Land markets and inequality: evidence from medieval England

Abstract

The 13 th century witnessed a substantial increase in inequality in the distribution of peasant landholdings relative to the distribution of the late 11 th century. Innovations in property rights over land in 12 th century England induced peasants to include the trading of small parcels of land as part of their risk coping strategy. We argue that these events are related. Recent theoretical work in development economics has explored the relationship between inequality and asset markets. When agents are able to trade productive assets to manage risk, the resulting dynamics may generate increasing inequality over time. We employ a simulation strategy to analyze the impact of land markets in generating inequality in 13 th century landholdings. We find that the dominant factor contributing to the unequal distribution of land was the interaction between emerging land markets and population growth driven by high fertility rates in households with large landholdings.Keywords: economic history, land market, Hundred Rolls, Domesday, inequality, risk, poverty, asset markets, simulation analysis, economic development JEL Classifications: N23, N53, O15, J11 ⇤ This paper has benefited from comments and suggestions from audiences at an ASSA Cliometric session in Chicago, the CNEH Conference in Montreal, and Oxford University. We are indebted to Bruce Campbell, Jeff Dunbar, Rui Esteves, Erin Haswell, and Alex Karaivanov for comments and encouragement. Rick Bekar helped with coding the simulations. Tamma Carleton provided valuable research assistance. All are absolved of responsibility.

History and the Social Sciences: Shock Therapy with Medieval Economic History as the Patient

“…Only very recently has there been a spate of works based on archival evidence to reconstruct long-term trends in inequality (Alfani 2010a, 2010b; Fourie and Von Fintel 2010; Hanus 2013; Hoffman et al 2002; Pereira et al 2013), yet there is almost nothing from the medieval period. Furthermore, those much older works able to reconstruct property or wealth distribution further back in time for the Middle Ages have generally only done this for short time periods or single dates—often reliant on exceptional or “special” sources such as the 1427 Florentine Catasto or the 1279–80 Hundred Rolls (Bekar and Reed 2013; Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber 1978). However, in very recent years, a few select pioneering works have appeared that show that reconstruction of different types of inequality for the (late) Middle Ages can be possible, can be integrated with longer-run series of inequality connecting to the early modern period, and do not necessarily need to be restricted to places with better source provision such as England or Italy (Alfani 2015; Alfani and Ammannati 2014), but have been attempted for parts of the Low Countries (Ryckbosch 2016; van Bavel 2009), Portugal (Johnson 2001), and for the Kingdom of Valencia (Baydal Sala and Martí 2014), for example.…”

Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidence from acrossWesternEurope, 1300–1800

“…Rights of common up to the high Middle Ages may have helped support the very poorest of rural societies eke out a precarious living, as seen in the hunting and fishing rights in the early medieval marshes and woodlands of the Po Valley of northern Italy (Fumagalli , 62–3; Montanari , 34–5, 48–9, 267–70), but later in the Middle Ages they came increasingly under attack from reclamations and expropriation into private plots (Comino ; Rao ; Alfani ). After the formalization of collective institutions for resource management in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the trend across Western Europe generally was one of increasing inequality in spite of the presence of the commons (see, e.g., Bekar and Reed ) – and the commons even became an ‘arena’ through which this inequality could be manifested and established. In some cases, those lower down the social hierarchy could theoretically enjoy the benefits of access to the commons in terms of grazing, but in practice were not able: if only a select few interest groups owned all the herds of cows or sheep, only a select part of society would in practice benefit from optimal functioning of the commons (De Moor , 17).…”

“…However, in some cases, it can be said that the commons did serve to limit or prevent further polarization of landownership in the countryside, by acting as a complex jurisdictional barrier that any potential urban investor had to get around if he wanted to accumulate more private property in the rural hinterlands. Indeed, it has been suggested in recent scholarship that both feudal and collective rights to resources often posed an institutional block to the transfer of land by disrupting the emergence of fluid and flexible land and lease markets (Whittle , 305–6; Feller ; Van Bavel , 130–1; Brakensiek ; Van Bavel ; Congost and Santos , 15–23) – ultimately, the kinds of factor markets that may have been one explanatory variable for accentuating economic inequality between peasants (Bekar and Reed ). So to use but one example, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries both powerful institutions and wealthy burgers from the city of Florence began to accumulate expropriated land from peasants in the nearby rural contado (Curtis , 482–3).…”

Aproximación a la desigualdad económica a través de fuentes fiscales bajomedievales: Valls (1378), Sevilla (1384) y Palma (1478)

“…No solo cabe mencionar al ya mencionado Van Zanden (1995) para el caso de los Países Bajos, sino también los trabajos de Wouter Ryckbosch (2014Ryckbosch ( , 2012 y Jord Hanus (2014Hanus ( , 2013 para esta misma región, o los de Guido Alfani (2014Alfani ( , 2010Alfani ( , 2009) sobre las regiones centro-septentrionales de Italia, los de Santiago Caballero sobre España (2011) y, finalmente, los de Reis y Martins sobre Portugal (2012). Hay que reconocer que los medievalistas también se han aproximado al tema de la desigualdad por su propio pie, que ya han calculado coeficientes de Gini 5 en Inglaterra, Francia y diversas áreas de la Península ibérica (Rubin, 1987;Bekar y Reed, 2013;Sussman, 2006;Slivinski y Sussman, 2009;Ribalta y Turull, 1992;Tello, 1987;Oliva Herrer, 2000ay 2000b 6 . Los estudios de desigualdad para el período medieval tienen por delante un campo lleno de posibilidades, enmarcadas y apuntaladas por todos estos trabajos.…”