Agrarian Wealth and Social Structure in Pre-Industrial Cumbria
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3337126 |
|---|---|
| Authors | T D Marshall (Lancaster University Ghana, corresponding author), J D Marshall (0000-0001-5632-3528, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1980 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 503-521 |
| Publication date | 1980-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Economic History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1468-0289.1980.tb01173.x |
| OpenAlex | W2103026367, W4244118687 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
T tHE socio-economic organization of late seventeenth-century English society no longer lends itself to convenient generalization. Prof. Holmes's recent critique of Gregory King has splintered that worthy's famous table, or conventional notions of its reliability, beyond apparent hope of repair, even though the critique itself leaves King's more specific local and demographic exercises unblemished.' This can only mean that, in future years, an even heavier responsibility will fall upon those hardy but sometimes ill-supported frontiersmen, the regional and local historians of economic development and social change. Nevertheless, the challenge thrown to a growing group of historians may well turn out to be beneficial. There is little doubt, for example, that the examination and analysis of probate inventories, covering large geographical areas, and for long curiously neglected, will eventually produce working estimates of changing wealth levels which will in turn permit inter-regional as well as inter-local comparisons. Moreover, inventories, used with care, yield considerable information relative to social aspiration and status as well as to purely economic considerations, and so will provide a more than rudimentary guidance in the formation of models of social structure. This is especially likely to be the case where rural societies are being considered; towns have social complexities which are best treated separately. Clearly, too, scholars in this field must not demand too much of their raw material and of its supporting documentation. Attempts to form sophisticated methodologies now being developed by researchers on U.S. probate inventories2 may, if applied unwisely, have the effect of depositing their
Agrarian society · Agrarian structure · Agricultural economics · Agriculture · Archaeology · Economics · Geography · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Scottish History and National Identity
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1981 - 2000 (20) |
| Highly cited | No |