Population Density in Medieval Fenland
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3373938 |
|---|---|
| Authors | H E Hallam (corresponding author), Henry Hallam (Loughborough College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1961 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 71 |
| Publication date | 1961-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Economic History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2591354 |
| OpenAlex | W4243712547 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 18 |
| References cited | 6 |
he medieval Fenland provides one of the rare opportunities in England to discover approximately how many people lived on how much land. By careful study of the thousands of twelfth and thirteenth-century charters produced by the numerous population of free sokemen the historian can reconstruct with confidence the plans of the thirteenth century townships and can trace the work of reclamation from turf fens and salt marshes which, between the Conquest and the Black Death, added about a hundred square miles to the enclosed arable, pasture and meadow of the original settlements. Study of the earliest maps and surveys, of rentals and acrebooks, enclosure awards and tythe awards, dyke-reeves' verdicts and eighteenth-century property deeds, together with a careful scrutiny of the land itself and of modern aerial photographs, compared with the six-inch ordnance survey map, give the opportunity to say where the waste lay unenclosed at any particular date and where the rights of the various townships were bounded.1 This essay is an attempt to use this topographical knowledge to say what the population of the wapentake of Elloe in the fenland of the Parts of Holland, Lincolnshire, was, and to compare it with that of the modern fenland. The attempt will be only partially successful because we do not know how to compare the resources of the fenlandin 1I300 and now, but at least therQ will be some impression of the density of population which one part of England could sustain at the height of the prosperity of the medieval agrarian economy. The remarkable series of three censuses of the native of Spalding, Weston and Moulton, made for the Prior of Spalding in i267-8, give the average figure of 4-68 persons per household amongst the bond sokemen and operarii of the three manors and there seems no reason why these bond households should be different from the free households of the same manors, which cannot have enjoyed a standard of living remarkably different from that of the bond households, or why the men of the Prior of Spalding should have households different in size from those of the men of other lords in the wapentake. I shall also assume that the same household size existed just before I 267-8 and also up to a generation after. Where appropriate I shall use the census
Ancient history · Archaeology · Geography · Population · Population density · Sociology · Demography · Historical and Archaeological Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
Going round in circles
Married and not
The Preplague Population of England
People and Land in the Middle Ages, 1066–1500
Agriculture and Rural Life in the Later Roman Empire
Multi-isotope evidence shows extensive free-roaming pig husbandry endured in medieval England
Land, labour and people, 1042–1350
The Spalding Priory merchet evidence from the 1250s to the 1470s
Productivity Growth without Technical Change in European Agriculture before 1850
Modification of artificial drainage networks during the past half-century
Demographic Limitations of the Spalding Serf Lists
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,28 |
| Citation span | 1962 - 2026 (65) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 13 |