You are single-handedly rewriting the most important part of human history so far. It is inspiring and extremely interesting. Your approach made me start looking into how global industries shaped history, such as silver, tea, or china. I'm avidly looking forward to your next articles!
Ah thanks Tomas, that's very kind of you! Been promising you this piece for a long while, it seems. I've recently inadvertently discovered a fun take on silver, but I think I will save it for a book! (the one after next)
Hi Anton. Perhaps I am a post too early as you have not yet got to the reason for the coal revolution, but I am impatient so here I go anyway. I have two thoughts/questions.
I have just finished reading a book called 'Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Onwership' by Andro Linklater. I wonder if you are aware of it. In that book he says that 16th century England saw a true revolution in the way the land was owned, that would eventually spread to the whole world. This was the replacement of the old manorial system in which land ownership was characterised by manifold mutual obligations on the part of the different people that had a stake in it by one defined by absolute individual private ownership of land (this was turbocharged by the Dissolution of the monasteries in which 20% of England's land passed into private ownership).
It is to this revolution which Linklater attributes the radical commercial/industrial changes which are clearly visible in England by the latter part of the century (as well as other changes but they are not relevant here). He says you can see the change in attitude as landowners start intensifying their efforts, focusing on using the land for commercial purposes, innovating and adopting new practices and so forth. As a result - he says - by the late 17th century even the families of labourers owned chairs, saucepans, earthenware plates and knives, items often absent from French peasant homes.
What do you think about this? Is it connected to the coal revolution? Surely the timing of this change right before and around the time of the growth of cities, use of coal and so forth, is not a coincidence?
Connected to this is my second thought/question on the same topic. My understanding is that in England, landowners owned the 'minerals' under their land, (with the exception of gold and silver) which would include coal, and this gave them a good reason to search for it and dig it up rather than hide any knowledge of it and obstruct anyone that might look for it, as one might do if only the Crown stood to benefit. I understand that on Continental Europe, the latter rule prevailed. Do you know how true this is?
I'd not seen the book, but have been giving the relevant parts a skim on your suggestion, and have noticed quite a few major misunderstandings. I really can't see much change in the way land was treated, other than as a response to other changes in the economy, and if anything it became *more* feudal under Henry VIII.
The bit about "uses" on p.19, for example, is *completely* garbled. Parliament could not have passed any laws at all without the king's assent, which he very happily held back whenever he wanted. And he wasn't being denied two thirds of his revenues, but almost all of the old 14thC revenues from various ancient feudal dues. "Uses" were essentially a medieval tax dodge, using immortal trusts that then allowed the owner to assign the land's use to himself and whichever heirs he chose, which had become common practice throughout the 15thC to avoid feudal fees that had to paid whenever the owner died. So Henry's legal moves in the 1530s were to undermine over a century of case law regarding the legality of uses, and he personally leant on the judges to ensure that they declared them to be void. This was incredibly destabilising of essentially all property rights in the country, rendering basically every property title suspect, as almost all of them would have at some stage changed hands through a use. When Parliament next sat, he held this over them so that they would grant him extraordinary taxation - called "subsidies", as subsidies to the king - even though it was peacetime, in exchange for them being able to pass the Statute of Uses to declare all *past* uses to be secure in their titles, but thenceforth to make them illegal and restore all the ancient feudal dues that had only really been collected from in the 14thC. It would be the equivalent of the king today having the judges declare that all leaseholds in the entire country are void, so as to restore various feudal obligations that haven't been paid for centuries in exchange for making them secure again. The thing about two thirds of revenues is that in 1540, because Henry was again absolutely desperate for cash, he persuaded parliament to grant him extra taxes again in exchange for watering down the feudal dues by two thirds - the Statute of Wills (which de facto relegalised uses for two thirds of the value of land, because the owner could once again will it to whoever they liked). So it's a completely different story to the one Linklater tells of an assertive House of Commons dominated by property owners creating a land revolution. Linklater's right to say that the dispute over uses should be very famous, but not at all for the reasons he says!
As for the dissolution of the monasteries, one of the key things to note is that all that land was sold by the Crown with the feudal dues imposed on it - leases involving "knights' service". So Henry very successfully used it to increase his innovative neo-feudal tax base. (Later on, as the crown became increasingly desperate for cash, the seized lands were sold on better and better terms, with many of the smaller parcels sold increasingly using "socage" leases - that is, without knights' services - there's a great paper by Sean Bottomley examining this in the reign of Mary).
It's certainly true that a lot of land had its common rights extinguished in this period via engrossment. But we also have basically no idea of the extent of sub-tenanting, with what scraps of evidence we do have about it indicating that it may have been huge. That's not to say that there weren't winners and losers in the period - certainly, anyone very rationally expecting the continuation of over a century of deflationary conditions and choosing shorter and more flexible leases would have been completely screwed when the next hundred and more years turned out to be mildly inflationary. But it's the same as the decision today between whether to get a fixed or a variable mortgage - it's ultimately a bet on the future, which may or may not turn out to be right! Those few who took out very long leases at fixed rents were the huge winners, like someone getting the lease of a rent-controlled apartment in New York in the 1970s. But I don't know if I'd call it a revolution - the mechanics of leases and sub-leases being used were ultimately the same going well back into the middle ages. It's just that some turned out to be more successful than others in an unprecedentedly inflationary era.
Thank you for taking the time to look into this and to reply to me.
I admit I was a bit skeptical of the story of Henry VIII being bossed about, and all the uses, trusts, fee tails, scutages and socages and the like are a bit obscure for the non-specialist so I struggled to follow that anyway (and also because it seemed to contradict what I'd read in Violence and Social Orders by Barry Weingast and co which covers some of the same history). But I was hoping at least that the basic picture of a transition from a system in which land came with numerous obligations to one of absolute private ownership was more or less accurate.
I am following Linklater here, but circumstantial evidence would suggest such a transition would it not? I mean you have the introduction of various Vagabonds Acts and Poor Laws, because there are now substantial people not subject to the control and support of the manor; in the 17th century you start to see thinkers wrestling with how absolute private property can be justified, with Locke saying it stems from combining one's labour with the earth; as well as (admittedly small numbers of) radical Protestant types who want to establish communal ownership, because the old system is gone; and in 1660 the official end of feudal-style ownership of land, which I presume was not some great sudden change but reflecting what was mostly a fait accompli. Linklater says Dutch, French and Iberian overseas settlers found themselves subject to old feudal-style restrictions whereas English ones did not (Quebec did not end these until 1854). When the changes hit France in the 18th century, Rousseau writes his famous line about the first person who, having enclosed a plot of land...etc. So is there not something going on here?
Regarding knight-service and sub-tenancy, is not the question simply whether one has control to use the land as one wishes, and is free to buy and sell it? I don't think having to pay some fee in lieu of knight-service or choosing to sub-let your land when it suits you impedes that.
Forgive me if I've misunderstood anything, which I am sure I have. And thanks again for the response.
It's possible I went too quickly to the weeds and honed in too much on what he says about the early sixteenth century developments, making it sound like there are no changes at all, which was not my intention.
In short: yes, there are certainly some gradual moves towards greater control or flexibility over how land can be used, with more land held in severalty rather than under the control of manorial courts (or what we might call effectively village regulation/management). You also, in the eighteenth century, see a huge number of private parliamentary acts removing conditions of entail from property, which had been set by the owners' ancestors.
The Poor Laws and Vagrancy Acts are an interesting one. I still need to look into them more for my book, but my current strong strong hunch is that they're initially mainly a response to the fallout from the devastating pandemics of 1557-60, which kill off a lot of working-age people and leave a lot of dependents unprovided for, and which because of the labour scarcity encourages even more conversion of arable to pasture.
On knights' service, the obligations could be extremely onerous. If you died without a male heir, the land was escheated, reverting to the crown. If you died before your male heir was of age, then the land was handed over to the crown to manage on your behalf - known as wardship - which in practice meant the crown selling it to the highest bidder, who tended to run down every asset they could and strip it bare. And that heir, when they came of age, had to pay a substantial fee when they came into their inheritance. They also had to pay a substantial fee if they turned down the marriage that the crown arranged for them. An awful lot of parliamentary struggle after the Uses affair in the 1530s is all to do with trying to get rid of wardship in exchange for a less intrusive means of raising royal revenue. They come close in 1610 as part of Robert Cecil's "Great Contract", but the crown and parliament couldn't agree on the price, and so it's only finally extinguished in the 1640s with parliament ascendant. When the Restoration happens in 1660 the change is confirmed - I'd presume as a major condition of it even taking place! But either way, that's a century of struggle to merely undo what Henry had resurrected (I should be clear that wardship and other dues had still been collected before the 1530s, but only for the vanishingly small number of people who failed to exploit uses)
My point on sub-tenancy is that in practice land seems to have been used with a greater deal of flexibility in the earlier periods already, and that the methods of attaining flexibility were essentially the same. Many of the common rights were, as I think Linklater mentions, extinguished through mutual consent, usually so as to switch the land to a more profitable use. The only problem was that this was often illegal under the tillage acts (basically anti-enclosure acts), and it's only much much later that the few remaining holdouts are mopped up by what are effectively parliamentary over-rides.
I am very interested in the thesis and its variants, however, and will look into this in much more detail as part of the research for my book!
Okay so basically there was a change but it was perhaps rather more prolonged and less dramatic than as portrayed by Linklater. But that still leaves open the question of whether, in the grand scheme of things, this did amount to a revolution, and whether it can explain or partly explain changes like the turn to coal or the rather dramatic urbanisation that we see see in the second half of the century. I wonder, how did it compare to what was going on elsewhere?
As for knight-service, I can certainly see that there is less incentive to invest in the land if you're not sure your son will inherit it, or will only do so after the Crown has run it down, but is not the main question regarding productivity of the land whether you are free or not to do what you want with it? Can you plant whatever crops you want, can you cut down woods, tear down cottages, rip out hedges, combine or separate fields, convert to pasture, try out new techniques, build new buildings, hire and fire labourers at will, terf out tenants, and sell all you make on the market? Can you make such decisions at a moment's notice without consultation? Or are you restricted in numerous ways by law and custom?
And on the Vagabonds Acts and Poor Laws, what about those that predate the 1560s, I believe the first, which seems to be purely punitive, was in 1494, and the second, which at least allows some people the freedom to beg, was in 1530, which is significant because it is before even the Dissolution of the monasteries. There had been pandemics before, and there had been population growth before (which Wikipedia cites as the reason for the 1494 act), but the Tudors come along and suddenly you get all these acts aimed at handling the poor (one way or another). Again, do we see the same thing happen in other countries? I think the international comparison must surely be central in any story told about why something dramatic occurred in England/Britain but not elsewhere.
Linklater's book is a bit eccentric (don't be put off when he refers to private property as a 'selfish monster') but I do recommend you add it to your reading list. I think that circumstantial evidence I mentioned above is worth something. I can believe he got details wrong, and that his own biases warp his judgement of the changes he described, but find it hard to credit that his big picture is all that far from the truth.
Great article. I was pretty familiar with the period, but I still learned a lot.
Your argument is very convincing. It is a common trend in history: forests get cut down to make way for agriculture as populations increase. But now we can add on that when an alternative heating fuel source is found that can cost-effectively replace wood, this ironically gives the incentive to create more agricultural land.
By the way, this reminds me: in the US where fossil fuels and the auto cut down on horses for transportation and pulling plows. Now the feed for those horses did not need to be grown so this unlocked more agricultural land for human consumption. And fossil fuels replacing wood for home heating and railroads led to reforestation.
Quick question: have you run across any good data for the changing percentage of energy in pre-industrial England for animal-power, wood, water and coal? Or for London specifically?
I am very interested in Energy Transitions, and this is an incredibly important one that I have not been able to find good data for.
The best data will come from various works by Paul Warde. Can’t recall the titles off the top of my head, or what the most recent will be, but definitely look up his work for this.
Makes an awful lot of sense - I suppose the question is, why did the cheapness of coal become important from the late 16th c. onwards? Better boats? Secular population growth in London driving demand for whatever fuel was available?
That is indeed the question I’ll be answering next time! The answer, as I hinted, has a lot to do with salt. The other thing I’ll mention, as a hint, is that there are different grades of coal, only some of which could be burned in people’s homes, and that they’re only attainable at certain depths. Also that the demand for other kinds of coal, nearer the surface, will likely have a big effect on the supply of those other coals.
Fascinating article, thanks. Walking in the countryside around London now it's hard to believe just how 'industrial' it used to be (and often how much more densely populated too). Other than price drivers, would be really interesting to hear if the problems of high sulphur coal were mitigated a bit, or was that something people just had to put up with?
One strategy, considered in the 1590s, was all about quality control - so only allowing the sale of larger coals rather than the crumblier and more sulphurous stuff. There are loads of patent applications, which I haven't quite sorted through fully, to do with this - not so much patents of invention, but patents of regulation, by which every chaldron of coal sent from Newcastle would be taxed by a couple of pence in order to fund the regulator to do the quality-control. None of these seem to have been adopted, however, but they did come up with some kind of local process to oversee it.
Another strategy, which I allude to with my mention of the inventor Hugh Plat, was to mix coals with various other materials - clays, that sort of thing - in order to mitigate the sulphur. This was apparently commonly practised near the coal mines of Liege, which Plat mentions in his pamphlet of 1603. But again, there's little to suggest any widespread adoption of this, especially as in the 1640s, when the Newcastle coal supply is disrupted by being captured by the rebellious Scots, there are fresh pamphlets presenting the exact same thing as an innovation again. I suspect the problem was the added labour cost of having to prepare the coals this way - Plat even suggests that making the "coal balls" be a major make-work scheme for the London poor, which gives an indication of how labour-intensive it must have been to do.
Otherwise, the main thing you can do is use a chimney with a strong draught. You need both that and a properly designed iron grate so as to manage a coal fire properly and stop it smoking up a room. This has been seized on by some as the key innovation that makes coal adoption possible in the city, but my next post will dispute this and offer an alternative explanation.
Sorry if I missed it, but why did people suddenly stop caring that the Sulfur made their eyes sting? Was there an improvement in chimneys or something?
What you have carefully outlined in your description is a foreign-exchange devaluation driven domestic price affect.
But even if one thought the English had a metallic theory of currency value, rather than simply using a scarcity of silver or gold in support of counterfeiting prevention: since the continent never had such a metallic theory of value (see *Coinage and State Formation in early modern Literature* by Stephen Deng, pages 87-102 for the period prior to this, and *What is Money* by Innes as to the more general case.), the debasement itself can't be the direct cause of the FX devaluation that step by step, as you outlined, led to domestic price increases.
Instead, it might be argued, for example, that the debasement supported a greater supply of coin issuance, which pushed against *continental* material supply constraints, raising import costs, you wrote, while simultaneously freeing continental purchasing capacity via the supply of said same English coin, to buy up English exports. So, in short: quantitative theory of "debasement" (perhaps), rather than a metallic theory (not supported by the facts, it seems), but one supported by a switch to easier to mine metals.
I don’t think that’s true for international exchanges - I’ve seen a great deal of evidence that bullion content was indeed the thing that mattered. For example, following the debasement, Antwerp bankers and merchants began to insist that payments from the English had to first be assayed for their bullion content. There is also the fact that the resultant inflation seems to have been much milder than we would expect from the gigantic expansion in the English money supply, and is much closer to the extent of the bullion decrease. But I will check those sources before I get back to you with a proper reply. I’ve mainly (though not exclusively) relied on the work of John H Munro to guide my understanding of it. But I am very keen to get it right, as it is a major part of my book!
"Money quantity" as a stimulus for inflation was just my quick try for an alternate causation to "debasement." I'd like to point out that in isolation, there's no reason to think that even a "gigantic" expansion in money supply would cause *any* rise in the general price level--it would be entirely case-by-case, as such an inflation causation depends on the specific inelasticity of the supply of each of the goods and services it is used to purchase, such as "wood, wheat, and wool" (since there aren't likely Antwerp Bankers adding up the total money supply and proportionately setting the exchange rate according to *that*!). So, upon reading your comment, I am moving towards your Antwerp bankers setting the exchange rate causation.
But one tries to imagine various scenarios. Suppose the continent also had coins that contained a fixed quantity of metals. Would these Antwerp bankers still be setting an exchange rate between the separate units of account, English currency and the continental currencies? For instance, Innes, for a later period, writes that in the eighteenth century Amsterdam and Hamburg Bourses: "Coins of similar weight and fineness circulated at different prices, according to the country to which they belonged."
Hi Anton. A very nice (long) post. In fact, I was starting to wonder where you had gone so long had it been since the last post. For me, the piece is pithily captured by these sentences: “The rise of coal was not caused by deforestation. Deforestation was caused by the arrival of cheap coal.”
One thing I recall that EP Thompson said was that more wood left English shipyards as perquisites in the hands of workers than ever left as naval vessels. Cannot recall now whether it was in an article or sometime in 1983 when Edward and Dorothy were guests of the British History Society at Nanjing University, China, where I was a graduate student and helped them navigate their way around. Fascinating stuff. I look forward to the next post.
Thanks Stephen! I was getting increasingly anxious as the delay stretched on! Hence the note of explanation and apology at the start of the emailed version (though I've removed it from the online version, as brand new readers won't have been subscribers). I hope, given the length, that this one is worth a few months.
That's interesting - now you mention it, I think I've seen something about the perquisites somewhere. I'll check it out, thanks!
You are single-handedly rewriting the most important part of human history so far. It is inspiring and extremely interesting. Your approach made me start looking into how global industries shaped history, such as silver, tea, or china. I'm avidly looking forward to your next articles!
Ah thanks Tomas, that's very kind of you! Been promising you this piece for a long while, it seems. I've recently inadvertently discovered a fun take on silver, but I think I will save it for a book! (the one after next)
100% agree, Tomas!
Excellent piece.
Thanks!
the average person has no understanding of economics. i appreciate this for helping to explain that everything has a cost. o7
Cheers!
This was incredible. Thank you for doing this work.
Thanks Adam!
This is really wonderful. It’s one of those things that is far from intuitive but makes perfect sense once you model it out.
Thanks! I'm really pleased to hear that, as getting the model across was exactly what I wanted to do.
Hi Anton. Perhaps I am a post too early as you have not yet got to the reason for the coal revolution, but I am impatient so here I go anyway. I have two thoughts/questions.
I have just finished reading a book called 'Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Onwership' by Andro Linklater. I wonder if you are aware of it. In that book he says that 16th century England saw a true revolution in the way the land was owned, that would eventually spread to the whole world. This was the replacement of the old manorial system in which land ownership was characterised by manifold mutual obligations on the part of the different people that had a stake in it by one defined by absolute individual private ownership of land (this was turbocharged by the Dissolution of the monasteries in which 20% of England's land passed into private ownership).
It is to this revolution which Linklater attributes the radical commercial/industrial changes which are clearly visible in England by the latter part of the century (as well as other changes but they are not relevant here). He says you can see the change in attitude as landowners start intensifying their efforts, focusing on using the land for commercial purposes, innovating and adopting new practices and so forth. As a result - he says - by the late 17th century even the families of labourers owned chairs, saucepans, earthenware plates and knives, items often absent from French peasant homes.
What do you think about this? Is it connected to the coal revolution? Surely the timing of this change right before and around the time of the growth of cities, use of coal and so forth, is not a coincidence?
Connected to this is my second thought/question on the same topic. My understanding is that in England, landowners owned the 'minerals' under their land, (with the exception of gold and silver) which would include coal, and this gave them a good reason to search for it and dig it up rather than hide any knowledge of it and obstruct anyone that might look for it, as one might do if only the Crown stood to benefit. I understand that on Continental Europe, the latter rule prevailed. Do you know how true this is?
Thanks
I'd not seen the book, but have been giving the relevant parts a skim on your suggestion, and have noticed quite a few major misunderstandings. I really can't see much change in the way land was treated, other than as a response to other changes in the economy, and if anything it became *more* feudal under Henry VIII.
The bit about "uses" on p.19, for example, is *completely* garbled. Parliament could not have passed any laws at all without the king's assent, which he very happily held back whenever he wanted. And he wasn't being denied two thirds of his revenues, but almost all of the old 14thC revenues from various ancient feudal dues. "Uses" were essentially a medieval tax dodge, using immortal trusts that then allowed the owner to assign the land's use to himself and whichever heirs he chose, which had become common practice throughout the 15thC to avoid feudal fees that had to paid whenever the owner died. So Henry's legal moves in the 1530s were to undermine over a century of case law regarding the legality of uses, and he personally leant on the judges to ensure that they declared them to be void. This was incredibly destabilising of essentially all property rights in the country, rendering basically every property title suspect, as almost all of them would have at some stage changed hands through a use. When Parliament next sat, he held this over them so that they would grant him extraordinary taxation - called "subsidies", as subsidies to the king - even though it was peacetime, in exchange for them being able to pass the Statute of Uses to declare all *past* uses to be secure in their titles, but thenceforth to make them illegal and restore all the ancient feudal dues that had only really been collected from in the 14thC. It would be the equivalent of the king today having the judges declare that all leaseholds in the entire country are void, so as to restore various feudal obligations that haven't been paid for centuries in exchange for making them secure again. The thing about two thirds of revenues is that in 1540, because Henry was again absolutely desperate for cash, he persuaded parliament to grant him extra taxes again in exchange for watering down the feudal dues by two thirds - the Statute of Wills (which de facto relegalised uses for two thirds of the value of land, because the owner could once again will it to whoever they liked). So it's a completely different story to the one Linklater tells of an assertive House of Commons dominated by property owners creating a land revolution. Linklater's right to say that the dispute over uses should be very famous, but not at all for the reasons he says!
As for the dissolution of the monasteries, one of the key things to note is that all that land was sold by the Crown with the feudal dues imposed on it - leases involving "knights' service". So Henry very successfully used it to increase his innovative neo-feudal tax base. (Later on, as the crown became increasingly desperate for cash, the seized lands were sold on better and better terms, with many of the smaller parcels sold increasingly using "socage" leases - that is, without knights' services - there's a great paper by Sean Bottomley examining this in the reign of Mary).
It's certainly true that a lot of land had its common rights extinguished in this period via engrossment. But we also have basically no idea of the extent of sub-tenanting, with what scraps of evidence we do have about it indicating that it may have been huge. That's not to say that there weren't winners and losers in the period - certainly, anyone very rationally expecting the continuation of over a century of deflationary conditions and choosing shorter and more flexible leases would have been completely screwed when the next hundred and more years turned out to be mildly inflationary. But it's the same as the decision today between whether to get a fixed or a variable mortgage - it's ultimately a bet on the future, which may or may not turn out to be right! Those few who took out very long leases at fixed rents were the huge winners, like someone getting the lease of a rent-controlled apartment in New York in the 1970s. But I don't know if I'd call it a revolution - the mechanics of leases and sub-leases being used were ultimately the same going well back into the middle ages. It's just that some turned out to be more successful than others in an unprecedentedly inflationary era.
Hi Anton,
Thank you for taking the time to look into this and to reply to me.
I admit I was a bit skeptical of the story of Henry VIII being bossed about, and all the uses, trusts, fee tails, scutages and socages and the like are a bit obscure for the non-specialist so I struggled to follow that anyway (and also because it seemed to contradict what I'd read in Violence and Social Orders by Barry Weingast and co which covers some of the same history). But I was hoping at least that the basic picture of a transition from a system in which land came with numerous obligations to one of absolute private ownership was more or less accurate.
I am following Linklater here, but circumstantial evidence would suggest such a transition would it not? I mean you have the introduction of various Vagabonds Acts and Poor Laws, because there are now substantial people not subject to the control and support of the manor; in the 17th century you start to see thinkers wrestling with how absolute private property can be justified, with Locke saying it stems from combining one's labour with the earth; as well as (admittedly small numbers of) radical Protestant types who want to establish communal ownership, because the old system is gone; and in 1660 the official end of feudal-style ownership of land, which I presume was not some great sudden change but reflecting what was mostly a fait accompli. Linklater says Dutch, French and Iberian overseas settlers found themselves subject to old feudal-style restrictions whereas English ones did not (Quebec did not end these until 1854). When the changes hit France in the 18th century, Rousseau writes his famous line about the first person who, having enclosed a plot of land...etc. So is there not something going on here?
Regarding knight-service and sub-tenancy, is not the question simply whether one has control to use the land as one wishes, and is free to buy and sell it? I don't think having to pay some fee in lieu of knight-service or choosing to sub-let your land when it suits you impedes that.
Forgive me if I've misunderstood anything, which I am sure I have. And thanks again for the response.
Chris
Hi Chris,
It's possible I went too quickly to the weeds and honed in too much on what he says about the early sixteenth century developments, making it sound like there are no changes at all, which was not my intention.
In short: yes, there are certainly some gradual moves towards greater control or flexibility over how land can be used, with more land held in severalty rather than under the control of manorial courts (or what we might call effectively village regulation/management). You also, in the eighteenth century, see a huge number of private parliamentary acts removing conditions of entail from property, which had been set by the owners' ancestors.
The Poor Laws and Vagrancy Acts are an interesting one. I still need to look into them more for my book, but my current strong strong hunch is that they're initially mainly a response to the fallout from the devastating pandemics of 1557-60, which kill off a lot of working-age people and leave a lot of dependents unprovided for, and which because of the labour scarcity encourages even more conversion of arable to pasture.
On knights' service, the obligations could be extremely onerous. If you died without a male heir, the land was escheated, reverting to the crown. If you died before your male heir was of age, then the land was handed over to the crown to manage on your behalf - known as wardship - which in practice meant the crown selling it to the highest bidder, who tended to run down every asset they could and strip it bare. And that heir, when they came of age, had to pay a substantial fee when they came into their inheritance. They also had to pay a substantial fee if they turned down the marriage that the crown arranged for them. An awful lot of parliamentary struggle after the Uses affair in the 1530s is all to do with trying to get rid of wardship in exchange for a less intrusive means of raising royal revenue. They come close in 1610 as part of Robert Cecil's "Great Contract", but the crown and parliament couldn't agree on the price, and so it's only finally extinguished in the 1640s with parliament ascendant. When the Restoration happens in 1660 the change is confirmed - I'd presume as a major condition of it even taking place! But either way, that's a century of struggle to merely undo what Henry had resurrected (I should be clear that wardship and other dues had still been collected before the 1530s, but only for the vanishingly small number of people who failed to exploit uses)
My point on sub-tenancy is that in practice land seems to have been used with a greater deal of flexibility in the earlier periods already, and that the methods of attaining flexibility were essentially the same. Many of the common rights were, as I think Linklater mentions, extinguished through mutual consent, usually so as to switch the land to a more profitable use. The only problem was that this was often illegal under the tillage acts (basically anti-enclosure acts), and it's only much much later that the few remaining holdouts are mopped up by what are effectively parliamentary over-rides.
I am very interested in the thesis and its variants, however, and will look into this in much more detail as part of the research for my book!
Cheers,
Anton
Hi Anton,
Thanks for the swift response.
Okay so basically there was a change but it was perhaps rather more prolonged and less dramatic than as portrayed by Linklater. But that still leaves open the question of whether, in the grand scheme of things, this did amount to a revolution, and whether it can explain or partly explain changes like the turn to coal or the rather dramatic urbanisation that we see see in the second half of the century. I wonder, how did it compare to what was going on elsewhere?
As for knight-service, I can certainly see that there is less incentive to invest in the land if you're not sure your son will inherit it, or will only do so after the Crown has run it down, but is not the main question regarding productivity of the land whether you are free or not to do what you want with it? Can you plant whatever crops you want, can you cut down woods, tear down cottages, rip out hedges, combine or separate fields, convert to pasture, try out new techniques, build new buildings, hire and fire labourers at will, terf out tenants, and sell all you make on the market? Can you make such decisions at a moment's notice without consultation? Or are you restricted in numerous ways by law and custom?
And on the Vagabonds Acts and Poor Laws, what about those that predate the 1560s, I believe the first, which seems to be purely punitive, was in 1494, and the second, which at least allows some people the freedom to beg, was in 1530, which is significant because it is before even the Dissolution of the monasteries. There had been pandemics before, and there had been population growth before (which Wikipedia cites as the reason for the 1494 act), but the Tudors come along and suddenly you get all these acts aimed at handling the poor (one way or another). Again, do we see the same thing happen in other countries? I think the international comparison must surely be central in any story told about why something dramatic occurred in England/Britain but not elsewhere.
Linklater's book is a bit eccentric (don't be put off when he refers to private property as a 'selfish monster') but I do recommend you add it to your reading list. I think that circumstantial evidence I mentioned above is worth something. I can believe he got details wrong, and that his own biases warp his judgement of the changes he described, but find it hard to credit that his big picture is all that far from the truth.
Best
Chris
Great article! It is grand to see someone working through the economic process so thoroughly.
Great article. I was pretty familiar with the period, but I still learned a lot.
Your argument is very convincing. It is a common trend in history: forests get cut down to make way for agriculture as populations increase. But now we can add on that when an alternative heating fuel source is found that can cost-effectively replace wood, this ironically gives the incentive to create more agricultural land.
By the way, this reminds me: in the US where fossil fuels and the auto cut down on horses for transportation and pulling plows. Now the feed for those horses did not need to be grown so this unlocked more agricultural land for human consumption. And fossil fuels replacing wood for home heating and railroads led to reforestation.
Quick question: have you run across any good data for the changing percentage of energy in pre-industrial England for animal-power, wood, water and coal? Or for London specifically?
I am very interested in Energy Transitions, and this is an incredibly important one that I have not been able to find good data for.
The best data will come from various works by Paul Warde. Can’t recall the titles off the top of my head, or what the most recent will be, but definitely look up his work for this.
Thanks for the tip. I have read his book “Power to the People.” In fact, I have a summary of it on my library of online book summaries:
https://techratchet.com/2020/05/07/book-summary-power-to-the-people-energy-in-europe-over-the-last-five-centuries-by-kander-et-al/
I will check out his other works.
Incredible! Looking forward to the next one
Makes an awful lot of sense - I suppose the question is, why did the cheapness of coal become important from the late 16th c. onwards? Better boats? Secular population growth in London driving demand for whatever fuel was available?
That is indeed the question I’ll be answering next time! The answer, as I hinted, has a lot to do with salt. The other thing I’ll mention, as a hint, is that there are different grades of coal, only some of which could be burned in people’s homes, and that they’re only attainable at certain depths. Also that the demand for other kinds of coal, nearer the surface, will likely have a big effect on the supply of those other coals.
As long as you talk about Scottish engineering, pumps and the subsequent effect on the enclosure movement, I am in ;)
Fascinating article, thanks. Walking in the countryside around London now it's hard to believe just how 'industrial' it used to be (and often how much more densely populated too). Other than price drivers, would be really interesting to hear if the problems of high sulphur coal were mitigated a bit, or was that something people just had to put up with?
Very good question.
One strategy, considered in the 1590s, was all about quality control - so only allowing the sale of larger coals rather than the crumblier and more sulphurous stuff. There are loads of patent applications, which I haven't quite sorted through fully, to do with this - not so much patents of invention, but patents of regulation, by which every chaldron of coal sent from Newcastle would be taxed by a couple of pence in order to fund the regulator to do the quality-control. None of these seem to have been adopted, however, but they did come up with some kind of local process to oversee it.
Another strategy, which I allude to with my mention of the inventor Hugh Plat, was to mix coals with various other materials - clays, that sort of thing - in order to mitigate the sulphur. This was apparently commonly practised near the coal mines of Liege, which Plat mentions in his pamphlet of 1603. But again, there's little to suggest any widespread adoption of this, especially as in the 1640s, when the Newcastle coal supply is disrupted by being captured by the rebellious Scots, there are fresh pamphlets presenting the exact same thing as an innovation again. I suspect the problem was the added labour cost of having to prepare the coals this way - Plat even suggests that making the "coal balls" be a major make-work scheme for the London poor, which gives an indication of how labour-intensive it must have been to do.
Otherwise, the main thing you can do is use a chimney with a strong draught. You need both that and a properly designed iron grate so as to manage a coal fire properly and stop it smoking up a room. This has been seized on by some as the key innovation that makes coal adoption possible in the city, but my next post will dispute this and offer an alternative explanation.
Sorry if I missed it, but why did people suddenly stop caring that the Sulfur made their eyes sting? Was there an improvement in chimneys or something?
Yes, I’ll get to that in the next post! (I initially planned to discuss it in this post, but it was already so long)
Yeah, sure can’t complain about you cutting corners in these posts! 😀
What you have carefully outlined in your description is a foreign-exchange devaluation driven domestic price affect.
But even if one thought the English had a metallic theory of currency value, rather than simply using a scarcity of silver or gold in support of counterfeiting prevention: since the continent never had such a metallic theory of value (see *Coinage and State Formation in early modern Literature* by Stephen Deng, pages 87-102 for the period prior to this, and *What is Money* by Innes as to the more general case.), the debasement itself can't be the direct cause of the FX devaluation that step by step, as you outlined, led to domestic price increases.
Instead, it might be argued, for example, that the debasement supported a greater supply of coin issuance, which pushed against *continental* material supply constraints, raising import costs, you wrote, while simultaneously freeing continental purchasing capacity via the supply of said same English coin, to buy up English exports. So, in short: quantitative theory of "debasement" (perhaps), rather than a metallic theory (not supported by the facts, it seems), but one supported by a switch to easier to mine metals.
Hi Tom,
I don’t think that’s true for international exchanges - I’ve seen a great deal of evidence that bullion content was indeed the thing that mattered. For example, following the debasement, Antwerp bankers and merchants began to insist that payments from the English had to first be assayed for their bullion content. There is also the fact that the resultant inflation seems to have been much milder than we would expect from the gigantic expansion in the English money supply, and is much closer to the extent of the bullion decrease. But I will check those sources before I get back to you with a proper reply. I’ve mainly (though not exclusively) relied on the work of John H Munro to guide my understanding of it. But I am very keen to get it right, as it is a major part of my book!
"Money quantity" as a stimulus for inflation was just my quick try for an alternate causation to "debasement." I'd like to point out that in isolation, there's no reason to think that even a "gigantic" expansion in money supply would cause *any* rise in the general price level--it would be entirely case-by-case, as such an inflation causation depends on the specific inelasticity of the supply of each of the goods and services it is used to purchase, such as "wood, wheat, and wool" (since there aren't likely Antwerp Bankers adding up the total money supply and proportionately setting the exchange rate according to *that*!). So, upon reading your comment, I am moving towards your Antwerp bankers setting the exchange rate causation.
But one tries to imagine various scenarios. Suppose the continent also had coins that contained a fixed quantity of metals. Would these Antwerp bankers still be setting an exchange rate between the separate units of account, English currency and the continental currencies? For instance, Innes, for a later period, writes that in the eighteenth century Amsterdam and Hamburg Bourses: "Coins of similar weight and fineness circulated at different prices, according to the country to which they belonged."
The Stephen Deng one was just the top search result. Innes is the old standard text on the POV. A modern similar author with that take is David Graeber (died young four years ago), and a living one is Richard Tye (e.g. https://gimms.org.uk/2022/01/25/an-accounting-model-of-the-uk-exchequer-the-paper-and-author-interviews/).
Thanks for this very insightful article Anton.
Cheers!
Hi Anton. A very nice (long) post. In fact, I was starting to wonder where you had gone so long had it been since the last post. For me, the piece is pithily captured by these sentences: “The rise of coal was not caused by deforestation. Deforestation was caused by the arrival of cheap coal.”
One thing I recall that EP Thompson said was that more wood left English shipyards as perquisites in the hands of workers than ever left as naval vessels. Cannot recall now whether it was in an article or sometime in 1983 when Edward and Dorothy were guests of the British History Society at Nanjing University, China, where I was a graduate student and helped them navigate their way around. Fascinating stuff. I look forward to the next post.
Thanks Stephen! I was getting increasingly anxious as the delay stretched on! Hence the note of explanation and apology at the start of the emailed version (though I've removed it from the online version, as brand new readers won't have been subscribers). I hope, given the length, that this one is worth a few months.
That's interesting - now you mention it, I think I've seen something about the perquisites somewhere. I'll check it out, thanks!