REVIEW OF PERIODICAL LITERATURE 1976: 1500-1700.

This article presents information on periodical literature that was published during the year 1976 on the variety and complexity of landlord-peasant class relations in England from 1500 to 1700. R. Brenner's insistence, in his wide-ranging and thought-provoking paper "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe" that was published in a 1976 issue of the periodical "Past and Present" that the question of who was to gain and who was to lose from a growing demand for land would be determined by the qualitative character of landlord-peasant class relations thrusts a fundamental Tawney theme to the foreground of the picture. A number of other writers illustrate its variety and complexity. In the paper "The Agrarian Problem in Sixteenth- Century Lincolnshire: Two Cases from the Court of Star Chamber" by R.W. Ambler and M. Watkinson that was published in the periodical "Lincolnshire History and Archaeology" print documents illustrating two such conflicts. The plaintiffs in one case were villagers, complaining about a newly risen landlord who was converting, harassing copyholders, and depopulating in a pure Tawney manner. In the other case, however, it was the encloser who was complaining about villagers entering into, and grazing their beasts upon, land, which he was set upon farming in severalty. In neither case, unfortunately, have the judgments survived, so we are unsure as to whether landlord or peasant prevailed.