Changes in Productivity, Income and Forms of Peasant Farms in the Low Countries, 14th-16th Centuries: Analysis of Royal Domain Accounts (with Computer Use)

Abstract

This article presents the results of a micro-economic analysis of the accounts of the royal domain in the Southern Netherlands (Flanders and Brabant) from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. The study pursues two objectives: to reassess the importance of the royal domain in public finances under the Burgundian and Habsburg principalities, and to analyse the evolution of peasant farm structures across five Flemish and two Brabantine domain groups over approximately two and a half centuries (ca. 1350-1603).
The analysis is based on the systematic processing of manorial accounts using computer-assisted statistical methods, enabling the detection of functional relationships between variables and the evaluation of their statistical validity. The data series cover revenues from rights, mills, arable land, and farms, as well as frequency distributions of farm units by size category.
The study reaches two main conclusions. First, contrary to the prevailing hypothesis, the royal domain retained genuine importance for state finances throughout the early modern period: while its relative share of revenues declined, its landed sector continued to serve as collateral for sovereign borrowing. Second, a progressive and continuous fragmentation of peasant farm units is observed from 1350 to 1603.
This process, initially slow in the fourteenth century, accelerated from the fifteenth century under the combined influence of the crisis in the cloth industry, urban migration to the countryside, and the development of rural industry. In the sixteenth century, demographic recovery and rising grain prices intensified fragmentation, while the expansion of the linen industry and agricultural technical innovation nonetheless permitted a marked improvement in peasant income from the second quarter of the century onwards.