Abstract: Agriculture was for long the single largest component of the English and British economies, both in terms of its share of employment and the value of its output. The latter was a function of the amount of land under cultivation, the uses to which it was put, the productivities of crops and animals and their respective prices. The main purpose of this chapter is to describe the methods used to derive the areas under arable and grass and, in particular, the total sown acreage. The crops produced and animals stocked are the subjects of the following chapter. Along the way, it will be demonstrated that claims that the peak arable area in the medieval period may have exceeded 20 million acres (Clark, 2007a: 124) are unrealistic, since, on the best available evidence, the combined total under field crops and fallow could not have been more than 12.75 million acres. In the absence of significant food imports, this limited both the population that could be supported and the supply of kilocalories per head needed for survival. It also shaped the production choices made by agricultural producers.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-12-31
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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