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In this paper, an attempt will be made to discuss the likely context for pre-plague indications of expropriation and its limits. There is plentiful evidence of an active land market in medieval villages by the end of the thirteenth century, and most likely for some time earlier. Fluctuation in the rate of buying and selling coincided with difficult harvest years and suggests a link between impecunious peasant sellers and wealthier peasant buyers. There is also some association between the selling of land and pre-existing indebtedness. In a period of partial commercial and market development, the extent to which exchange of land or of moveables proceeded to a significant structural redistribution of land and resources was constrained, and even in those parts of the country where an early peasant land market was well-established, significant adjustment is not evident. Instead, impediments to expropriation, such as seigneurial control of peasant land and limited capacity for extensive capital accumulation, acted as constraints on significant accumulation and redistribution. That said, there is limited suggestion in our sources of a redistribution of property rights associable with inequality of dealing and the advantage of wealthier landholders and creditors. In exploring this last point, particular use is made of the court records for the Welsh marcher lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd.

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2006 The following four articles arise from a one-day conference on ‘Sharecropping in History’, organized by Benedita Câmara and held at the University of Madeira on 8 October 2004. The papers gathered here, though revised, reflect the variety of approach evident in their first presentations at the meeting. A fifth paper, by Kyle Kauffman, on ‘Monopsony land tenure and sharecropping in Dutch South Africa, 1652–1795’ (which was not presented for publication here) also suggested that same variety, not only in terms of the inevitable spatial and temporal range but also in terms of approach. That said, a number of discrete themes emerged from the meeting, with ‘sharecropping’ a central concept, tantalizingly clear and yet fiercely resistant to close categorization, offering a number of avenues for exploration. The majority of these approaches were conditioned by, and set out to test, some of the more prevalant assumptions of economic history and economic theory with regard to sharecropping.