Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Delabastita, Vincent
• Maes, Sebastiaan

Titel

The Feudal Origins of Manorial Prosperity: Social Interactions in Eleventh-Century England

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of economic history, 2023-06, Vol.83 (2), p.464-500

Ort / Verlag

New York, USA: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Does the prosperity of medieval manors depend on their position in the feudal system? How large are these effects? And what are the underlying economic mechanisms? Using Domesday Book, a unique country-wide survey conducted by William the Conqueror, we reinterpret the eleventh-century English feudal system as a network in which manors are linked to one another based on their common ownership structure. Both a reduced-form and a more structural approach reveal the existence of external economies of scale: manorial prosperity was closely intertwined with the fortune of feudal peers. Our findings quantitatively establish the existence of feudal coordination in High-Medieval agricultural activities, revealing how institutionalized interactions could serve to mitigate transaction costs.