Notes

Outline

The feudal system. Change in the MES of military technology. The great stirrup controversy. Feudalism as a “contract.” Exchange of work for defense. Why an in-kind exchange? Serfdom: tying workers to the land. Labor shortage and rent distribution. Example: professional sports.

Feudalism as a system of rights.

The manorial system. Villein tenancy. Disappearance of slavery. The custom of the manor. Demesne obligation. Three days of week-work on the lord’s land. An input-sharing contract.

Early medieval agriculture. Traditional individualistic subsistence agriculture. Shared common “wastes” with little common-pool pressure. “Sedentary pastoralism” takes precedence over cultivation of arable. Eventually: communal control over common-field grazing.

Evolution of the manorial system. Population growth leads to nucleation. Peasants leave hamlets and assemble in villages. Arable of hamlets merged to become village arable.

Evolution of the manorial system. Labor transferred from pastoralism to cultivation of the arable. “Cerealization” and “destocking.” “Common of shack”: grazing on the fallow arable. Final element: scattering of arable holdings.

Crop rotation. Spring crop: Oats/barley or peas/beans. Harvested in summer. Autumn sowing of wheat or rye, harvested following summer. A year fallow. Nitrogen fixing by soil bacteria. Manure from pasturing.

The open-field system.

Representative village. Division into arable and non-arable land. “Waste” for grazing. Arable divided into two or more fields. Hundreds of acres each. Arable subdivided into elongated narrow strips. But waste not subdivided.

Representative village. Villeins, copyholders, and freeholders. Not much practical difference. OFS as a village system, not a manorial system. Commons owned collectively. Not “unowned.”

Representative village. Management of the Commons. Changeover from private to collective rights. Use of commons. Joint expenses. Manor court or village meeting. Set planting and harvesting dates. Prevented overuse of commons. Controlled private exchange of strips.

Representative village. Little specialization in production. Except near big cities. Specialized farms didn’t use the OFS. High transportation and transaction costs. Some activities collective. Grazing, plowing, harvesting. Some activities private. Sowing, weeding.

The OFS: economic analysis. Fine-tuned adaptation to diversified autarkic production. Pastoralism and crop rotation. Many tasks, with different levels of economies of scale and different costs of monitoring. Manage tasks collectively when economies of scale high and monitoring costs low. Assign private property rights when economies of scale low and monitoring costs high.

Scattering.

Scattering: early explanations. Size of plow team. Land in proportion to contribution. But scattering observed even when light plow used. Desire for equality. But there were many inequalities among peasants. Partible inheritance. But this applies only to holders in fee simple. Assarting. Creating new arable form the waste.

Scattering and risk. McCloskey: scattering as a form of insurance. Variability of climate and soil over small areas. Scattering as portfolio diversification in the absence of other assets.

Problems with the risk hypothesis. Landlords provide de facto “charity.” Livestock another portfolio asset. Optimal risk sharing through combination of rental, wage, and share-cropping contracts.

Scattering and the open-field system. Dahlman: scattering helps preserve OFS. By increasing costs of private enclosure, scattering reduces “hold-up” threats. Scattering protects the system against the individual. Fenoaltea: stands Dahlman on his head. Collective activities (especially harvesting) capacity constrained. Not all parts of all fields can be harvested in some years. Scattering protects the individual against the system. A different sort of risk-diversification argument.