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The open field system and beyond: A property rights analysis of an economic institution
Journal of Historical Geography, 8, 3 (1982) 299-332
Reviews
The British Isles and the European mainland CARL DAHLMAN, The Open Field System and Beyond: A Property Rights Analysis of an Economic Institution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. viii+234.
511.50) ROBERTA. DODGSHON,The Origins of British Field Systems (London:
1980. Pp. xiv+165.
Academic Press,
fll.20)
The study of field systems has accelerated in the last few years with a general momentum of interest moving towards theoretical perspectives and frameworks and away from the analysis of empirical data. Existing information about the layout of field systems and related cultivation and management practices is deemed by some to provide a sufficient basis from which to develop new ideas and theories which, in turn, may then be used to identify new directions for more overtly empirical research. The new perspectives and theories most avidly sought after are those which might assist our understanding of the origins of the fields and related husbandry and tenurial systems together with their essential elements (subdivided fields, rights of common grazing over arable, common waste, and systems of control and regulation including the manorial court). These volumes address the problems of origins, characteristics and survival in different ways, though they also have much in common. The aim of Dodgshon’s book is “to present an interpretation of how British field systems originated”, using many of the ideas which the author has already published elsewhere and without the aid of new evidence. The focus is essentially on the context of and formative influences on field systems, particularly the relationship between subdivided fields and farming communities, and the evolution of land tenures and assessments. The significance of the experience of the “Celtic” parts of Britain is stressed and many of the examples cited are (not surprisingly, in view of the author’s important work on the country) drawn from Scotland. Subdivided fields are seen not as “the product of a socially-or totally constituted farming community in the sense conceived by Vinogradoff et al.“, but as influences themselves shaping the community in the context of feudalism. This link between subdivided fields and the communities with whose formation they are associated was forged initially by process of colonization and subsequently in a second stage by a formalization of the scattered holdings into a shared tenure. The nature of infield-outfield is another major theme, deriving its meaning more from the difference between assessed (infield) and non-assessed (outfield) land than from associated cropping systems. This theme is a familiar one from Dodgshon’s earlier publications, as also is the third major theme of the book: the splitting of townships. In many ways this is the best part of the book, written in a more relaxed way and with a freer-flowing style and stream of ideas than the tighter and less easily absorbed structures of the earlier sections. The argument is that the process of township splitting (division for logistical and operational convenience) “provided a nursery for experimentations with layout-out of which the pioneer examples of the two- or threefield systems may have emerged”, that is an experimental basis-though not an exclusive one-for the rational organization of layout. This new rational system could then have
300
REVIEWS
been diffused without being necessarily linked to splitting. The period to which Dodgshon ascribes the beginning of the process of splitting is the tenth or eleventh century, which is fairly close to the date suggested by H. S. A. Fox and others for the known existence of the Midland system, whose “origins” have been ascribed to the eighth or ninth century (see T. Rowley, Ed., The Origins of Open-field Agriculture, 1981). Stress is laid upon the multiplicity of causal factors as well as the varied chronologies and forms of open fields; hence “field systems everywhere were a response to the same basic set of problems. It was the way the different responses were combined and weighted that determined the regional varieties of form and function, not differences of a more substantive kind” (pp. 153-4). The general stress on the field system as a synthetic institution whose form reflects a variety of processes and trends is an interesting one, and does point the way forward, as Dodgshon suggests, for future work, though there will be those who disagree with his premise that “there is but one type of British field system articulated into different regional variants”. This is a provocative book with many valuable ideas. Its main weaknesses derive from its structure whose elements are not always clearly linked, and one occasionally has the feeling that the welding of material from periodical articles into a book has not been totally successful. It is a work for the cognoscenti (students would find it very hard going, except perhaps for the first and last three chapters) and as such deserves wide circulation and appraisal among specialists. Dahlman’s book is based on a Ph.D. thesis, but like Dodgshon he presents little or no new empirical material. The open field system is treated as a social and economic “institution”, examined in a “property rights paradigm” and with particular reference to transaction costs. The body of theory-for this is essentially a work on theory-is that of the economics of institutions, and a fundamental assumption is the postulation of “private wealth maximization as the fundamental assumption about human behaviour”. The purpose of the exercise is clear: “We shall then characterize a representative village by a number of ‘stylized facts’ descriptive of the open field system, and the intellectual exercise will be to set up an economic theoretical model that, in a logically consistent fashion, can account for the simultaneous existence of those observed characteristics” (p. 19). This is a laudable enough objective, though one which may give rise to considerable misgivings among empirically and technically inclined scholars. After a review of theories of the open-field system, which includes rejection of the “dumb lord” and “dumb peasant” models (“predicated on the basic belief that the peasants of the open field villages were unable to run their affairs in such a way as to achieve a reasonable degree of efficiency”) Dahlman proceeds to examine property rights transaction costs and institutions, the economics of commons, open fields and scattered strips, and the economics of enclosure. A digest of his argument is that there were essential differences between the ownership and management of the commons and wastes and the arable fields respectively, and that a key to the maintenance of large arable fields is the need to provide large areas for grazing. The relationship between grain-production and livestock was important and sensitive, hence “if the land is kept undivided and the fields large, then the output from the livestock is greater for a given area of land” (p. 190). The existence and persistence of scattered strips is explained by reference to the technicalities of ploughing and the topography of the village land, to risk aversion, and to “the incentives for selfish bargaining behaviour afforded by communal grazing”. As far as “ownership” is concerned, the principle of “private ownership” which is deemed to have determined control of arable land is thought to have been an incentive to efficient use of a scarce resource and also to the maintenance of the institutional constraint to inefficient use, that is collective decision making. The various arguments promoted to explain the elements of the open fields are superficially attractive, but give the distinct impression of being too simple, not just in relation to our factual knowledge of the complexity of open fields and their linked communities, but also in relation to the complexities of land tenure, ownership, feudalism, and other key elements. This excessive simplicity reduces the credibility of the book, which is of less value than Dodgshon’s work. Nevertheless, Dahlman does offer new insights and
REVIEWS
301
perspectives, and is worth reading for this reason, even if in the end one is obliged to reject or qualify many of the assumptions made. Loughborough ROGER
FINLAY,
ROBIN BUTLIN
University of Technology Population
and Metropolis:
The Demography
of London 1580-1650
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Geographical Studies, 198 1. Pp. xii+ 188. g22.50) Although the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure has been biased towards the study of rural England, Professor E. A. Wrigley has also prompted investigation of the demography of the capital city. Roger Finlay’s monograph is the first fruit of this enterprise, and tribute should be paid to the audacity of attempting to subject a city of some 130 parishes and up to 400,000 people to analytical techniques developed in dealing with villages of only a few hundred inhabitants. What makes the exercise possible is a concentration on the central area of the metropolis, the City proper, and within this an analysis of a very small sample of parishes. Of the six substantial chapters in the book three have been previously published in Population Studies, Annales de DLmographie Historique, and the Journal of Family History. Finlay first argues that it is possible to tackle the demographic history of this large city: he demonstrates the accuracy of London parish registers, and suggests that high geographical mobility in the city, which might make parish register analysis difficult, is offset by a high persistency rate in each parish population. Using aggregative techniques he demonstrates the very sharp increase in London population between 1580 and 1650, a period when the city’s rate of growth was higher than in the century from 1650 to 1750 that Wrigley has examined. He goes on to distinguish rich and poor London parishes by mapping the 1638 tithe rental (a similar exercise to that carried out by Professor Emrys Jones in The London Journal for 1980). Thus equipped, he samples two wealthy central parishes, and two poorer peripheral parishes, by the river and by London Wall, on which to practise reconstitution techniques, arguing that the chosen parishes were typical of their areas and that their results reflect general demographic experience in different zones of the City. He is able to show that London mortality was much higher than in rural England, that life expectancy was much higher in wealthy than in poor London parishes, that plague, though a major killer, had a limited “drag” on population increase, and, most originally, that fertility in London was high, especially in wealthy parishes where mothers commonly sent their newly-born children to be wet nursed in the country, thus shortening post-natal amenorrhoea and encouraging conception. Such conclusions are of considerable interest but abstracting them from the text is a struggle. It is not assimilating the 110 tables and figures which creates the problem but the sparse text which must run to only a hundred pages and often reads like a mere technical commentary. Such brevity squeezes out any adequate explanation of the developing argument of the book, and it is left to the reader to provide a coherent overall view of the dynamics of London population. A final chapter, which might have supplied this, is but three pages long and is more concerned with problems still to be investigated than in drawing together conclusions reached in the book. A recurrent problem of demographic studies, the absence of an economic and social context, is also unhappily illustrated here. Finlay’s designation of “rich” and “poor” parishes is based entirely upon levels of rent paid in 1638, with no additional information about the occupations and status of their inhabitants, yet he is prepared to hazard that “residential segregation did not occur on the basis of guilds, trades, or occupations, but in terms of the social distribution of wealth”. He has evidence for the second contention but none for the first. The influence of occupation on demographic behaviour remains an uncharted subject in London, though a recent thesis by Deborah Hibberd on seventeenthcentury York has demonstrated that the two factors can be convincingly linked in an urban study.
Reviews
The British Isles and the European mainland CARL DAHLMAN, The Open Field System and Beyond: A Property Rights Analysis of an Economic Institution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. viii+234.
511.50) ROBERTA. DODGSHON,The Origins of British Field Systems (London:
1980. Pp. xiv+165.
Academic Press,
fll.20)
The study of field systems has accelerated in the last few years with a general momentum of interest moving towards theoretical perspectives and frameworks and away from the analysis of empirical data. Existing information about the layout of field systems and related cultivation and management practices is deemed by some to provide a sufficient basis from which to develop new ideas and theories which, in turn, may then be used to identify new directions for more overtly empirical research. The new perspectives and theories most avidly sought after are those which might assist our understanding of the origins of the fields and related husbandry and tenurial systems together with their essential elements (subdivided fields, rights of common grazing over arable, common waste, and systems of control and regulation including the manorial court). These volumes address the problems of origins, characteristics and survival in different ways, though they also have much in common. The aim of Dodgshon’s book is “to present an interpretation of how British field systems originated”, using many of the ideas which the author has already published elsewhere and without the aid of new evidence. The focus is essentially on the context of and formative influences on field systems, particularly the relationship between subdivided fields and farming communities, and the evolution of land tenures and assessments. The significance of the experience of the “Celtic” parts of Britain is stressed and many of the examples cited are (not surprisingly, in view of the author’s important work on the country) drawn from Scotland. Subdivided fields are seen not as “the product of a socially-or totally constituted farming community in the sense conceived by Vinogradoff et al.“, but as influences themselves shaping the community in the context of feudalism. This link between subdivided fields and the communities with whose formation they are associated was forged initially by process of colonization and subsequently in a second stage by a formalization of the scattered holdings into a shared tenure. The nature of infield-outfield is another major theme, deriving its meaning more from the difference between assessed (infield) and non-assessed (outfield) land than from associated cropping systems. This theme is a familiar one from Dodgshon’s earlier publications, as also is the third major theme of the book: the splitting of townships. In many ways this is the best part of the book, written in a more relaxed way and with a freer-flowing style and stream of ideas than the tighter and less easily absorbed structures of the earlier sections. The argument is that the process of township splitting (division for logistical and operational convenience) “provided a nursery for experimentations with layout-out of which the pioneer examples of the two- or threefield systems may have emerged”, that is an experimental basis-though not an exclusive one-for the rational organization of layout. This new rational system could then have
300
REVIEWS
been diffused without being necessarily linked to splitting. The period to which Dodgshon ascribes the beginning of the process of splitting is the tenth or eleventh century, which is fairly close to the date suggested by H. S. A. Fox and others for the known existence of the Midland system, whose “origins” have been ascribed to the eighth or ninth century (see T. Rowley, Ed., The Origins of Open-field Agriculture, 1981). Stress is laid upon the multiplicity of causal factors as well as the varied chronologies and forms of open fields; hence “field systems everywhere were a response to the same basic set of problems. It was the way the different responses were combined and weighted that determined the regional varieties of form and function, not differences of a more substantive kind” (pp. 153-4). The general stress on the field system as a synthetic institution whose form reflects a variety of processes and trends is an interesting one, and does point the way forward, as Dodgshon suggests, for future work, though there will be those who disagree with his premise that “there is but one type of British field system articulated into different regional variants”. This is a provocative book with many valuable ideas. Its main weaknesses derive from its structure whose elements are not always clearly linked, and one occasionally has the feeling that the welding of material from periodical articles into a book has not been totally successful. It is a work for the cognoscenti (students would find it very hard going, except perhaps for the first and last three chapters) and as such deserves wide circulation and appraisal among specialists. Dahlman’s book is based on a Ph.D. thesis, but like Dodgshon he presents little or no new empirical material. The open field system is treated as a social and economic “institution”, examined in a “property rights paradigm” and with particular reference to transaction costs. The body of theory-for this is essentially a work on theory-is that of the economics of institutions, and a fundamental assumption is the postulation of “private wealth maximization as the fundamental assumption about human behaviour”. The purpose of the exercise is clear: “We shall then characterize a representative village by a number of ‘stylized facts’ descriptive of the open field system, and the intellectual exercise will be to set up an economic theoretical model that, in a logically consistent fashion, can account for the simultaneous existence of those observed characteristics” (p. 19). This is a laudable enough objective, though one which may give rise to considerable misgivings among empirically and technically inclined scholars. After a review of theories of the open-field system, which includes rejection of the “dumb lord” and “dumb peasant” models (“predicated on the basic belief that the peasants of the open field villages were unable to run their affairs in such a way as to achieve a reasonable degree of efficiency”) Dahlman proceeds to examine property rights transaction costs and institutions, the economics of commons, open fields and scattered strips, and the economics of enclosure. A digest of his argument is that there were essential differences between the ownership and management of the commons and wastes and the arable fields respectively, and that a key to the maintenance of large arable fields is the need to provide large areas for grazing. The relationship between grain-production and livestock was important and sensitive, hence “if the land is kept undivided and the fields large, then the output from the livestock is greater for a given area of land” (p. 190). The existence and persistence of scattered strips is explained by reference to the technicalities of ploughing and the topography of the village land, to risk aversion, and to “the incentives for selfish bargaining behaviour afforded by communal grazing”. As far as “ownership” is concerned, the principle of “private ownership” which is deemed to have determined control of arable land is thought to have been an incentive to efficient use of a scarce resource and also to the maintenance of the institutional constraint to inefficient use, that is collective decision making. The various arguments promoted to explain the elements of the open fields are superficially attractive, but give the distinct impression of being too simple, not just in relation to our factual knowledge of the complexity of open fields and their linked communities, but also in relation to the complexities of land tenure, ownership, feudalism, and other key elements. This excessive simplicity reduces the credibility of the book, which is of less value than Dodgshon’s work. Nevertheless, Dahlman does offer new insights and
REVIEWS
301
perspectives, and is worth reading for this reason, even if in the end one is obliged to reject or qualify many of the assumptions made. Loughborough ROGER
FINLAY,
ROBIN BUTLIN
University of Technology Population
and Metropolis:
The Demography
of London 1580-1650
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Geographical Studies, 198 1. Pp. xii+ 188. g22.50) Although the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure has been biased towards the study of rural England, Professor E. A. Wrigley has also prompted investigation of the demography of the capital city. Roger Finlay’s monograph is the first fruit of this enterprise, and tribute should be paid to the audacity of attempting to subject a city of some 130 parishes and up to 400,000 people to analytical techniques developed in dealing with villages of only a few hundred inhabitants. What makes the exercise possible is a concentration on the central area of the metropolis, the City proper, and within this an analysis of a very small sample of parishes. Of the six substantial chapters in the book three have been previously published in Population Studies, Annales de DLmographie Historique, and the Journal of Family History. Finlay first argues that it is possible to tackle the demographic history of this large city: he demonstrates the accuracy of London parish registers, and suggests that high geographical mobility in the city, which might make parish register analysis difficult, is offset by a high persistency rate in each parish population. Using aggregative techniques he demonstrates the very sharp increase in London population between 1580 and 1650, a period when the city’s rate of growth was higher than in the century from 1650 to 1750 that Wrigley has examined. He goes on to distinguish rich and poor London parishes by mapping the 1638 tithe rental (a similar exercise to that carried out by Professor Emrys Jones in The London Journal for 1980). Thus equipped, he samples two wealthy central parishes, and two poorer peripheral parishes, by the river and by London Wall, on which to practise reconstitution techniques, arguing that the chosen parishes were typical of their areas and that their results reflect general demographic experience in different zones of the City. He is able to show that London mortality was much higher than in rural England, that life expectancy was much higher in wealthy than in poor London parishes, that plague, though a major killer, had a limited “drag” on population increase, and, most originally, that fertility in London was high, especially in wealthy parishes where mothers commonly sent their newly-born children to be wet nursed in the country, thus shortening post-natal amenorrhoea and encouraging conception. Such conclusions are of considerable interest but abstracting them from the text is a struggle. It is not assimilating the 110 tables and figures which creates the problem but the sparse text which must run to only a hundred pages and often reads like a mere technical commentary. Such brevity squeezes out any adequate explanation of the developing argument of the book, and it is left to the reader to provide a coherent overall view of the dynamics of London population. A final chapter, which might have supplied this, is but three pages long and is more concerned with problems still to be investigated than in drawing together conclusions reached in the book. A recurrent problem of demographic studies, the absence of an economic and social context, is also unhappily illustrated here. Finlay’s designation of “rich” and “poor” parishes is based entirely upon levels of rent paid in 1638, with no additional information about the occupations and status of their inhabitants, yet he is prepared to hazard that “residential segregation did not occur on the basis of guilds, trades, or occupations, but in terms of the social distribution of wealth”. He has evidence for the second contention but none for the first. The influence of occupation on demographic behaviour remains an uncharted subject in London, though a recent thesis by Deborah Hibberd on seventeenthcentury York has demonstrated that the two factors can be convincingly linked in an urban study.