Estate Management in the Later Middle Ages: The Talbots and Whitchurch, 1383-1525.

REAL estate management; MANORS; REAL property; POSTAN, M. M.; MIDDLE Ages; WHITCHURCH Estate (Bristol, England); ECONOMIC history

BRISTOL (England); ENGLANDReport Available

This article examines the hypothesis on management of real estate in Whitchurch in Bristol, England, proposed by economist M.M. Postan. Whitchurch's suitability as a case study is fourfold. First, it provided revenues from all the principal sources of landed and seigneurial income in the fifteenth century. Five-sixths of the lands were in the hand of copyholders paying fixed rents, which in 1400 provided approximately one-third of the income. Secondly, there were no special advantages such as offered by the cloth industry on the Castle Coombe estate of John Fastolf. Whitchurch was not geared to a special sector of the economy. Thirdly, the estate was administered at different times both personally by its lord and on his behalf by a well-established bureaucracy. One factor that cannot be ignored in the study of the fifteenth-century economy is the difficulty of making generally applicable conclusions for a kingdom with very marked regional differences, which tended to make economic movements and the responses to them less than uniform. There would seem, for instance, to have been significant differences between the counties feeling the pull of the London market, the midland plain, and the lands of the Welsh and Scottish marches.