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paralleled opportunity to advance their own self-interest at the expense of the less powerful, the inept and the ndive; it deprived the commoners of their sustenance and set the seal on their debasement; it reduced the recreational and communal space of the village to what in many cases was merely a sham; it subverted both the letter and the spirit of countless benefactions to the poor so that established rights were no longer treated as such and access to them was increasingly denied; it helped reinforce the mounting attack on the doctrine that Nature’s gifts were for the free use of all; it re- moved the single most important residual reason for preserving a viable participatory system of local administration; and by obliterating the old landscape, with all its associa- tions and traditions, and replacing it by other less familiar scenes, it promoted a sense of disorientation, dislocation and, in one or two recorded instances, deep despair and dismay.

What else did parliamentary enclosure do ? It brought to the open-field core of south and east Britain a system of production completely untrammelled by the dilatoriness and inertia of customary procedure. The balance between pasture and arable could be ad- justed at will. Experiment was fostered: inefficiency and waste were reduced. Cereal yields were enhanced, though probably not to the same immediate extent as arable rents. The disappearance of the communal flocks and herds gave the individual complete free- dom to improve his stock, or not, as he chose. Ring-fenced holdings with centrally-placed farmsteads meant increased efficiency in the application of time and effort. And the investment of substantial sums in agriculture’s fixed capital stock, which parliamentary enclosure did much to initiate, became a sort of habituation, underpinning the drive towards High Farming during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

In his new book, Dr Turner does not tell us whether he believes parliamentary en- closure to have been, on balance, a good thing or a bad thing, for neither his essentially economic approach nor his concern with causes rather than consequences encourages judgements of this kind. His laudable efforts in editing and completing W. E. Tate’s Domesday of Enclosure, published in 1978, provide the point of departure for this study. The spatial and temporal incidence of enclosure are charted in turn, particular attention being drawn to the concentration of activity in two distinct phases, separated by the quiescent 178Os, with the second phase witnessing an increasing proportion of awards involving common and waste in addition to open-field. Succeeding chapters ask the question why enclosure occurred when and where it did; and an array of explanations are offered, albeit tentatively. The acute shortage of pasture emerges as a strong con- tender in explaining the rapid enclosure of clayland Midland parishes, although the proximity of forested areas afforded temporary respite in places. [And for the record the Forest of Wychwood (p. 143) is not, and never has been, in Northamptonshire.] Multi- variate methods support the cautious conclusion that shifts in the rate of interest were an important determinant of the general chronology, while the penultimate chapter examines the relationship between landownership and the chronology of enclosure, interpreting the friction of multiple ownership as an important cause of delay.

Since there is much in this discussion which is both interesting and valuable, it may seem churlish to complain that the book’s chief deficiency is that it does not go far enough. But had the author exercised greater control in handling his narrative, much of which only serves to reinforce the findings of previous researchers, he would have had ample space to introduce some of the issues which both the title of the book and the claims for comprehensiveness on the dust jacket suggest ought to be there. And for El3 the customer has the right to expect a more exciting, less enervating treatment.

The University College of Wales, Aberystwyth JOHN R. WALTON

T. S. WILLAN, Elizabethan Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press for the Chetham Society, 1980. Pp. x + 163. %1@50) A striking feature of Professor Willan’s book is his reluctance to place the findings of his

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investigation within the broader framework of urban history. With just an occasional perfunctory reference to the experience of other Elizabethan towns of “a respectable size” (Worcester had c. 4250 inhabitants and Winchester 3120, compared with Man- chester’s 2000) his study is the very antithesis of Patten’s recent all-embracing account. Not that the study is lacking in merit: the author is, of course, a much respected scholar as well as a traditionalist, and he has marshalled all his experience and skill to provide a most readable book. It should have instant appeal to all who are interested in the history of Manchester per se and no doubt it will be much quarried by future writers of general texts, who will find its index rather more helpful in tracing people than places or topics.

It is not the intention of the author to cover all aspects of the history of Elizabethan Manchester. He assiduously avoids politics, local government and religion because they have been discussed elsewhere. Perhaps with less justification, as they have not yet been researched for Manchester, he manages to tiptoe through the minefields of Tudor infla- tion and demographic crisis with neglectful ease. What he chooses to focus upon instead are those aspects of the urban economy (agriculture, industry and trade) and society (wealth and family, house and home) that lend themselves most readily to a contempla- tive probing of surviving documentary sources. The task of reconstruction does indeed have its problems: topographical detail is imprecise because Christopher Saxton appar- ently lost his maps in 1596, and information on trading relationships is rather hazy because as an unincorporated town Manchester possessed no gild records or lists of freemen. What do survive are Court Leet Books, rentals and probate inventories, sufficient to allow a liberal sprinkling of statistical data and dead bodies throughout the text. It transpires that many of the deceased had once lived lives of considerable comfort with fine furnishings, well-stocked wardrobes, feather beds and “concealed” chamber pots in their “bourgeois baronial” homes. Butcher Wharmby had owned a “silver touthpycke” while John Glover, “one of the singinge men of the Colledge of Manchester” and “a bit of a dandy” had owned a fine set of jewellery. Less attractive were the general standards of hygiene, especially down wind of Salford Bridge, where night soil was frequently and illegally tipped into the river Irwell. The Court Leet jury may have succeeded in clearing the streets of “hoares, notorious offenders and unmuzzled dogs” but cattle, horses and pigs, like their owners, were an integral part of the urban economy and in consequence middens and dung hills were intermixed freely with the burgages of the well-to-do along Deansgate and Marketstead Lane. It is indeed a blessing to learn (p. 107) that families did not “live in the street or garden looking at their houses”. In fact, what they spent most of their time looking at was their neighbours since few homes had mirrors that would have allowed them to look at themselves. The foreman of the leet jury spent much of his time looking at blacksmith Cowopp, a most reprehensible charac- ter who maintained a “mydinge in his backside” and kept pigs to annoy Rodger Bex- wicke’s widow. He should also have kept an eye on Cowopp’s “great mastiffe”, as subsequent events were to demonstrate.

Less colourful than the social habits of early Mancunians, but potentially more valuable to the student of urban history, were their economic activities. One important feature may be the diversity of occupations encountered, even among individuals, for Professor Willan suggests that the absence of occupational barriers in a non-corporate town might have been more significant in promoting long-term economic growth than any alleged stimulus of the ‘Protestant ethic’ in this northern centre of Puritanism. However, it is necessary to stress that there was some specialization of economic function: long before it acquired European pre-eminence as the great commercial centre of cotton trading in the nineteenth century, Manchester had become a focus for both the manufacture and marketing of woollen and linen yarns and cloth. Some cloth was carried overland, in the depths of winter, to be resold in London. Manchester’s immediate hinterland may well have been similar to that of the north Lancashire town of Preston which had an inner zone that extented seven to twelve miles and an outer zone that sometimes stretched to twenty. Certainly there were strong rural-urban links developing around Manchester if

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we are to judge from the numbers of shopkeepers and market traders (there were no fewer than 39 butchers trading from 50 stalls in 1599) and the considerable financial transactions, involving both credit owed and money lent, of its clothiers. The proto- industrial town of Manchester may have had its unpaved and insanitary streets but for the likes of Isabel Tipping, Henry Shakeshafte and Ottiwell Hodgkinson it also had its pathways to economic riches. The post-industrial inhabitants of that very townscape may well care to reflect upon the march of progress as they negotiate fractured gas pipes and collapsed sewers on their journeys to space-age shopping precincts.

University of Manchester R. I. HODGSON

The Americas

DONALD H. AKENSON (Ed.), Canadian Papers in Rural History ZZ (Gananoque, Ontario: Langdale Press, 1980. Pp. 172. $12.95)

Even today it is encouraging to find an historian who, in his efforts to be “true to the reality of the past”, is prepared to welcome the work of social scientists in cognate disciplines. Donald H. Akenson has compiled a second volume of papers in the rural history of Canada, which, like its predecessor, offers a mixed fare of papers on a wide variety of topics. It is perhaps to be expected that such a collection would vary both in quality and in the utility of its contributions, but the three or four best essays make the volume worthwhile overall.

Easily the best in content and rigour of treatment is by economists R. E. Ankli, H. D. Helsberg and J. H. Thompson on ‘The adoption of the gasoline tractor in western Canada’. Using a micro-economic approach which draws on detailed costing data from various farm operations, the authors explain convincingly why it was that the gasoline- powered farm tractor took so long to displace horses from prairie farm operations. Although introduced as early as 1908, the tractor did not really come into its own until after World War II; there was no farming “revolution” effected by this innovation in the sense of a swift or sudden switch to its use. Several reasons are suggested for this long period of changeover. Early models were plagued by technical shortcomings, and though World War I speeded up somewhat the conversion of farms to motorized power, recurring market uncertainties, the Great Depression, and material shortages during World War II all inhibited farmers from taking the critical decision. More telling, how- ever, was the demonstrated (and published) fact that for many regular farm operations such as ploughing and reaping, horses were the cheaper power source in 1920. And although improvements to tractors, especially the power take-off, had reversed this by about 1930, the onset of the Depression and dust bowl altered so many cost parameters that the complete acceptance of gasoline tractors was set back until the post-war recovery. The data examined in this paper incidentally yield a rather interesting insight into the relationship between two parameters-the size of farm and the length of the growing season. A single four-horse team could not handle more than 250 acres in the time available, though an eight-horse team could manage over 400 acres; comparable tractor units could handle about double these figures. The implications for rural depopulation and its sociopolitical concomitants are indeed intriguing.

Easily the best paper in terms of intrinsic interest and readability is by D. E. Weale on ‘The shell-mud diggers of Prince Edward Island’, concerned with the practice of dredging oyster-shell and mussel-shell sediments for liming old-settled farmlands and refurbishing the fertility of the soil. Again, a technological innovation (c. 1860) figures prominently- the notion of dredging the mud in winter, by means of devices operated on the surface of the ice, and transporting it on sleighs to the recipients. Weale’s paper explains the technicalities clearly but also emphasizes the social nature of the operation, almost a