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This excellent and concise summary of the social and economic history of Europe in the Middle Ages examines the changing patterns and developments in agriculture, commerce, trade, industry and transport that took place during the millennium between the fall of the Roman Empire and the discovery of the New World. After outlining the trends in demography, prices, rent, and wages and in the patterns of settlement and cultivation, the author also summarizes the basic research done in the last twenty-five years in many aspects of the social and economic history of medieval Europe, citing French, Ge

Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State is a research initiative hosted by the British Museum and the British Library in London. Moving beyond geographical, chronological, disciplinary and historiographical boundaries, the books in this series explore the interactions of India and her neighbors from late antiquity to the close of the medieval.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 Water for everyday use -- The supply: aqueducts and their water -- The supply: wells, cisterns, and springs -- The demand: domestic water usage -- 2 Water, baths, and corporeal washing -- The perpetuation of public baths -- The social world of the baths -- Habits of the bath -- The bath from collective nudity to domestic solitude -- Bathless washing -- 3 The wet and the dry: water in agriculture -- Floods, drainage, marshes, and mentalities -- Drainage -- Irrigation -- 4 Water, fish, and fishing -- The Roman heritage -- The new fishing patterns -- The rise of private fishing rights -- The administration of fishing -- Early medieval fisheries and their techniques -- The fishers -- 5 Water and milling in early medieval Italy -- Technologies of milling with water -- Water power and social power -- The ownership of mills -- Mill income -- Watermillers -- 6 Conclusion: the hydrological cycle in the early Middle Ages -- Bibliography -- Index

Europe at the millennium -- Agriculture and rural life -- Trade 1000-1350 -- Cities, guilds, and political economy -- Economic and social thought -- The great hunger and the big death -- The calamitous fourteenth century -- Technology and consumerism -- War and social unrest -- Fifteenth century portraits

Output per farm worker in the northern United States and Britain in the early nineteenth century was many times that inEastern Europe or in medieval England and wages were correspondingly higher. Technical progress explains little of the high American and British productivity in the early nineteenth century, nor, in the American case, does abundant land per worker. Instead, most of the difference derived from more intense labor in America and Britain.

"Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China traces the development of the food systems that coincided with China's emergence as an empire. Before extensive trade and cultural exchange with Europe was established, Chinese farmers and agriculturalsits developed systems that used resources in sustainable and efficient ways, permitting intensive and productive techniques to survive over millenia. Fields, gardens, semiwild lands, managed forests, and specialized agricultural landscapes all became part of an integrated network that produced maximum nutrients with minimal input--though not without some environmental cost" --

Agriculture was the largest and most important sector of the medieval English economy. Yet although peasants comprised the majority of the population, and were responsible for the greater part of land use, surprisingly little is known about peasant cropping patterns and production strategies. Taking the Crowland Abbey manor of Oakington, Cambridgeshire as a case study, this article examines peasant land use and agricultural strategies. Using data collected from the Oakington tithe accounts and manor court rolls, this article demonstrates that peasants used their land more extensively than did the lord, raising their output per acre above that of the demesne. This was driven by peasant need for fodder crops, and the strain placed on agricultural systems that required peasants to use their land to produce grains and legumes for consumption, fodder, and sale.

Two fundamentally different phases of social development in archaic Scandinavia can be identified. Judging by the fact that the long house of frame construction of the patrilocal extended family, who had been keeping an oðal for generations, emerged in the early Scandinavian Bronze Age around 1800 BC and existed for three millennia, including the so-called "Viking Age", it is possible to assume that the traditional Scandinavian society of bonds had existed all this time until 1179–1180 in Denmark. The odel system had developed; this land was inherited by males and passed down from generation to generation. Often three generations of relatives — the head of the oðal with his wife and his adult sons with their wives and children as well as numerous household members and house slaves — lived under the same roof in a long house with central rectangular hearths along the axis. The king had the right to call out militia of bonds, which under the leadership of its leaders — strong and wealthy bonds — was quite capable of resisting the king's not large squad and often dictated terms to it. The kings were chosen at þings — assemblies of armed men of districts where legal issues were settled. The formation of early medieval states in Denmark took place in the last quarter of the 12th century. The king Valdemar and Bishop Absalon after a period of the so-called "civil wars" supported by professional heavy cavalry defeated the militia and disarmed bonds, who were now assigned only agriculture work, taxes to the crown and the church and service to the new feudal lords.

Abstract
In this essay I produce historical arguments for 'suspending belief in the hypothesis of discontinuity, by which I mean the conception that the real or alleged differences between economic regimes and historical periods are in some sense (never explicitly discussed) more fundamental to their historical interpretation than the factors which they share in common. Part One challenges the notion that the different economic epochs are each characterised by a predominant type of labour relation, e.g. the ancient world by slavery. Part Two looks very rapidly at the work of some medieval historians to extract the general postulate that the agriculture of any given period is characterised by a complex and differentiated use of labour. Finally, in the concluding pages I take up sharecropping and permanent farm contracts, referring mainly to India. The logical next step, after an essay of this sort, would be to look at the issue of managerial control in agriculture but in this paper I've sedulously avoided this massive subject.

The Postan thesis is that medieval agriculture had low yields because there was insufficient pasture to keep the arable land fertile. This argument (and variants of it) has become an orthodox technological explanation for low preindustrial yields. Yet the thesis, on its face, implies that early cultivators were ignorant, irrational, or completely custom bound. This article develops a revised Postan thesis, in which medieval cultivators knew that pasture restored fertility but were unwilling to employ it. Impatience made this way of increasing yields unattractive because it required large capital investments in the soil nitrogen stock.

Between 1236 and 1240 the king's estate steward Walter de Burgo improved the productivity of about forty royal manors by systematically increasing agricultural investment to levels four to five times the medieval average. On estates where he managed the inland directly, de Burgo improved the quality of the draft animals and spent large sums on marling, smother crops, and on the purchase of foreign seed. Within four years he raised the net value of these manors 70 percent, thus demonstrating the direct link which could exist between investment levels and productivity in medieval agriculture.

The survey intends to analize the institutions developed in the XIII and XIV centuries for the exploitation of the land, considering the social and economical circumstances that had an influence on these institutions since the publication of the "Furs de Valencia". Thus, this survey is focused on the legal-historic agricultural servitude in the Kingdom of Valencia. This analysis about the ways of agricultural servitude is complemented with an historical introduction on servitude law. The methodology employed consists in an analysis of the legal institutions according the legislation, the documentation of archives and legal matters (Commentators of Roman Law, such as Bartolo, Baldo . ); and commentators of Valencian Law (Alabanya, Jáffer, Rabaçes, Johan, Mascó, Bonifaci Ferrer, Belluga . ). ; Les Furs Valence furent le droit en vigueur à l'ancien règne de Valencie pendant l'époque apcellée "foral" (1238-1707). De toute cette legislation apellée "foral", nous étudions ici dans nôtre article les servitudes agricoles comme une institution du droit agrarien qui réglait les relations entre fonds limitrophea à fin d'aider la protection del 'agriculture. La méthodologie employée dans nôtre étude consiste en l'analyse de la législation des Fun de Valence sur la matière des servitudes agricoles, tout completant cettes informations légals avec la documentation des archives, et la doctrine "classique" des commentateurs du droit romain (Baldo, Bartola . ) et commentateurs des Furs de Valencia (Alabanya, Guillem Jáffer, Rabaces, Johan, Mascó, Bonifaci Ferrer, Belluga. ).