THE LINK THAT SEPARATES

Evidence for the pastoral economy of one medieval estate cannot rewrite our models of medieval agricultural development. The findings do, however, question concepts of productivity and relations of pastoral and cereal agriculture basic to such models. Political reliance on consumption to conserve agrarian lordship and economic reliance on consumption to mitigate market dependence profoundly shaped production on the Peterborough Abbey estate. The centrality of consumption to the Abbey's production indicates the need for further comparative studies of consumption on estates of different size and ownership. Further research on everyday consumption of agricultural products will substantially revise our models of medieval productivity which have neglected household consumption. The study also shows that the pastoral and cereal sector of the estate economy did not oppose each other as posited by our development models. The Abbey linked different livestock and their products with its household economy, the market, and its cereal agriculture along multiple paths. It cleared new paths and linked cereal and pastoral activities in news ways as its political and economic position changed. As a well-endowed Abbey with twenty-three manors, the Abbey coordinated an ensemble of resources to achieve such linkages. On an estate of this scale, the estate economy cannot be reduced to any one of its manorial economies but requires analysis as a network.

Such multiple and changing links between the pastoral and cereal sector complicate methodological efforts to find any one unitary "pastoral" index. In the early twelfth century, when the Abbey had not yet turned to large-scale cash-cropping and direct estate-management, its estimated livestock ratio, or number of cattle, horses, and sheep per one hundred cultivated acres, measured 88.8. At a high-farming peak, its early-fourteenth-century livestock ratio had dropped to 70.8, a ratio that compared well with the estate of the Bishop of Winchester, where a supposed pastoral crisis existed. Peterborough Abbey and Winchester enjoyed livestock ratios almost twice those of Westminster Abbey and demesnes in eastern Norfolk for the same period. Does that mean, then, that Peterborough and Winches-

ter are pastoral estates during this period and Westminster and eastern Norfolk arable demesnes? The risks of simple comparisons of such measures become clearer if we look at the changing composition of Peterborough's livestock ratio. In the early twelfth century, cattle, chiefly oxen, dominated the livestock ratio, by contributing just under two-thirds of the ratio. Sheep and horses together contributed the remaining third of the livestock ratio. By the first decade of the fourteenth century such relationships had reversed. Sheep and horses contributed just under two-thirds of the livestock ratio; cattle, one-third. Presumably the Abbey could have achieved the higher twelfth-century livestock ratio of 88.8 if it had herded more livestock rather than sold its hay and pasture resources, as it chose to do in the fourteenth century. The simple relations between pastoral and cereal husbandry posited by Postan do not adequately account for the comparative commercialization of haulage, dairying, and wool production over the thirteenth century and the trade-offs made between producing such products and selling pastoral resources to others to produce them.

Its commitment to conserving certain consumption strategies did not mean that the Abbey resisted technological innovation or market involvement. It engaged in indebtedness as did large and small lay and ecclesiastical lords of the twelfth century. It adopted Cistercian improvements such as windmills and cereal granges operated by wage labor soon after their introduction into England. The estate herded on average twice the number of workhorses and cart horses as other demesnes in the eastern Midlands. The Abbey had certainly committed itself to investments in speedy haulage. In the instances where the Abbey recorded cereal yields, they were good to excellent, compared to the highyielding Norfolk demesnes. The Abbey used the same strategies observed by Bruce Campbell in Norfolk to achieve such good yields. It spent money on the purchase, hauling, and spreading of manure and hired workers to weed. It applied such strategies near the Abbey where the bulk of the grain went to household consumption and not to the market. Thus, strategies to achieve high yields need not be constructed narrowly as market strategies. On the estate of Peterborough Abbey, we find such investments in higher yields occurring in consumption contexts. In Norfolk such strategies occurred on manors producing for the market.

The Abbey selectively participated in medieval markets to conserve

its powers to consume. The Abbey did not have to step outside of its household economy to consume basic foodstuffs; nor did it rely on the market to replace the sources of such products. The Abbey did, however, appear on the market as a seller of animal products when it so chose. It thus simultaneously enjoyed the advantages of "costless" everyday consumption of foodstuffs and the profit the market could bring by preventing subsumption of consumption by the market.

The Abbey's strategies of consumption shaped the demography of the estate cattle herd, and therefore its productivity. Its reliance on consuming estate-produced bread and ale as chief sources of nourishment determined that the traction produced by the oxen of its cattle herd became a main, albeit hidden, ingredient of household consumption. The Abbey organized the demography of its cattle herd to furnish the necessary oxen needed for ploughing its demesne. The production of beef and dairy products took second place to the production of traction. The Abbey, in fact, preferred to sell fodder, pasture, and meadow to its peasants rather than expend its herd of dairy cows and young beef cattle. The Abbey's choice not to husband more beef and dairy cattle in order to accumulate capital or, in other words, to maximize profit demonstrates how fundamentally a secure source of consumption motivated the Abbey's household economy.

The Abbey knew how to produce profit but did so selectively. It produced wool for cash and used the market to expand flock size when wool prices rose. It never relinquished, however, its basic control over biological reproduction of its sheep flock. By herding a reproductive flock, the Abbey conserved its ability to shift from cash-cropping to subsistence husbandry. For once interregional markets began to organize herd reproduction, as in the early modern period, sheepherders became irreversibly caught in cash-cropping of livestock products.

The evidence also suggests that the specialized pursuit of cash in seigneurial sheep husbandry, which started in earnest in the late twelfth century, overturned a long-standing practice of consumption which relied on sheep as dairy animals. In the twelfth and early thirteenth century, production shifted from a diversified reliance on dairy and wool to a highly specialized concentration on the production of fine wool. Sheep dairying dropped out of the seigneurial economy of sheep husbandry. Dairy cows grew in importance to the Abbey with such a shift.

The horse husbandry of the Abbey illustrates both the flexibility and the potential instability of its pastoral economy. The Abbey bred its own riding horses, the animals that marked its lordly status, and eschewed the market for their supply. By relying on its stud farm to furnish its riding horses, the Abbey conserved long-standing links between its consumption sphere and its embodiment of agrarian lordship. The Abbey did not breed its own cart horses. It relied on market purchases to replace these animals on the estate. Cart horses gained economic importance as transport animals on the estate in the thirteenth century and embodied the link of the Abbey to the market. The Abbey's commitment to speedier haulage and ploughing was considerable. It kept, on average, almost twice as many workhorses as other demesnes in the East Midlands. Such a contrast reminds us that within a geographical region, such as the East Midlands, different estates pursued different economic policies, which produced variation, much in need of further study. The Abbey's practices of consumption made its investment in workhorses possible. It fed its horses with its own demesne-produced oats, thus defraying the considerable fodder-costs of keeping work-horses.

Pig husbandry long remained central to the Abbey's household consumption. As the Abbey began more intensive management of its woodland resources over the eleventh and twelfth centuries and converted much of this preferred habitat of pigs into fields, it developed sty husbandry and continued to consume pork as an important source of calories in its household diet. Again, its practices of consumption facilitated its sty management of pigs. It fed a substantial portion of its demesne-grown legumes to its pigs.

The Abbey's consumption of poultry also harked back to its oldest practices of consumption. It collected most of its poultry and eggs from its peasants. The use of pigeons to supplement the Abbey's diet grew out of new strategies of production grafted onto the household economy in the thirteenth century.

The one-dimensional concern with production in medieval agricultural history has left consumption invisible in medieval rural economies. The findings of this study show how consumption shaped production, exchange, and reproduction in the pastoral economy of the estate of Peterborough Abbey. Such findings bear on the debate over technological innovation and productivity in medieval agriculture. Postan ascribed the stagnation of English manorial regimes

to the low rate of investments in agriculture made by English lords. If lords had been rational economic actors, they would have invested more. Recent research on the high productivity of medieval agriculture in the county of Norfolk has recast the debate on agrarian innovation by emphasizing structural rather than technological differences. Differences in the units of production, fields and farms, not technology, critically influenced agrarian progress and productivity. The links between consumption, production, and reproduction outlined in this study call for widening the debate on agrarian structure to include of consumption and differences in consumption practices.

The local findings also bear on the debate over the market in the rural economy of medieval England. To reproduce themselves as agrarian lords in a political economy that burdened them with taxation, litigation, and political service, the lords of Peterborough Abbey actively, but selectively, participated in the market at the same time they strove to conserve the "costless" consumption of estate-produced subsistence goods. For them, market and subsistence relations paradoxically intertwined rather than polarized, as some simplistic models of historic markets have led us to expect. The Abbey reproduced agrarian lordship as long as it conserved an asymmetry between consumption and exchange. An almost exclusive concentration on the productive sphere in medieval economic history has obscured the importance of this asymmetry.

The feathers and furs conspicuously consumed by English lords camouflaged the seriousness of everyday consumption of subsistence goods in their estate economies. Their decisions about consuming and marketing resources embodied feudal power, the link that separated them from the peasant farmers among whom they lived and to whom they allocated resources.