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Abstract: Estimates of English income in Broadberry et al.’s British economic growth, 1270–1870 are founded upon a fourfold growth of farm output, and output per farm worker, over this interval. This article shows, using four separate tests, that farm output growth must have been much more limited. The tests are, first, whether in 1300 there was enough work at harvest to employ all the labour force; second, whether the value of output per worker in agriculture was greater than the annual earnings of workers; third, whether the implied relative outputs per acre of arable versus pasture were reasonable; and fourth, whether a much shorter medieval work year was possible. An alternative index of farm output consistent with the labour supply, wages, and farm rents is derived. This shows much less growth during the period 1270–1800. Overall economic growth in England during these years must consequently have been far less than Broadberry et al. estimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that historians have paid insufficient attention to the agrarian roots of early modern English famines. While not dismissing the insights arising from entitlements theory, the article takes issue with recent writings that have explained the famine of 1622-3 in north-west England as an entitlements crisis. It offers new empirical evidence from an estate in east Lancashire to demonstrate the scale of the crisis in the early 1620s, using estate accounts to produce new price data and estimates of productivity. On the basis of oat tithe data, the scale of the shortfall in foodstuffs in the harvest of 1621 is demonstrated as being probably in the region of a third; that of the following year has to be inferred from price data. The evidence shows that the crisis was not limited to the arable economy, but was followed by an extensive restocking of the pastoral economy. The article therefore makes a contribution to the growing interest in weather as an exogenous factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The productivity of agriculture in England and the Yangtze Delta are compared c.1620 and c.1820 in order to gauge the performance of the most advanced part of China vis-à-vis its counterpart in Europe. The value of real output is compared using purchasing power parity exchange rates. Output per hectare was nine times greater in the Yangtze Delta than in England. More surprisingly, output per day worked was about 90 per cent of the English performance. This put Yangtze farmers slightly behind English and Dutch farmers c.1820, but ahead of most other farmers in Europe—an impressive achievement. There was little change in Yangtze agricultural productivity between 1620 and 1820. In 1820, the real income of a Yangtze peasant family was also about the same as that of an English agricultural labourer. All was not rosy in the Yangtze, however, for incomes there were on a downward trajectory. Agriculture income per family declined between 1620 and 1820, even though income per day worked changed little since population growth led to smaller farms and fewer days worked per year. The real earnings of women in textile production also declined, since the relative price of cotton cloth dropped—possibly also because a larger population led to greater production. The implication is that the Yangtze family, unlike the English family, had a considerably higher real income c.1620, and that period was the Delta's golden age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All organic economies were subject to constraints upon growth for reasons familiar to the classical economists, but their relative success in coping with these constraints differed substantially. This is visible both when comparing different areas at the same point in time and when comparing the circumstances of a given economy at different points in time. In this article the state of the English economy in 1300 is compared with its state in 1800. At the former date the balance between output and population was unfavourable. A run of poor harvests spelled grave and widespread suffering. Five hundred years later this had ceased to be true. The particular focus of the article is upon the significance of a rising level of productivity per head in agriculture, not simply in supplying food but in providing the raw materials and energy needed if industry and transport were to expand. In the circumstances of an organic economy both were heavily dependent upon the ‘surplus’ made available by a productive agriculture after meeting the needs of the population for food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a study which examined the methods used by agricultural historians which showed that they support a revisionist view of English agricultural history. This study argued that much of the productivity growth that occurred in England between the middle ages and the nineteenth century took place before the mid-eighteenth century, that small-scale, open field farmers accomplished much of this advance, that the middle and end of the eighteenth century was notable for its lack of output and productivity growth, and that the innovations of the eighteenth century made only a scant contribution to productivity growth. Growth in output and in productivity were in fact slow in the second half of the eighteenth century but accelerated notably in the first half of the nineteenth. This view sees the industrial revolution as the result of a long, prior phase of agricultural expansion, and suggests that one reason for the slow economic growth in the early phases of the industrial revolution was the stagnation in agricultural output and productivity in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The article discusses the cereal yields on the Sussex estates of the Abbey of Battle during the later Middle ages in England. One of the general deficiency of most of the early studies of medieval productivity was the examination of yield data in almost complete detachment from the environmental, socio-economic and technical conditions, which seemingly influenced the production under review. The types of arable farming practised on the Battle Abbey estates in Sussex at Alciston, the principal estate and home-farm, Apuldram, Barnhorne and Lullington invest the yield data with special interest and importance. By the late thirteenth century, when the extant documentation first reveals the economy of the Battle Abbey manors, cultivation for commercial purposes flourished and this was most clearly manifested in the arable husbandry by the suppression of fallow on the best or most conveniently manured land. The density of seed sown per unit of land is a much neglected aspect of medieval farming despite the importance of the relationship between the seeding rate and the yield, which up to a certain point increases as seeding is intensified.