Chayanov, Domesday and the Eight Ox Team
To which some might be tempted to respond: “What fresh hell is this?!” Well it is an attempt to backfill some of the argument behind my last post on consumption vs accumulation in relation to investment and marginal rates.
A.V. Chayanov was an early Soviet era agricultural economist of enormous influence during his time. Unfortunately his empiricism ran afoul of Stalinist magical thinking, ultimately to be a non-Marxist economist proved to be literally fatal, five years into a sentence in a labor camp in Kazakhstan Chayanov was re-arrested in 1937 and shot the same day. His most important works were finally made available in English in 1966 under the title The Theory of Peasant Economy. The material is quite dense and has enough data tables, graphs and equations to make both Kimel and Spencer weep with joy and I don’t intend to summarize it here. But it did smash the idea that the typical peasant labor unit, aka the family, operated as an instrument of accumulation and/or had its labor maximally exploited. Instead even the most oppressed serfs of Czarist Russia had astonishingly high amounts of leisure time at most points in their life cycles and ramped their labor up and down to maintain fairly predetermined consumption targets. This required the highest level of labor intensity during early child rearing years when small children were from an economic position pure friction, but mostly this intensity was not maintained afterwards even though it would have meant higher levels of accumulation. In short the peasant household was not a profit oriented operation at all, efforts in that direction generally being ends directed, particularly in the form of setting up children as their own economic unit. All in all the data collected and analysis made by Chayanov does not support the theory of peasant economy common to western liberal economics in either its neo-classical or Marxist formulations, with the mismatch with the latter being ultimately fatal.
But what does this have to do with oxen? Well it turns out that reading Chayanov illuminated my understanding of English agricultural economy in the middle ages. More below the fold.
In 1086 after 20 years of consolidating control after his conquest of England in 1066 William the Conqueror commissioned the Domesday survey. In the course of this William’s commissioners accomplished something almost inconceivable for its time, a near total economic survey of the entirety of England that established down to the acreage the control, rent, and carrying capacity of every land holding as it was currently and in the time of his predecessor Edward the Confessor (William considering King Harold whom he defeated at Hastings to be an usurper). The information was compiled into two large books the Little and Great Domesday which rather miraculously survived down to our time and represent the oldest public record of England. The entire text is now available online as well as in translation in a Penguin addition. Lots of great stuff but I want to focus on one aspect, that of the typical peasant holding in relation to the plow team.
The great middle swatch of England between the County of Kent (which is a historical world unto itself) and Wales in the west and Yorkshire and Lancashire in the north was largely devoted to ‘open field’ farming in which ownership to various strips were scattered between three or less often two large fields. The nominal unit of land ownership was the hide which served both as the basis for taxation and as a measurement for a specific area of land. Unfortunately for us that measure varied from place to place. The historical literature on the hide is vast and in places astonishingly bitter but at risk of stirring ghosts of historians past I am going to define it as roughly 60 acres. While landlords might measure their holdings in terms of hides it was the very rare tenant that would hold so much, indeed a substantial peasant would be lucky to hold a virgate or 30 acres, while half virgates (~15 acres) or bovates (~7.5 acres) might be more common. Now the word ‘bovate’ derives from Latin ‘bos, bovis’ meaning ‘ox’ and was considered the minimum size needed for a peasant to maintain two oxen. But here is the key point. In traditional open field farming a plow team consisted of eight oxen drawing a single plow. The manpower needed to direct the plow consisted of two people, a plowman and a ox boy, one doing the heavy work of directing the plow itself, while the boy and mostly literally such just keeping the oxen moving along the furrow. Okay all this is just Medieval English History 1, but few people seem to have drawn the conclusion that a collision of Chayanov and Domesday points you to.
If a typical peasant tenant holds a bovate and owns two oxen while a middling peasant might hold a semi virgate with four oxen and yet it takes eight oxen to make up a full team then cooperation is essential. Except for the rare virgater putting together a plow team means a cooperative effort between 2-4 peasants or in some cases more (Domesday has holdings only large enough for ‘half an ox’ and in one case at least reports that there is half an ox there ‘ubi semi-bos’). But here is the kicker, since it only takes one adult plowman to operate the plow in any given day, this means the other 1-3 or more peasants are on any given day not working their own fields. Now some of this time is occupied by tilling the lords fields using the lord’s plows but as often as not such plowing services require the tenants to bring their own plows which of course is impossible if another tenant is using it at the time. All of which kind of blows to smithereens the long held construct of the peasant working at the plow from dawn to dusk. Not just because the typical plowing session lasted only half the day (the oxen needing the other half to graze) but because your typical peasant might only be faced with plowing duties every other day or four. Nor was plowing a round the year occupation, you plowed in preparation for planting or in some cases conditioning of the field, but for much of the year the fields were just growing their crops, at most needing some weeding or drainage maintenance.
Now obviously there were other tasks to keep peasants occupied but few if any so labor intensive as working a heavy plow. Which kind of up-ends our typical understanding of peasant life particularly as contrasted to that of the factory worker of 18th and 19th century England. Almost all economic literature I am aware of simply builds in the assumption that as onerous as the six day, 72 hour work week might have been, at least those workers were better off than the serfs of Czarist Russia, working as they did from dawn to dusk for merciless landlords. Well frankly neither the data painstakingly collected and analyzed by Chayanov from actual workers in Czarist times or the English evidence based on field sizes and plow teams from 11th century Domesday really fits that model very well. Moreover a look at the calender for rural England in the middle ages shows an astonishingly long list of ‘holidays’ ‘feast days’ and ‘Saint’s Days’ when no work was performed at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that daily life in England or certainly Czarist Russia was exactly like Hobbiton in the Shire. Just that our common understanding of mud stained serfs working under the cruel lash of their overseers may be just the mirror image of that same fantasy. Reality as almost always being more complicated.
First, its always nice to be pointed to a data source to make me weep with joy.
Second, its a rare organization that doesn’t tell its people how well treated they are.
Third, my guess is that there was a big difference in the monitoring ability of those watching over the serfs v. those watching over factory workers.
Land measurement trivia. While the ‘mile’ is ultimately of Latin origin most of our longer measures of length were derived from plow teams. The Wiki article on ‘furlong’ is good but kind of gets the ox behind the plow as it were. A furlong is indeed the distance that a ‘furrow’ is ‘long’ but it is ultimately measured by the length of the field that an ox team can drag a plow in one pull. At which point the team would be turned around and started up the field in the opposite direction. As the article notes the furlong was ultimately standardized at 660 feet or an eighth of an English mile.
The druids had solar days, and midquarter days, I suspect around the farm labor cycles.
We just had mid summer’s eve. Maybe start of harvest work.
May Day may have been the conclusion of heavy cultivating work, while Belltane would be the start (mid quarter after the winter solstice).
The Roman church in northern Europe took and gave a lot to the pagans for centuries until the protestants went heavy on the bible and began burning practitioners as witches.
The Celtic cycle is more oriented towards pastoralism than crop agriculture, though both are in rough accord.
But in northern climes Samhain, or Oct 31/Nov 1/All Saints Day/Halloween is associated with death for a reason. Although some would have it that it is the date of late harvest I am convinced by others that it is the day that the herds are culled for the winter and so is more about blood and guts than cornucopias full of grain as opposed to Lugnasadh or August 1st which is more obviously a harvest festival.
In any event I am not aware of much evidence that actual historical druids were solar oriented at all. Indeed modern druids seem to have jumped right past actual Celtic times to embrace ‘traditions’ more properly associated with whoever the people who built Stonehenge were. But who preceded the earliest Celts by close to 2 millenia.
(BTW I used to do this stuff for a living. Or at least as much of a living as you do as a graduate student in anything, still less Celtic Studies.)
The dissertation I never wrote. After the trope ‘starving grad student’ became all too real and I left the Berkeley PhD program.
A cursory study of manorial surveys, which is to say a listing of rents due, shows that peasants in addition to labor services were also expected to deliver certain agricultural goods in kind in the form of eggs, ale etc. But a more intensive study shows that these were not necessarily spaced out in a way that would provide steady subsistence to the landlord’s table, even if the landlord was mostly in residence which as often as not he wasn’t. Though nobody I know has done a detailed study of this there seems to be some correlation between the customary deliveries of these goods in kind and the ceremonial provision of a holiday feast by the lord for his tenants. Which led me to the very preliminary and very much needing six or seven years of rigorous research possible conclusion that what looks like rent extraction in the form of food from starving peasants starts looking awfully close to a church potluck with mandatory contributions.
A really excellent book which has traditionally been much maligned by historians is Homans’ English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century. Some of this is just professional jealousy in that Homans was a prominant sociologist and not a historian at all, but a lot of it stems from Homan’s device of opening the work with a sort of “Year in the Life” narrative that seemed overly rosy to most historians at the time. But what nobody seemed to recognize, even one of my professors the justly famous Bob Brentano is that Homans wasn’t just weaving a story out of nothing, instead he proceeded to document every story point with evidence in later chapters. Unfortunately most professional historians never got to that point, his thesis seeming so obviously wrong as to not be worth taking seriously. I kind of wonder what the reaction would have been have Homans put that introductory story into an appendix and footnoted every point with a page reference.
A follow-up. I have noticed that in some organizations, the ones who work the least are the ones closer to the top of the hierarchy. Who monitors the monitors?
Mike that is not fair. Many of those people spend long, long hours compared to those slackers on the factory floor. Of course lots of those hours are spent in meetings in air-conditioned rooms on comfortable chairs with donuts and bottled water at the ready where the only actual effort is keeping your eyelids open during the PowerPoint presentation. But the boss might snap a question at you at any time so you have to be sort of alert. And God knows the world would grind to a half if we ran short of our supply of lerts.
We live in a society where playing golf and consuming fancy lunches can and are billed by the elite as “entertaining clients” and so well worth the extra $200 an hour of compensation involved. And then to have them brag about “60-80 hour work weeks”. Some of those folk might want to try a job where they count seconds on your piss break.
Is this really suprising today? I thought that “enclosure acts forced former peasants off the land an into factories” is pretty much canonical English economic history. Its certainly the history I’m familair with, and I’m just a moderately informed layman.
Bruce
thanks for this. always a pleasure.
i’d be a little slow, though, to believe those three days not plowing were spent in idle play and frittering. There is always work to be done on a farm.
On the other hand, I think you are right, and my very little knowledge of peasants and primitives is that they know when to take some time off. The doctrine of idle hands are the devils workshop seems to be an invention of the industrial age. Factory owners can guage pretty closely how much work they can get out of a person for wages that may or may not prevent starvation.
and if we have come up from there it has not been due to the generosity of factory owners or the progress made possible by reinvesting all those profits.
The forcing of peasants off their holdings due to the Enclosure Acts has nothing to do with the intensity or not of work on those holdings. The arguments are orthogonal.
Well you would have to read some of the literature Marxist oriented or otherwise which simply assert that peasants had little time to exploit their own holdings because landlords were exploiting every single bit of labor productivity they had leaving them no time for any kind of intensive cultivation of their own plots.
But you also have to consider the nature of these ‘farms’ in an open field system. This is not a situation where every farmer has to maintain his own fences and tend his own stock in his own barns. Generally in champion farming the ‘fences’ are hedgerows and what maintenence is needed is down communally. Similarly the village livestock would be released together.
No the typical villager maybe wasn’t lounging around, but someone had enough leisure to come up with all those traditional songs, dances and games played on the numerous holidays throughout the year.
But the key is that under a lot of modern economic theory we should expect these folks to spend every spare hour trying to maximize their return. Moroever the apologists for early capitalism went to great lengths to make the argument that whatever the ills of urban life in a factory town, at least it wasn’t the grinding work of Piers Plowman, that is industrialism was seen as a rising tide kind of event. For example you could Google the ‘Standard of Living’ argument whereby economists argued that the urban poor weren’t really poor because they know had sugar and pepper and tea on their tables. (The Happy Meal and color TV argument we see today). That whole argument is undercut if you can make the case that even during the most labor heavy portions of the year, which without a doubt were plowing seasons, that peasants were not putting in anything like the hours of the typical wage worker in a factory.
That burning practioners of the old pre-Christian religions as witches myth was developed starting in the late 18th and through the 19th centuries when there was a “paganism” revival or rather re-invention. In the 19th century, there was a big movement in this direction as part of the romantic movement, and the idea of surviving old religions was most romantic.
For a more serious study, I suggest reading Norman Cohn’s book, Europe’s Inner Demons which is a good study of the evolution of the stereotyped witch. He does a lot of debunking and he has a lot to debunk. Frazer (of the The Golden Bough), among others, was great at selectively quoting his sources. Reading Cohn’s book is almost like reading a blogger.
Yes, Christianity, a syncretic religion, co-opted a lot of the older religions, but quite completely.
European historians have done a lot of work on the material history of their continent, but a lot of it is in French, Italian and German and has not been translated. For example, Europeans have long studied the cycles of famine and stability dating from the high middle ages, basically as far back as their records would take them, though they are starting to incorporate archaeological work to get a better picture of the Roman, migratory eras and early middle ages. For a glimpse, I’ll suggest Hackett-Fisher’s The Great Wave.
I’m willing to bet that there was a fair bit of slack in the system at times, so a lot depends on the century you choose. Also, remember that not everyone was a land owner or land owner’s wife.
Bruce
I am easy to convince. Because Sammy on another threat taunts me with the fact that my forty cent solution to SS has not become part of the “debate,” I’ll note that your observation about workers conditions before the industrial age will not become part of the standard economic theory.
I won’t ask you to speculate on the reasons… but i suspect they are similar.
Well Medieval Studies is like that, a lot of what we “know” is much the same as what most people “know” about Social Security.
If you read through much of medieval romantic literature or more directly mythological text a constant them is the hero running across the heroine/goddess/whatever bathing in a stream. Yet you will have historians solemnly testifying that medieval folk never washed and lived in filth, dogs and babies crawling around in the straw. The very idea that peasants who actually had access to fresh water might use it, or that they would use the brooms otherwise only needed to transport witches from here to there for the purposes of periodically, I don’t know, sweeping being a crazy concept. And in my not at all humble opinion it all goes back to the Early Industrial Age notion of capital P Progress, the notion that the urban dweller of 1799 might actually be living in a more unhealthy food, drainage, sewage, hygiene generally environment than his ancestor back in the village in 1499 being almost heretical. Kind of like the idea that ‘Free Trade’ might actually have adverse consequences on the domestic economy. At least as that economy was experienced by the working class.
You don’t want to go too far in this direction, England circa 1200 was not the “Merrie Olde England” that the Whig landowners tried to sell in resisting the upstart manufacturers of Manchester, but bye and large we have let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. A big part of why the Dark Ages were so called is because until quite recently no one actually directed a light that direction. And the picture that is emerging is not so different from the Classical Age that came before or the Modern Age that came after, oddly enough it turns out that time did not stand still between the Fall of Rome in 476 and the Discovery of America in 1492, the thousand years in between having its own up and down cycles that differed from place to place, the whole story not being reducible to famine, dirt, plague and illiteracy. At a minimum we can say that modernity was not an unmixed blessing for all.
Very few English villagers were what we would considr land owners where that is defined as holding their land in fee simple, certainly none of the villagers of Homans’ book would fall in that category, each being a tenant, a ‘holder’, from someone else. But then again the whole concept of land ownership could stand some reexamination, at least in the English context in that it became a legal maxim that all land was ultimately held from the King. Now it is tempting to call this a legal fiction and a perversion of the deep historical record but it is amazing what a millenium of judge made case law can do to what were facts on the ground.
And yes there is absolutely a lot of variation in terms of famine and stability and cycles of all types. In England the peasant economy of the 12th century has little to do with that of the late 13th century which in turn is quite different from that of the post plague years of the 14th. As I hinted the notion that the entire period from 476 to 1492 was a flat line of filth, illiteracy and stasis ignores the granular reality. In fact lots went on during that time period and there was tremendous variation between time and place. You can’t assume that conditions in 13th century Italy tell you anything about conditions in 13th century Poland. Any generalizations about the Middle Ages almost guaranteed to get you into conceptual errors when applied outside your specific data set.
There’s a lot of weight here being put on the 8 ox team. I have a feeling that rather too much might be.
I don’t doubt that there were 8 ox ploughs, but I’d rather think that they were used only on the heaviest soils. There’s certainly evidence of 6 and 4 ox ploughs out there……..
Doesn’t change the basic point, that there was a lot more leisure than people today generally tend to think: Terry Jones (yes, the Python) has made much of this in some of his popular writing. But that assumption that all ploughs were 8 ox ones might be overstating that case.
Of course, we also get people underestimating current leisure hours: far too many people look only at market working hours and forget how household production hours have declined.
Domesday rather assumes the 8 ox plow in three field champion husbandry, which is to say the typical agricultural practice in the parts of England I referenced in the post. Agricultural practices tended to change west of the Severn and the Wye and in the north starting in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Which is why I excluded them in the original post. And perhaps you could find evidence for so-called Celtic field patterns that compressed that some. But the very existence of the terms ‘oxgang’ and ‘bovate’ and ‘carucate’ assume some identity between the ox team and acreage. Given this wasn’t a submittal to a peer reviewed journal I feel fairly comfortable identifying the eight ox team and midland open field farming practices. Plus as you implicitly note the same logic applies to four and six ox teams as long as the typical tenant maintained less oxen than needed to make up a full team and/or had to share a plough. Domesday Book making it very clear that the existence of ploughs not being a trivial thing at all
Picking an entry at total random from p. 584 of the Penguin edition:
“In Stratton Fulcher of Paris holds 3 1/2 virgates of the countess. There is land for 2 ploughs. in demense 1 plough. There is 1 villan and 5 bordars, meadow for one plough. It is and was worth 8s;TRE 20s. Alwine, a man of King Edward held this land and could sell”
You can strain your brain trying to convert this to economic units, in large part because these entries are describing taxable segments that could well be tied into other on the ground arrangements, after all we have the ‘ubi semibos’ to deal with. But however we want to approach the data we really can’t get away from the fundamental equation implied in the term ‘ploughland’. Clearly contemporary farmers/peasants saw some equation. And tax and rent collectors too.
(This may double post. JS Kit giveth and it taketh away. I thought it had taketh but it may giveth two-fold. Only Igor knows for sure)
Thanks Bruce. You’ve told me some things that I didn’t know. A couple of minor points:
1. I’m pretty sure that in the American South field slaves were usually given the day off when it rained. Not that much work they could do. I wonder if the same was true in England.
2. Idyllic though the life of an English peasant might have been (and yes, you didn’t really say or mean that), by the eighteenth century, neither they nor their relatives in the factories seem to have been that well nourished. After Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga his army was parolled and returned to England. Letters written by the British awaiting transport home often commented on the height of the colonial soldiers who were said to be 4 or 5 inches taller than their European counterparts — presumably due to better childhood nutrition.
Bruce
not exactly sure what you mean by “legal fiction.” the fact is that no one has ever had complete ownership of his land. it is always subject to the law of the king. complete ownership is a matter of conquest.
that is true in America where for king read “sovereign” read “the government”… even “government by the people.” you never own land “free and clear” in the sense that libertarians and republicans imagine their purchase price grants them.
codger
glad to see you.
and even the tractors get the day off when it rains on the farm here. not much you can do.
of course, it took capitalism to decide not to pay workers for their days off.
“Well you would have to read some of the literature Marxist oriented.”
Could you give some specific references because I teach the history of the development of wage labour from a largely historical materialist frame and I do not teach my students that the lord was drubbing the peasants into the ground. None EP Thompson or Brenner’s work goes in this direction. Moreover, much of the Marxist literature on economic development in the 60s, through to the 80s was awkwardly pre-occupied with converting peasants into prols precisely because the political economy of peasant based economies did not allow for the same level in creation and extraction of a surplus. And not because the “lord” was too busy wasting the peasants time with corvee but rather because there were / are too many limitations on the “lords” ability to compel work and not the right incentivess for the peasants to produce a large trading surplus.
I’m responding to this: “Almost all economic literature I am aware of simply builds in the assumption that as onerous as the six day, 72 hour work week might have been, at least those workers were better off than the serfs of Czarist Russia, working as they did from dawn to dusk for merciless landlords.”
I thought that the accepted story these days is that the dark satanic mills were much worse than agricultural work and that people had to be forced off the land and into them, rather than slaving away in them for the increased “utility”, or some such nonsense.
That is not the accepted theory in neo-classical economics, and it is that group to which I am directing this argument.
Marx and Engels did. I don’t recall which vol of Capital has Marx’s explicit depiction of feudalism, but my recollection is pretty clear that HW was arguing for maximal exploitation of labor prodictivity. And Engels also depicts peasant life in medieval England in pretty stark terms.
But my quarrel is with Chicago and allied schools and not directly with Marx. But I find it hard to believe he thought that the feudal mode of production was actually a better one for the working class than what replaced it.
But I am willing to listen and learn.
If medieval English peasants got rain days off it is not clear how they could get any work done at all. This is particularly so in plowing seasons which were in the rainiest parts of the year.
The rule of thumb is that a plough team can cultivate an acre a day meaning it would take a full month to plow a thirty acre virgate, actually longer if you subtract out Sundays.
Plus oxen don’t get bogged down in the way a tractor would, an eight oxen team being equipped with 32-Hoof Drive and literally not subject to spinning their wheels.
In any event nothing I ever read even suggested weather holidays.
Bruce
i know nothing about English farming. But i’m thinking if it took eight oxen to pull a plow, conditions must have been different from “40 acres and a mule”, or the lone settler and his horse… or wife.
Marx never argues that feudalism is superior to capitalism. In fact Marx and Engels have been accused of fetishizing capitalism because of its productive superiority over feudalism. ATST, Marx is one of the first to point out that under feudal relations of productions it is the peasant that controls the labour process. Tithing and corvee are usually but not necessarily a percent of the cut. But even if it is a quota (2 pigs, a sheep, a bail of wool, 3 cord of wood etc., etc.) the peasant family works until their own needs and obligations are met. They may produce a surplus above that but there is nothing that politically or economically compels them to do so.
To be sure in times of war, greed, large infastructure projects (e.g., roads, canals, churches etc) both the church and state taxed the peasants heavily sometimes to the point of impoverishing the peasantries. But, and this is the big but, peasants for the most part controlled both the labour process and the means of production even if they were tied to them. In feudal society in the countryside (artisanale production in the cities was a little different) we have administration but not management.
As an aside, the putting-out system pre-dates the satanic mills for these reasons. Polanyi and Thompson are really good on the transition between the two modes of production and the degree to which early would be capitalists had a miserable time with what we call human capital retention. Workers would work enough to meet their needs and fuck-off until they needed more cash.
Back to the main show. Marx and Engels are against feudal relations for the same reason they are against capitalist social relations: the direct producers are exploited (albeit by different mechanisms). And they think that capitalist freedom is a chimera because the peasants trade off the uncertainty of feudal tyranny for the tyranny of wage labour. But they are not interested in the conservative narratives of the landed aristocrats nor the vacuous promises of bourgeois liberal radicals like John Locke. And this where their writing gets politically charged. That is any narrative which seeks to paint feudal social relations in an idyllic manner (the Feudal romanticism of Cardinal Richelieu’s New France for example) has to be destroyed. So I would not be surprised to find a tract in their text which was engaged in an exaggerated condemnation of feudalism. But for very different reasons than bourgeois liberals: AKA Chicago.
Labor on a middle age European farm had a small peak in the spring when you plowed and a large peak in the fall when you harvested, slaughtered, etc. You worked very hard indeed in the harvest, but loafed a lot the rest of the year. This was not politics are even economics, itwais inherant in the technology they used. You simply couldn’t space the work out all year.
City people worked all the time because the work was always there.
Actually Samhain and All Saints’ Day are completely distinct. We know this because the Irish celebrated All Saints’ Day in April — like the rest of the Church, except that they were very late adopters of the November 1st day. Quite possibly in a conscious effort to keep away from Samhain as long as it was remembered.