4 - Agrarian change: the evidence

Summary

The evidence of the last chapter, introduced as if in demonstration of method, began to make a case for interrelated changes over time and space in agriculture and industry, and to locate the interlocked changes more strongly in the seventeenth than in its flanking centuries. But in the interest of best comprehending the early modern restructuring of the rural economy, the agricultural and industrial sectors will be conditionally sundered in the next three chapters, before returning to synthesis in Chapter 7. Chapter 6 will investigate rural industry, but this and the next chapter examine agriculture. What happened that the centre of pastoral marriage seasonality moved to the west and north in Figure 3.12, while that of arable seasonality moved eastward? What happened that in parishes in many parts of England (Figures 1.1 and 1.4), marriages ceased to cluster in the weeks after the grain harvest?

First, consider the timing of the change. The regionally specific switch from arable to pastoral seasonality did not occur at a constant rate over the long span of the marriage record. Table 4.1 compares the Seasonal Types, autumn-marrying (A), spring-marrying (P), nonseasonal (X), or heterogeneous (H), of parishes in 1661–1700 (the rows) with their typing in the next adjacent forty year period, 1701–40 (the columns). The expected frequencies are given in parentheses, under the observed frequencies; they would have resulted had the size of the sixteen cells been determined by the row and column totals (displayed in the table's margins).