economy

The key works are R. Welldon Finn, The Norman Conquest and its effects on the economy, 1066-1086 (1971); H.C. Darby, Domesday England (1977); and R.H. Britnell, The commercialisation of English society (1993). John McDonald and G.D. Snooks, The Domesday economy: a new approach to Anglo-Norman history (1986), and the many articles by the same authors, offer an econometric analysis of the Domesday data which will be daunting to most medieval historians. The authors are modern economists and many of their ideas on the medieval economy are regarded as eccentric or implausible by medievalists. The most recent book by John McDonald, Production efficiency in Domesday England (1998), is also the most daunting.

A.R. Bridbury, From Bede to the Reformation (1992), challenges the view that Domesday values can be used to study the economy, while G.D. Snooks, Nicholas Mayhew, and Christopher Dyer, have debated the level of total economic output indicated by the Domesday valuations in A commercialising economy: England, 1086 to c.1300, edited by R.H. Britnell and B.M.S. Campbell (Manchester, 1995), pages 27-77, 194-98. They come to widely divergent conclusions.

John Langdon, Horses, oxen and technological innovation: the use of draught animals in English farming from 1066 to 1500 (Cambridge, 1986), and Richard Holt, The mills of medieval England (Oxford, 1988), analyse the available evidence for these two fundamental infrastructural investments in the economy, while Peter H. Sawyer, 'The wealth of England in the eleventh century', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 15 (1965), pages 145-64, makes a convincing case for the wealth of England at this date, largely based upon wool exports. James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon state (2000), has added further weight to Professor Sawyer's arguments.