2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
An Quantitative Analysis of Agricultural Institution and Market System in Medieval England
| Project/Area Number |
16530237
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Economic history
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| Research Institution | SOKA UNIVERSITY |
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Principal Investigator |
KANZAKA Junichi Soka University, Economics Dept., Professor, 経済学部, 教授 (20267488)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2006
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| Keywords | labor services / the Middle Ages / England / the Hundred Rolls / economic history / contract theory / draft animals |
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| Research Abstract |
In medieval England, peasants made a contract with a landlord to work on the lord's farmland for certain days in exchange for holding an amount of land. Although many historians have regarded this "labor services" as an irrational, "feudal" custom, we built an economic model which shows the rationality of this contract. In medieval agriculture, it is important to take care of livestock which plough and harrow fields. When the landlord possesses horses and oxen and lets hired laborers tend the livestock, the workers do not have incentive to spend much time for that task. This results in declining productivity of the farmland. In contrast, if peasants keep draft-animals which they use for cultivating their own land as well as the landlords' demesne, the peasants have strong enough incentive to take care of them. Exploiting the well cared animals, landlords enhance the productivity of their demesne. Therefore, to induce peasants who possess horses and oxen to make a contract of labor services, landlords give some "rent" to their tenants. Thus, our model predicts that peasants bear a lighter burden when they perform labor services than when they pay fixed rent; the monetary value of labor services per acre estimated by the wage of each task is lower than the fixed rent. Next, we validate this hypothesis against the record of the Hundred Rolls of 1279-80, from which we make a database of approximately 11,000 unfree peasant holdings. This analysis shows that the value of labor services performed by tenants of one or half a virgate, the necessary amount of land to keep horses and oxen, was usually less than that of fixed rent. Since peasants possessing draft-animals were indispensable for demesne farming, "rational" landlords required these peasants labor services in exchange for providing large plots at a relatively low rent.
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Research Products
(2 results)
