He wishes to thank David Galenson and the members of the Economic History Workshop at the University of Chicago for keeping the faith.Google Scholar

¹ McKay, John P., Hill, Bennett D., and Buckler, John, A History of Western Society (3rd edn., Boston, 1989), p. 283.Google Scholar

² Or from political economists with a historical method, such as K. Bücher and W. Sombart, and not without opposition from other historians. Friedrich Keutgen, a distinguished student of medieval towns, writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1910 on the subject of “Commune, Medieval,” opined that “Sombart's notion of an entire absence of a spirit of capitalistic enterprise before the middle of the fifteenth century in Europe north of the Alps…is absolutely fantastic.”Google Scholar

³ Herlihy, David, “The Economy of Traditional Europe,” this Journal, 31 (03 1971), pp. 153–64: the quote is on p. 155.Google Scholar

⁴ The last news from the front was McCloskey, Donald, “The Open Fields of England: Rent, Risk, and the Rate of Interest, 1300–1815,” in Galenson, David W., ed., Markets in History: Economic Studies of the Past (Cambridge, 1989). pp. 5–51. which does summarize the earlier work.Google Scholar

⁵ Allen, Robert C.. “The Efficiency and Distributional Consequences of Eighteenth Century Enclosures,” Economic Journal, 92 (1982), pp. 937–53;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand Allen, Robert C., “Enclosure, Capitalist Agriculture, and the Growth of Corn Yields in Early Modern England” (University of British Columbia, Department of Economics, Discussion Paper 1986–1939). Allen is writing a book on the subject.Google Scholar

⁶ McCloskey, Donald, “Theses on Enclosure,” Agricultural History: Papers Presented to the Economic History Society Conference, Canterbury, April 1983 (Canterbury. 1983), esp. pp. 69–71.Google Scholar

⁷ Thomas Weiss has pointed out to me that incompetent landlords would also be incompetent at seizing (even large) gains from enclosure. They would be bad at farming and also bad at enclosuring. So a cross-section on this account would exaggerate the experimentally controlled difference in efficiency. Wrandyke hundred would be the region of stupid landlords.Google Scholar

⁸ Allen, “Efficiency and Distributional Consequences.” p. 939. Emphasis is added.Google Scholar

⁹ Compare with McCloskey, Donald, “The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century,” this Journal, 32 (03 1972), pp. 15–35. esp. p. 33.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Clay, Christopher, “Landlords and Estate Management in England,” in Thirsk, Joan. ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales (Cambridge, 1985), vol. 5. part 2, pp. 119–251. esp. p. 242.Google ScholarClay called his section “Different Landlords, Different Approachs,” pp. 241–45.Google Scholar

¹¹ Taken from Clark, Gregory, “The Cost of Capital and Medieval Agricultural Technique,” Explorations in Economic History, 25 (07 1988), pp. 265–94, esp. table 5, p. 281. I use the geometric average of the ratios.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² See Heckman's, James recent paper on the rhetoric of experimentation, “Randomization and Social Policy Evaluation” (Unpublished Manuscript, Department of Economics, Yale University, 03 1990), in which he remarks that “Plots of ground do not respond to anticipated treatments of fertilizer nor can they excuse themselves from being treated with fertilizer” (pp. 2–3). To put it another way, he thinks that the analogy of agronomical treatment has been run into the ground.Google Scholar

¹³ Reed, Michael, “Enclosure in North Buckinghamshire, 1500–1750,” Agricultural History Review, 32 (2, 1984), pp. 133–44, esp. p. 138.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Meager, Leonard, The Mystery of Husbandry (1697),Google Scholar excerpted in Thirsk, Joan and Cooper, J. P., eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Cambridge, 1972), p. 186.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Post, J. B., “Manorial Amercements and Peasant Poverty,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 28 (05 1975), pp. 304–11, esp. p. 305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ Another Weiss point: suppose the benefit to the trespasser were very high, such as trespassing in order to save his life? In actual fact most of the trespasses were recognized as low value relative to the havoc created, but the point is conceptually correct. One would have to argue that high-value trespasses would play Out in the long run as purchases of rights, such as rights of way.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Walker, Sue Sheridan, ed., The Court Rolls of tile Manor of Wakefield from October 1331 to September 1333, Wakefield Court Roll Series, Vaughan, Richard, ed. (Leeds, 1983), vol. 3. I thank David R. Myers for his work on the project.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Post, J. B., “Manorial Amercements and Peasant Poverty,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 28 (05 1975), vol. 3, p. 112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ McCloskey, Donald, “English Open Fields as Behavior Towards Risk,” Research in Economic History, 1 (Fall 1976), pp. 124–70.Google Scholar

²⁰ Geiger, Rudolf, Climate Near the Ground (Cambridge, MA, 1950), p. 393; the next quotation is from p. 394.Google Scholar

²¹ McCloskey, Donald, “English Open Fields as Behavior Towards Risk,” Research in Economic History, 1 (Fall 1976), pp. 397–98.Google Scholar

²² In Rotberg, Robert I. and Rabb, Theodore K., eds., Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton, 1981),CrossRefGoogle Scholarfrom the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 10 (1980), pp. 599–630.Google ScholarThe quotation is from p. 46 of Climate and History, emphasis added.Google Scholar

²³ Table 3 in Bryson, Reid A. and Padoch, Christine, “On the Climates of History,” in Rotberg, Robert I. and Rabb, Theodore K., eds., Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton, 1981), pp. 3–17,Google Scholarfrom the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 10 (1980), pp. 583–97.Google Scholar

²⁴ Harvey, P. D. A., ed., The Peasant Land Market in Medieval England (Oxford, 1984), p. 341.Google Scholar

²⁵ Calculations by Van Vleck, V. N. in Rogers, J. E. Thorold, A History of Agriculture and Prices and Wages in England (Oxford, 1886–1900), vol. 4 (prices in Oxford market and in St. Johns College, Cambridge)Google Scholarand in Lloyd, W. F., Prices of Corn in Oxford (Oxford, 1830). The decades were the harvest years 1593 to 1602 and 1623 to 1632 for “early” and 1653 to 1662 and 1683 to 1692 for “late.” There were 379 pairs of prices early and 364 late. The smaller subsamples (such as Oxford from Rogers, with 70 pairs early and 44 pairs late) can yield anomalies: negative interest rates. But “the” interest rate in the two college towns could be expected to be a single number, which emerges from the mist as the sample gets larger.Google Scholar

²⁶ Clark, “The Cost of Capital,” pp. 270–76.Google Scholar

²⁷ Titow, J. Z., English Rural Society, 1200–1350 (London, 1969), pp. 97ff. Titow used prices from other places when those from Mardon and Ecchinswell are missing.Google Scholar

²⁸ Beveridge's, William prices are from B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, An Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 484–85.Google Scholar