Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy

The contribution of Bruce Campbell to medieval economic and social history, honoured in this volume, has been second to none. In his own words, Campbell’s research career has been built around doing the same thing again and again, only on a bigger and bigger scale with each iteration. To a great extent this is true: he has exemplified the modelling and interpretation of crop yields, demographic information and other economic data for many years, beginning with the study of just a few manors, before expanding his horizons to encompass England as a whole in the landmark books English Seigniorial Agriculture 1250–1450 (2000) and England on the Eve of the Black Death: An Atlas of Lay Lordship, Land, and Wealth, 1300–49 (2006) (the latter with Ken Bartley) and the wonderful web-based databank and modelling tool Three Centuries of English Crop Yields (www.cropyields.co.uk). It is in the field of late medieval English economic and social history that he has been most influential to date, a fact reflected in this excellent volume of essays which, together and separately, advance many of the themes that Campbell himself has often pioneered. But, over the past decade, Campbell has also been pushing the boundaries of his analyses ever outwards, in both chronological and geographical terms. Without his work on indicators of wealth, productivity, population and so on it would be hard to imagine the medieval period occupying the central place that it does in the 2015 book British Economic Growth, 1270–1870, co-authored by Campbell (rev. ante, cxxxi [2016], 969–70). And it is Campbell who is spearheading a global medieval economic history in which climate and disease play a major part, notably in the 2010 article ‘Nature as Historical Protagonist’ and the 2016 book The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. These two paths are less well-trodden but it seems probable that Campbell’s contributions will stimulate new work here, just as they have in the medieval English context

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