The Evolution of the English Corn Market


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Excerpt from The Evolution of the English Corn Market: From the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century The following essay, based upon a study of printed materials and manuscript sources in the English archives, had its beginning in a class thesis and in its present form is an expansion of a doctoral dissertation submitted at Harvard University. Such an extended treatment of the early corn (grain) trade of England as is here presented is not to be justified on the ground of a lack of general information concerning the subject. The use, however, of new manuscript materials and the adoption of new points of View seem to form an adequate basis for a fresh study of the subject. The chief of these manuscript sources are the communications between London and the central government in the Tudor and Stuart periods, the account books of various London companies, and the national customs accounts and port books. From the second and third of these sets of documents have been compiled statistics of corn prices and of the corn trade, both foreign and domestic. In the compilation of these statistics, as indeed in other parts of the work, I have had in mind both the old interest in corn legis lation, to which one chapter is exclusively devoted, and the new interest in market development, with which the other chapters deal at length. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.







EVOLUTION OF THE ENGLISH CORN


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The Medieval Antecedents of English Agricultural Progress


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Until recently, historians tended to stress the perceived technological and ecological shortcomings of medieval agriculture. The ten essays assembled in this volume offer a contrary view. Based upon close documentary analysis of the demesne farms managed for and by lords, they show that, by 1300, in the most commercialized parts of England, production decisions were based upon relative factor costs and commodity prices. Moreover, when and where economic conditions were ripe and environmental and institutional circumstances favourable, medieval cultivators successfully secured high and ecologically sustainable levels of land productivity. They achieved this by integrating crop and livestock production into the sort of manure-intensive systems of mixed-husbandry which later underpinned the more celebrated output growth of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If medieval agriculture failed to fulfill the production potential provided by wider adoption of such systems, this is more appropriately explained by the want of the kind of market incentives that might have justified investment, innovation, and specialization on the scale that characterized the so-called 'agricultural revolution', than either the lack of appropriate agricultural technology or the innate 'backwardness' of medieval cultivators.







Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society


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An examination of the complex interrelationships among past demographic, social, and economic structures demonstrates how the impact of hunger and disease can enhance the exploration of early modern society.