It is the rare student who first delves into the economic history of the Middle Ages and does not emerge either bewildered or intimidated. The field is not only polemical but dominated by several hoary methodological approaches. Moreover, novel modes of analysis now compete with the "grand supermodels". Practitioners of economic history also frequently fail to identify their theoretical assumptions for the reader. The student heretofore has negotiated this complex landscape without benefit of a map. In this respect, John Hatcher and Mark Bailey's Modelling the Middle Ages: the History and Theory of England's Economic Development fills a void.
The authors' principal goal is an accessible explication of the dominant theoretical models employed in the reconstruction of medieval economic history. Their determination to expose the workings of these models in clear and elegant prose makes their work especially useful for the student trained more in history than economics. However, Hatcher and Bailey have produced more than a primer. As active practitioners of the craft, the authors' discomfort with the analytical and evidentiary foundations of the principal models and an erroneous categorization of their own work spurred them to critique these models, to examine new approaches, and to outline the best path, in their view, for the economic historian to follow. Their exploration of medieval economic history is useful both for the novice and for the professional in search of an overview of the state of the art.
Their plan is straightforward. Hatcher and Bailey's first chapter examines models in the abstract and acknowledges the inevitability of their use. The historian cannot adopt the dictum of Detective Joe Friday: "Just the facts, ma'am". Naive cataloguing devoid of an interpretational framework transforms the historian into an antiquarian, a collector of trivia who shirks the responsibility to reconstruct a comprehensible, relevant, and significant past. Even an antiquarian determines which facts to include and exclude, since rarely can every fact be presented. The limited utility of "factual" history compels the scholar to adopt, consciously or unconsciously, a principle of selection -- in effect a model -- in order to reduce a mountain of arcane facts to a useable form. No model, however, is a panacea. The authors are cognizant of the tension inherent in models, the need to provide global explanations for sweeping problems without sacrificing the ability to account for the individual case. Awareness of this tension informs Hatcher and Bailey's critique of the three "traditional supermodels".
The authors follow a consistent plan in their discussion of each "supermodel": an identification of its intellectual roots (invariably a magisterial figure of the eighteenth or nineteenth century), a summary of its elaboration by historians, an overview of the evidence marshaled in its support, and an evaluation of its shortcomings.
Perhaps the most powerful and influential approach has been the "population and resources" model, more widely known as the Malthusian or neo-Malthusian analysis. The precursors of this school were David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, two pioneers of modern economics. Proponents of the population- and-resources model rely on Ricardo's ideas concerning diminishing returns and economic rent: (1) population pressure fosters more labor-intensive cultivation of better lands and expansion onto inferior lands to the point that both the productivity of labor and the output per unit of land suffer and (2) heightened demand for land hikes the level of rents which in turn spurs more intensive cultivation of better land and movement onto marginal soil. The model's originators merged Ricardo's ideas with Malthus' gloomy analysis of the interplay of population and resources -- a geometrically growing population bound to outstrip an arithmetically expanding supply of food unless or until population and resources are restored to balance either by "positive checks" (starvation, disease) or "prudential checks" (later marriage, smaller families, sexual abstinence). The model's leading proponents -- M. M. Postan, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, et al. -- identified an overexpansion of population in western Europe by the late thirteenth century, an overpopulation evident in more labor-intensive cultivation of existing land, expansion of cultivation onto poorer soils, reduction of the peasantry's standard of living, and an inability of the commercial sector of the economy to dissipate the growing pressure. This imbalance became a crisis around the beginning of the fourteenth century, when checks -- most notably the Great Famine of 1315-21 -- began to reduce population to supportable levels.
The second "supermodel" likewise locates a crisis at roughly the same time but identifies a different culprit: the relationship between social classes and the nature of the "mode of production". Having Karl Marx as their intellectual forebear, this model's adherents are grouped under the rubric "Marxist". While Marxist historians claim to explore a broader swathe of the human experience than their population- and-resources brethren, Hatcher and Bailey suggest that they focus mostly on the transition from feudalism to capitalism and on the contentious relationship between the feudal lord -- the controller of the economy's "factors of production" -- and the laborer. They view the relationship as exploitative due to the feudal lord's "extraction" from the agricultural laborer of the "surplus value" of toil, an extraction facilitated by the lord's use of "non-economic coercion". For Marxist historians (among them M. Dobb, Robert Brenner, and E. A. Kosminsky), a "contradiction" in the feudal mode of production emerged, especially during the thirteenth century: the feudal lord's appetite for consumer goods necessitated more aggressive extraction of rent from the laborer, an extraction which deprived the peasantry of the wherewithal to improve the productivity of its land and indeed stymied any incentive to do so. The lord likewise had little reason to enhance the output of demesne agriculture since further extraction of surplus value was easier. This "contradiction" reached a critical juncture by the close of the thirteenth century and confrontation between feudal lord and laborer sharpened, an animosity that fostered the erosion of the feudal mode of production. While Marxist historians acknowledge the demographic pressures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they reject absolute overpopulation in favor of overpopulation relative to the mode of production and the extraction of wealth, in effect an artificial crisis in population.
While the population-and-resources and the Marxist approaches focus on a crisis, the third supermodel enshrines progress as its foundation. This sunnier view of the medieval economy has as its intellectual progenitors Adam Smith and Johann von Thuenen. The model's supporters discern in the medieval economy the operation of the Smithian "invisible hand", the impulse of individuals to make exchanges in the marketplace for personal betterment, an enlightened self-interest that pushes society further down the path of progress. In this model, the growth of population ceases to be a villain. Demographic buoyancy instead engenders larger and denser settlements, better communication and transportation, greater willingness to develop and apply technology, more economic and occupational specialization, and ultimately a more commercialized economy. This reading of medieval economic history has consequently been labeled the "commercialization" model due to its emphasis on an inexorable movement toward a more commercialized economy. This advancing commercialization provided an outlet for the demographic and social pressures of the era. The ever more vibrant urban centers of the Middle Ages were the turbines of economic progress for the areas surrounding them, progress that spread through local, regional, national, and international commercial connections.
Hatcher and Bailey scrutinize these three models and find weaknesses and strengths in each. More interesting and more useful, however, are the features that the models, in the authors' opinion, share. Each model focuses upon a factor of undeniable significance in the evolution of the medieval economy, whether it be demographic change, social conflict, or commercialization. This monocausal approach satisfies the innate human desire for simple solutions to complex phenomena, a source of the supermodels' argumentative strength. The elegant simplicity of causation championed by each approach's most doctrinaire adherents, however, costs these models their workability when faced with the messiness of reality. Hatcher and Bailey illustrate this failing by examining the supermodels from a variety of perspectives. The supermodels, especially the demographic and Marxist models, have difficulty dealing with the impact of the exogenous factor, a factor originating beyond the model's neat confines. Those wedded to an imbalance of population and resources or to a struggle among classes as the lone engine of historical change must minimize the impact of the Black Death, an exogenous factor, and relegate it to the role of accelerating agent. Likewise, technological change is driven to the analytical wilderness. Partly due to this shortcoming, each supermodel yields insights regarding the economic expansion of the central Middle Ages but none of them accounts convincingly for the lengthy economic retrenchment of the late Middle Ages. Moreover, the authors interpret the proliferation of new models, a development driven partly by the academy's love affair with the novel, as an indictment of the grand old theories. In this context, Bailey and Hatcher subject to summary analysis S. P. Epstein's "integration crisis", monetarist explanations, the "institutional" model of D. C. North and P. Thomas, and S. A. Rigby's use of "closure theory", none of which, in the authors' view, provides a crystalline window through which to view medieval economic development. Hatcher and Bailey then test of the usefulness of the supermodels in a case study, the evolution of serfdom in medieval England, and find all of them wanting.
While Hatcher and Bailey value the ability of the supermodels to underscore a single variable, they recognize the complexity of the medieval world and the inability of a simple model to reflect it. In search of a better approach, they investigate the methodologies at the cutting edge of the social sciences: chaos theory and postmodernism. They peer into the methodological and theoretical chasm and then pull themselves back from it. They commend chaos theory's sophisticated view of causation -- they use the enduring image of the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in Tokyo that, through an ineffable chain of causation, visits a hurricane on New York City -- and they acknowledge the power of path dependence theory to illuminate modern economic phenomena. However, they note the difficulty of applying these techniques to fragmentary medieval evidence. They also find troubling the most extreme conclusion of chaos theory: that small-scale causes and the force of random chance render knowledge of historical causation unattainable.
Hatcher and Bailey find little to recommend the postmodernist stance toward causation. They are discomfited when extreme postmodernists assert that reconstruction of historical truth is impossible due to the inscrutability of language as a means of conveying information. They characterize as "bizarre" the contention that no hierarchy of causation can be established because it is impossible to grade the significance of individual causes within the tangled skein of causation, a contention that renders all causes equal.
Having questioned the usefulness of virtually every approach they encounter, what do Hatcher and Bailey offer as an alternative? They counsel common sense. Even with the poor instruments at his disposal, the historian must endeavor to explain the past. Until better methods emerge, the historian should combine two longstanding approaches rarely used in concert, approaches perhaps best characterized as vertical and horizontal. Historians must bear in mind the process of change in the long durée, across centuries and epochs, something historians immersed in specialized projects often fail to do. At the same time, the historian dealing with a small slice of time must make a greater effort to understand the full range of "institutions and activities" that foster change in society.
Ambitious projects inevitably elicit criticism. Because of the scope of their material, Hatcher and Bailey condense and simplify. Some scholars may believe that their work has been misunderstand, oversimplified, misrepresented, poorly classified, or ignored. Some may charge, especially among the academic avant-garde, that their positions have been caricatured or subjected to a reductio ad absurdum analysis. The authors inoculate themselves against this accusation in several ways. They deftly work into their exposition all major and many less generally known practitioners of economic history. The authors also make clear that theoretical purity is observed by economic historians mostly in its breach. A scholar sometimes adopts and discards a model according to its usefulness in addressing a particular problem. The model used by another scholar may be a hybrid creature that defies ready classification. Yet another scholar may find the single variable of a supermodel too confining and introduce other considerations. For example, Hatcher and Bailey identify a number of Marxist historians -- R. H. Hilton, Perry Anderson, Guy Bois, et al. -- who have strayed from orthodoxy. These clues to the complexity of economic history lend to a brief work a sense of comprehensiveness. The authors' ability to avoid jargon when describing a field prone to it is among the book's strengths. The book, finally, displays a commodity rare in scholarship: a sense of humor.