Book reviews* GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND

This important book is a pioneering application of a Geographical Information System (GIS) to medieval data, bringing together two national sources: the Inquisitions Post Mortem (IPM) for the period 1300–49 and the 1327, 1332, and 1334 lay subsidies.The results are in the form of numerous tables, graphs, and maps. Built around these is a series of invaluable commentaries. After a concise account of the methods employed in the mapping and an invaluable discussion of the merits of the IPMs as a source (reaffirming H. L. Gray’s positive view over E. A. Kosminsky’s), the book turns to the mapping of regional traits. Naturally, many of the results are confirmatory rather than revelatory—on the distribution of common rights, for example—but they are no less significant for that. Similarly, the IPMs tend to confirm Kosminsky’s findings on the variety and composition of manors from the surviving returns of the Hundred Rolls of 1279–80; that is to say, that demesnes were generally of greater relative significance on small manors, rents and services on middle-sized manors, and customary rents and services on the largest of all.The positive correlation between size of manor and size of estate is also confirmed. Of particular interest is the evidence for the distribution of small lay manors, indicating the area in which they predominated and those in which they did not. In terms of topographical features, one of the most interesting finds is that river flooding appears to have been a greater hazard than inundations from the sea. Chapters on demesne land use, both major and minor, and on demesne buildings provide extremely useful distribution maps and statistics. There is an especially valuable discussion of the recording and non-recording of fallow land which all future users of IPMs will need to consult. There is a fine discussion of land values which shows, inter alia, that these values moved up or down according to general price trends. The construction of moving averages across the period 1270–1349 reveals not only short-term variations but also a long-term decline. A variety of factors underlay the determination of these values in addition to the quality and productivity of land, and there was in-built distortion due to the persistence of customary as opposed to statute acres. Nonetheless, the authors are able to provide both a detailed spatial analysis and an overall classification of land values. From there they move to a classification of husbandry or ‘farm enterprise’ types and, by combining this with land use, to ‘a comprehensive picture of agriculture’ in the form of ‘agricultural types’.There follows a thorough discussion of rents and services, on average the largest single component of manorial revenues. The authors calculate