Background

The study of Rembrandt's prints has occupied scholars for over two centuries. With several thousand impressions in existence today, the study of his printing papers occupies a prominent place within this scholarship. Rembrandt's prints were predominantly executed on antique laid papers. Until the widespread adoption of the papermaking machine in the early nineteenth century, paper was made by scooping up macerated and suspended paper pulp from a vat using a rectangular mould comprised of a porous screen surrounded by a removable wooden frame. Prior to 1750, the screen was fabricated from fine, densely spaced horizontal rows of laid wires secured by thicker, more widely spaced vertical chain wires. When the mould was plunged into the vat and lifted out, the wires acted as a sieve, filtering out the pulp in thinner and thicker accumulations depending upon how much interference they produced as the water drained through. The crisscrossed pattern of chain and laid lines is thus replicated in the final sheet of paper. Because the paper is thinner in areas corresponding to the wire grid, the laid and chain line pattern can be easily seen when the paper is held up to the light. Two papers will have identical laid and chain line patterns if they have been formed at the same time in the same manner on the same mould – hence they are called mouldmates.

Introduction

Between 1270 and 1870 Britain slowly progressed from the periphery of the European economy to centre-stage of an integrated world economy. In the process it escaped from Malthusian constraints and by the eighteenth century had successfully reconciled rising population with rising living standards. This final chapter reflects upon this protracted but profound economic transformation from the perspective of the national income estimates assembled in Part I and analysed in Part II of this book. Because Britain’s economic rise did not unfold in isolation, account is taken of the broader comparative context provided by the national income reconstructions now available for several other Eurasian countries: Spain from 1282, Italy from 1310 and Holland from 1348, plus Japan from 725, China from 980 and India from 1600. All are output-based estimates but have been derived via a range of alternative approaches according to the nature of the available historical evidence. Several make ingenious use of real wage rates and urbanisation ratios (Malanima, 2011; Álvarez-Nogal and Prados de la Escosura, 2013), two economic indicators often used as surrogates for estimates of GDP per head. Only the GDP estimates for Holland, like these for Britain, have been made the hard way, by summing the weighted value-added outputs of the agricultural, industrial and service sectors and then dividing the results by estimates of total population obtained by reconciling time-series and cross-sectional demographic data. Methodologically, the British and Dutch national income estimates are therefore the most directly comparable. Each is free from overdependence upon any single or narrow range of data series and, instead, they encapsulate variations in the wide range of economic indicators, appropriately weighted in line with their importance in overall economic activity, from which they have been reconstructed.

Introduction

Agriculture was for long the single largest component of the English and British economies, both in terms of its share of employment and the value of its output. The latter was a function of the amount of land under cultivation, the uses to which it was put, the productivities of crops and animals and their respective prices. The main purpose of this chapter is to describe the methods used to derive the areas under arable and grass and, in particular, the total sown acreage. The crops produced and animals stocked are the subjects of the following chapter. Along the way, it will be demonstrated that claims that the peak arable area in the medieval period may have exceeded 20 million acres (Clark, 2007a: 124) are unrealistic, since, on the best available evidence, the combined total under field crops and fallow could not have been more than 12.75 million acres. In the absence of significant food imports, this limited both the population that could be supported and the supply of kilocalories per head needed for survival. It also shaped the production choices made by agricultural producers.

Comprehensive national agricultural statistics were collected annually from 1866 and provide the starting point for calculating the acreages of arable and grass (Anon, 1968; Coppock, 1984). Together with the tithe files, which provide a precise but incomplete guide to the share of land in each county devoted to arable production during the 1830s (Kain, 1986; Overton, 1986), they are used to provide a nineteenth-century benchmark. The chapter proceeds as follows. After a discussion of the potential agricultural area of England in Section 2.2, Section 2.3 reviews the arable acreage by county from the tithe files of the 1830s and from the agricultural statistics of 1871. Section 2.4 then examines changes in land use between 1290 and 1871, while Section 2.5 presents county-level estimates of the arable acreage in 1290. Section 2.6 provides a further cross-check by examining changes in land use between 1086 and 1290. Finally, Section 2.7 provides estimates of land use for a number of benchmark years between 1270 and 1871.

Introduction

Economic growth can be either extensive or intensive. Extensive growth arises where more output is produced in line with a growing population but living standards remain constant, while intensive growth arises where more output is produced by each person. In the former case, there is no economic development, as the economy simply reproduces itself on a larger scale: in the latter, living standards rise as the economy goes through a process of economic development. To understand the long-run growth of the British economy reaching back to the thirteenth century therefore requires knowledge of the trajectories followed by both population and GDP. Of particular interest is whether periods of intensive growth, distinguished by rising GDP per head, were accompanied by expanding or contracting population. For it is one thing for living standards to rise during a period of population decline, such as that induced by the recurrent plagues of the second half of the fourteenth century, when survivors found themselves able to add the land and capital of those who had perished to their own stocks, but quite another for living standards and population to rise together, particularly given the emphasis of Malthus [1798] on diminishing returns. Indeed, Kuznets (1966: 34–85) identified simultaneous growth of population and income per head (i.e. the concurrence of intensive and extensive growth) as one of the key features that distinguished modern from pre-industrial economic growth.

Introduction

Chapter 6 has argued that workers responded to changes in real wage rates by adapting how hard they worked so as to maintain their earnings. Household incomes therefore tracked GDP per head rather than real wage rates and progressively improved over time, doubling between the early fourteenth and late seventeenth centuries and doubling again over the course of the industrial revolution. Higher incomes translated into changing patterns of consumption and the forms these consumption choices took are the subjects of this chapter. Section 7.2 reconstructs the kilocalorie value and composition of diets based on the agricultural-output estimates presented in Chapter 3, augmented by information on imported foodstuffs. Given that populations require an average daily food intake per head of 2,000 kilocalories (Livi-Bacci, 1991: 27) to provide sufficient nourishment for both economic and biological reproduction, these calculations also provide a useful cross-check on the consistency of the agricultural-output and population estimates. Section 7.3 then considers non-food consumption drawing upon early modern evidence of material culture as revealed by probate inventories. Again, these trends need to be consistent with those of industrial output reconstructed in Chapter 4.

Price, habit, fashion and status all shaped the budgetary decisions taken by households. Demand for food was inelastic up to the point where basic subsistence needs had been met, but as incomes rose there were clear trade-offs to be obtained between increasing consumption of cheap sources of kilocalories such as pottage, potatoes and salted herrings on the one hand, or indulging in more expensive refined bread, quality ale and beer, dairy produce and meat, plus the imported luxuries of wine, sugar, tea, cocoa and tobacco, on the other. In effect, higher incomes allowed more households to trade up to a respectability basket of foodstuffs providing a more varied and processed diet but not necessarily more kilocalories. The changing relative prices of arable, livestock and luxury products influenced these consumption decisions, while the relative cheapness or dearness of food determined how much disposable income could be devoted to the increasingly varied and tempting array of non-food consumer goods (Figure 5.02).

Introduction

Income distribution in England between 1270 and 1870, as elsewhere in Western Europe, was profoundly unequal due to entrenched inequalities in access to the land, capital, education and political power upon which personal wealth depended. Gender, rank and servility and their differential legal rights were determined at birth. Privilege, patronage and position ensured that rent-seeking was rife, while warfare created opportunities for ransom and plunder to the enrichment of those in command and impoverishment of the vanquished. Everywhere, as a result, there were rich men in their castles and poor men at their gates. Moreover, as van Zanden (1995) and Milanovic and others (2007) have demonstrated, the effect of economic growth was to magnify rather than mitigate these inequalities and widen the income gap between those at the top and bottom of the social pyramid.

The rich became richer as average wealth grew because the more wealth there was the greater the opportunities for those with power and privilege to enrich themselves at the expense of the weak and disadvantaged majority. In Holland one legacy of the prosperity achieved during the Dutch Golden Age was a greatly increased inequality of incomes, which was more marked in towns than rural villages and greatest of all in major cities (van Zanden, 1995). In England, similarly, Milanovic and others (2007) claim that inequality rose with average incomes between 1688 and 1801/03, thereby confirming Kuznets’ (1955) observation that income inequality typically increased during the early stages of economic growth and only declined relatively late in the modernisation process. Prior to 1870, therefore, increasing inequality can be treated, like urbanisation, as a characteristic and unavoidable manifestation of economic growth.