Toward a History of European Pastoral Husbandry

The economic activities of the estate of Peterborough Abbey offer answers to this question.^[14] I have deliberately chosen to explore an estate rather than a geographical region because the institutional approach offers the best chance to focus on a nuanced study of poorly known household strategies for pastoral resource-use. Founded as a frontier monastery straddling the edge of the English peat fens and the undulating uplands of the eastern Midlands of England, Peterborough Abbey controlled manors in areas conventionally considered highly arable and highly pastoral.^[15] Such a blend of resources makes this estate an ideal laboratory for questioning Postan's fundamental conceptualization of "pastoral" and "arable" and their interrelationships.

The sources for the pastoral economy of Peterborough Abbey vary in quality and quantity. Archaeological findings offer the chief evidence for the Abbey's early economic history. The Domesday inquest and a royal survey provide insight into the Abbey's resources and their changing deployment over the late eleventh and early twelfth century. The Pipe Rolls, records of the royal Exchequer, shed light on the estate's economic relationships to the Crown and facilitate a political understanding of its changing agrarian organization over the twelfth century. Manorial accounts preserved for the entire estate provide the richest source of systematic evidence for herd demography and productivity and the Abbey's coordination of resources to achieve its reproductive strategies at the turn of the fourteenth century.

Since no scholar has written a history of European pastoral husbandry, this study pioneers a methodology for analyzing pastoral activities. The method goes beyond the partial model offered by studies of cereal agriculture, which have concentrated almost exclusively on the narrow issue of gross productivity-that is, the yield of grain from seed or per acre.^[16] Such a narrow approach ignores everyday political and economic use of local resources. It leaves unaddressed, first, the political formation of resources (who developed what resources for whom?) and their changing forms of deployment within and beyond households. The method developed here, a broader one capable of analyzing the complexities of pastoral activity, explores the links between consumption, production, and exchange of pastoral resources, livestock, and their products.

The study has grappled with defining the terms consumption, production , and exchange appropriately for a medieval monastic household.^[17] Modern conceptions, which valorize production and oppose it to consumption, do not apply to multistranded medieval economies with their Braudelian links to material life, the market economy, and capitalism. This study applies consumption to ways of using resources in the household. It defines resources broadly to include not only those derived from the environment (material forces and produced goods) but those more intangible resources produced from harnessing human activities, such as authority and social control.^[18]Exchange refers to ways of circulating resources beyond the household and production to ways of making things for consumption and exchange. For discussion of change over time, the term reproduction figures strongly. Reproduction includes ways of ensuring the replacement of resources. The interplay of such definitions suggests the difficulties involved in simply or arbitrarily isolating, opposing, or hierarchizing these processes in the study of preindustrial societies.

The study yielded a rich and diverse history of the Abbey's pastoral economy. The right of Dark Age abbots to "eat off the land," to collect resources and food from different parts of their estate, linked Peterborough's first abbots to their pastoral resources. The act of consumption literally embodied or symbolized their lordship. As the monarchy developed and increased its demands over the twelfth century, and as the commercialization of the medieval world economy intensified, the Abbey grafted the production of cash crops onto the trunk of consumption. Such hybridization of old forms of consumption and new forms of exchange bore bitter economic fruit.

The Abbey wielded its seigneurial power to redistribute land and pastoral resources on the estate to coincide with new productive strategies. Paradoxically, the market tempted the Abbey as a source of cash as it threatened the Abbey's autonomy in replacing resources on its estate.

The nature and context of the Abbey's control over pastoral resources thus changed over time; control over resources bound agrarian lordship to ecology, to the physical world.^[19] By considering the effects of politics on ecology, this study extends beyond the confines of the estate to broader questions of power and resources in medieval agricultural development.

Readers will wonder about the typicality of the pastoral economy of Peterborough Abbey. With such a poorly known subject as the European pastoral economy, it is difficult to know in advance what comparative measures offer the best insight into typicality. Wherever possible, comparisons have been made with published data from other estates, especially Winchester and Westminster, and Bruce Campbell's regional study of Norfolk demesnes. The comparisons underscore the selectivity of different estate strategies. Such selectivity precludes statements about tradition and typicality until further study illumines the changing range of reproductive strategies practiced by different estates and regions.

In their pursuit of rich and thick description of the pastoral economy of Peterborough Abbey, the chapters that follow seek to enlarge the ways in which we talk about preindustrial agrarian institutions. The study achieves such a goal to the extent that it restores hitherto invisible and marginalized forms of economic activity to historical vision and resonates to the extent that it inspires sustained appreciation of the multiple vanishing points of such economic activity.