This 1988 volume deals with the agrarian history of England and Wales from the beginning of the reign of Edward the Confessor to the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348. It divides the counties into regions and deals with each under the headings of new settlements, agriculture and pastoralism (crops and stock), yield ratios and techniques (including field systems, crop nutrition and drainage). There are also sections on the Late Saxon period, Domesday England, wages and prices, vernacular architecture, and the life of the people. The volume as a whole offers a detailed description of trends,...

The third volume of The Agrarian History of England and Wales, dealing with the last century and a half of the middle ages, follows the general pattern of the second volume which described the generations of agricultural expansion between the time of Domesday and of the Black Death. The third volume, however, concerns itself with the new demographic and economic circumstances created in large measure by endemic plague, and how these circumstances influenced patterns of settlement in the countryside, farming practices and the structure of rural society, both at the level of landlords and in...

Volume VIII of the Agrarian History of England and Wales was first published in 1978, and provides a technical, social and economic history of rural England and Wales in the years 1914 39. This period included four years of war, during which there was a rapid rise in prices, the post-war deflation and the depression. The author assesses the effects of these political and economic conditions on farming and farm workers. She describes regional variations in patterns of farming and the changes in methods of production by which farmers tried to reduce costs and increase output. She also examines...

This 1967 volume was the result of a project which originated a decade before its publication, when scholars from eleven British universities met under the presidency of the late R. H. Tawney and decided to create a work of co-operative scholarship covering the entire social and economic history of rural England and Wales from the neolithic period to the twentieth century. This was the first of eight volumes to appear, and deals with such topics as the structure of farming regions, agricultural techniques, and estate management by the crown. Based as it is on studies that span the entire...

The agrarian history of Britain begins not with the earliest written documents but with the archaeological evidence marking the advent of the first agriculturalists from the European continent before 3000BC. The foundations of the farming community, which was encountered by the Romans and the subsequent Germanic settlers, were laid by stone-using peoples growing cereal crops and domesticating animals, and the later development of metal technologies enabled these peasant communities to intensify their exploitation of the natural environment. This volume was originally published in two parts,...

This 1989 volume continues the detailed account of the agrarian history of England and Wales, and with volumes IV and V provides a continuous comprehensive study for the whole of the period 1500 to 1850. The century covered in the present volume has always been considered one of vital importance in agrarian history as being that of the classical 'agricultural revolution'. The work provides a fresh analysis and assessment of this period, particularly in the estimation, in terms more precise than ever before, of the extent of the growth of agricultural output, as well as of the prices that...