1972, p. 5s). When techniques were changing slowly, if at all, a consensus as to the optimum use of the land was readily achieved; but agreement to innovate could only be reached with difficulty, particularly in view of the wholly empirical nature of most of the new advances (Chambers and Mingay, 1966, pp. 12- 13) and of the inevitable ignorance of their long-term effects. Some villages stuck together until a new consensus emerged after a painful process of education$ but others found it preferable to dissolve the common operation and let each go his independent way. In the long run, of course, technical knowledge is perfectly 46”lt took five years of unending Great Tew, in Oxfordshire, before course to a nine-course rotation”(Blum,

argument among the sixty to eighty they could agree among themselves 1971, p. 175).

families of the village of to change from a three-

148

STEFANO

FENOALTEA

diffused, and the open fields’ combination of consensual social decision making with optimized private incentives would remain desirable; but in the short run, as perceptions differed, consensus disappeared and coordination became a burden on those whose expectations it did not reflect. Enclosure did not reap economies of scale; but it did allow independent operation with minimal externalities, and the imperfect diffusion of information made independence valuable. This new knowledge-so much of it borrowed from the more advanced regions of the Continent-was of course more readily accessible to the wealthy and formally educated than to the peasants. Superior knowledge warrants control; and the improving landlord or capitalist farmer worked the land himself with a labor force that was ordered about and rewarded for its time and effort rather than for its output. Despite its higher transaction costs, then, dependent labor may be preferred to petty tenants for the sake of profit alone if it is the means to implement a superior technique; and this suggests a similar rationale for “high farming” in the Middle Ages as well (Fenoaltea, 1975b). The enclosures may thus illuminate the logic of demesne farming and labor dues; but they shed little light on the earlier organization of peasant tenures,47 and certainly do not disprove the claim that medieval open fields maximized productivity in the then prevailing state of agricultural knowledge. VII.

CONCLUSION

When all is said and done, then, neither labor sharing nor scattering can plausibly be explained as a sacrifice in return in order to reduce risk. This does not mean, of course, that medieval peasants were not risk averse, or that risk aversion did not affect behavior; but its effect is to be sought in consumption decisions rather than in the organization of production. It is precisely because of aversion to risk-with the specific connotation of famine-that popular culture placed such stress on prudence; but prudence was a matter not of sacrificing output to stabilize it but of hard work, abstinence, and above all, hoarding. The Ant and the Grasshopper taught the folly of failing to store, not of failing to scatter or share labor; and the stereotype of the pathologically “virtuous” individual who lives miserably despite his wealth is the miser who never feels he has accumulated enough, not a peasant who would keep his vast landholdings so scattered he spends all his working hours racing from plot to plot. As far as the organization of production is concerned, risk aversion is simply an impetus to efficiency, for the sake of saving as well as of 47This would remain true even if scattering had been determined by risk rather than transaction costs: Changes in the cost of shedding risk would have altered the extent of scattering within the open fields, but the suppression of the open fields themselves would clearly be due to a different influence altogether.

MEDIEVAL

149

AGRICULTURE

consumption; but since the desirability of efficiency is taken for granted in any case, the complication of the model to include risk is here singularly unprofitable. The key to scattering, rather, is to be found in the transaction costs of purchasing or exchanging labor: once these are taken into account, diversification is seen to increase output by increasing the scope for useful self-employment and for economically small and stable teams of hired hands, and the open fields can be justified by the simple desire to maximize agricultural productivity. Transaction costs similarly explain the repeated tendency of the lord’s reserve to vanish into peasant tenancies held for a fixed rent; by the same token, however, they do not account for the cultivation of the lord’s demesne with dependent labor, or indeed for the widespread use of a slave or wage-earning labor force in ancient or modern times. To explain the efficiency of the latter institutions, the model must be expanded in different directions-most promisingly, I believe, by allowing for imperfect diffusion of technical information and for “social engineering” avant la lettre; but that is another story.

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