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Inferring Yields from Probate Inventories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Robert C. Allen
Robert C. Allen
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Y2Canada.
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Abstract

An improvement on Mark Overton's method of computing crop yields from probate inventories is proposed. Harvesting costs are explicitly allowed for and a new procedure for eliminating cost-of-production valuations is offered. Applying these methods to a sample of Oxfordshire probate inventories generates higher yields than Overton's investigation of East Anglian inventories. The finding lends support to the view that most of the yield increase in early modern England occurred in the seventeenth century rather than the eighteenth.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 117 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1988

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References

I would like to thank Jane Cottis, Nick Crafts, Stanley Engerman, Sir John Habakkuk, Michael Havinden, Paul Hohenberg, Peter Lindert, Joel Mokyr, Cormac Ó Gráda, Mark Overton, Patrick O'Brien, and Michael Turner for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The remaining errors are my own. I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support.

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5 Overton, , “Estimating Crop Yields,” p. 373; and “Agricultural Productivity in Eighteenth Century England: Some Further Speculations,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 37 (05 1984), p. 250, fn. 37, mentions this problem but does not systematically deal with it.Google Scholar

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9 Havinden read through the Oxfordshire probate inventories and extracted those that distinguished the acreages of the various crops. I have read the inventories for the people that he lists (in Havinden, Michael A., “The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire, 1580–1730,” [B. Litt. thesis, Oxford University, 1961])Google Scholar and recorded the acreages of the crops, their valuations, and the livestock owned by the farmers. (The inventories are now deposited at the Oxfordshire County Record Office, and I am grateful to its staff for expediting my access to them.) Sixteenth-century inventories were taken from the printed collection in Havinden, M. A., Household and Farm Inventories in Oxfordshire, 1550–1590 (Oxfordshire Record Society, 1965), vol. 44. The data sets analyzed here generally consist of all the relevant, usable inventories so obtained.Google Scholar

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14 Thirsk, , Agrarian History, vol. 4, p. 864, and vol. 5, pt. 2, p. 877, reports winter wage rates for male agricultural laborers in Oxfordshire by decade from 1450 to 1750. Harvesting costs for each decade from 1550 to 1727 were computed by deflating Batchelor's harvesting costs by the ratio of Thirsk's winter wage for the decade to Batchelor's winter wage.Google Scholar

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