Agr Hist Rev 45 (1)

On the response of the peasantry to harvest failure in the Suffolk manor of Hinderclay in the late-thirteenth century. Using documentary evidence, annual fluctuations in the transfer of land are compared with local, regional, and national grain price movements. The article tests the assumption that land transfers increased as grain prices rose and that this reflected a rush to the market by sellers. The crisis sales have been set within the context of the withdrawal of credit in years of bad harvest, and the possibility that excessive taxation in the 1290s caused creditors to withdraw loans and invest in land is mooted. Includes

Study of the evolution of the seignorial economy in the Forest of Arden during the fifteenth century. This was a wood pasture area, whose resident landlords were mainly lesser peers, gentry, and smaller religious houses. In contrast to other areas in the later Middle Ages, where direct demesne exploitation by the lord was abandoned in favour of the leasing out, the Arden demesnes and their management were adapted to the particular circumstances of the fifteenth century to create home farms, while other manors were involved in commercial cereal cultivation, livestock raising, and generating cash from the woodland and industrial resources of the estate.