In the sixteenth century, in sharp contrast with the previous period, there is a remarkable consistency amongst those countries for which we have tithe data. There was expansion and growth almost everywhere, at least in the period 1500 to 1560 or 1570. This is not, of course, a new discovery. Historians have spoken of the ‘splendid’ sixteenth century as a time of significant economic and demographic expansion. Despite this general trend, however, there was considerable poverty at an individual level because the increase in food production did not keep pace with the increase in population. The uniformity of agricultural expansion from Poland to Spain was very striking; it was not to be repeated during the second period of growth which began in the eighteenth century.

Needless to say, to refer to the sixteenth century as ‘splendid’ is to use superficial, metaphorical language. In fact the population increased more rapidly than production, which led to impoverishment, at least so far as real wages and the per capita income of the peasants were concerned. These phenomena were not particularly ‘splendid’, but rather were ‘harsh’.

I shall begin with central Europe; my first chapter was essentially concerned with France, as I did not have enough data for other countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but I can now widen my scope.

The tithe as a source

In France, the tithe has traditionally been studied by canon lawyers or historians of institutions, first with the purpose of justifying the tithe or improving the methods of collection (till 1789), and later to estimate the importance of the tithe relative to other dues the peasants of the ancien régime were obliged to pay to the State, the Church and the seigneurs. For the last twenty years the tithe has been looked at from a radically different angle, and, in the course of the two great national and international surveys and other studies mentioned in the previous chapter, it has become the focus of a new type of research. This is because of the nature of the tithe, because it is possible to constitute long series, sometimes spanning several centuries, and because it enables us to make comparative studies of a very large number of European or non-European countries in the preindustrial period. It is the ambiguous nature of the tithe which makes it so interesting to the historian: it was an integral part of the dues extracted by the ruling class from the gross agricultural product, but it belongs essentially to Quesnay's second category, that of the net product.

If every tithe represents a movement of the net product between those liable to pay and those entitled to receive it, it also represents a proportion (varying locally) of the gross product – in other words of the harvests.

The pages which follow focus on the history of agricultural production as measured by the tithe. For the methodology of this problem, see the book I edited with Joseph Goy, and the first part of this volume.

Like some other historians, including Baehrel, we started from the idea that because the tithe was a fixed percentage of agricultural production (a tenth, an eleventh etc.), it could be used to measure trends in that production year by year and decade by decade. And so at the conference on tithes in Paris in 1977 we and our collaborators drew up graphs of fluctuations in the product of the tithe in a good many parts of Western and Central Europe, from Spain to Hungary, via France. The period involved runs from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century.

We tried to establish certain trends with the aid not only of the tithe series, but also of documents concerning leases (fermages) and ground rents, as well as statistics of agricultural productivity when they existed. In other words, we did our best to describe changes in the gross agricultural product and, where possible, in productivity. In doing this we naturally had to consider other trends; although they were marginal from the point of view of our own research, they still had to be taken into account.

The present volume aims at describing, for the Englishspeaking public, the present state of research on the tithe. This kind of payment, typical of the agrarian ancien régime, is of great value for historians because it serves as a rough indicator of changes in the agricultural product (grain, wine etc.) from year to year, decade to decade, or over longer periods. This assertion is true in essence for traditional societies, such as France before 1789, and other countries of Europe and Latin America in the nineteenth century.

The tithe, however, is inseparable from a whole series of other revenues which came from the land and filled, in theory at least, the coffers and the barns of the great landowners, whether they were members of the clergy, the nobility or the upper bourgeoisie. Consequently, we have not separated the tithes (our main preoccupation) from the other revenues derived from the land (rents, seigneurial dues etc.).

This book is divided into two parts. The first part, by Joseph Goy, deals with methodology. The second part is by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie with the collaboration of Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide; this portion deals with long term fluctuations in the product of the tithe and other revenues from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It is a work of comparative history, focussed on Europe but touching on America, and draws upon the research of nearly a hundred historians from many countries, to whom we are most grateful.

The form of the tithe in France under the ancien reǵime

The tithe as a biblical institution dates back almost 2,000 years and was well established by canon law. It should have been levied on the totality of agricultural products, on livestock, on the proceeds from fishing, hunting and from windmills, as well as on the profits of trade and industry. But in fact it quickly became a traditional means by which the Church could collect each year a percentage of the fruits of the earth, in other words, of crops and livestock. Very roughly, and allowing for the inevitable regional variations, one can distinguish between

1. (1) the major tithes, which were levied on the basic components of agricultural production, wheat, barley, oats, rye and wine;

2. (2) the lesser tithes or ‘green tithes’ on vegetables and fruit from gardens and orchards;

3. (3) the tithes on livestock, commonly known as ‘blood tithes’.

Because the tithe was based on custom rather than on rigid laws it was a living institution liable to change. In addition to the long-established tithes (the dîmes solites) others could be introduced, especially on new crops (maize, potatoes etc.). These were the so-called ‘exceptional tithes’ (dîmes insolites) which were often a source of conflict between the tithe collector and the producers. It was in the interests of the latter to prevent these new tithes from being paid continuously for forty years, since this would make them ‘long-established’ (solites) and the amount levied was then increased.

Historiography

In Autumn 1963 the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) recommended, on the advice of Ernest Labrousse, that systematic research be undertaken on the fluctuations in agricultural production during the French ancien régime, on the basis of such sources as estate accounts, leases, tithe registers and the contracts made with tithe collectors. Labrousse made this suggestion because he wanted to draw the attention of economic historians to a type of source which a few bold spirits had exploited in an attempt to calculate the relationship between population, production, revenue and consumption, as precisely as possible and preferably over the long term. At this point, important progress was being made in historical demography, thanks to the work of Pierre Goubert on the Beauvaisis, and the research directed by Pierre Chaunu, Louis Henry and Marcel Reinhard, not to mention the iconoclastic hypotheses formulated by René Baehrel in his study of Provence. The ‘new rural history’ of early modern France had much more to say about the landscape, the agrarian systems, the social structure and prices than about yields, productivity and, above all, production. Two works which appeared more or less simultaneously were crucial in the evolution of ideas about French rural society in the early modern period.

It is obvious that, in this rapid description of sources and methods, it has not been possible to mention all the studies of rural societies concerned with dues, production and productivity. The tithe, ground rents and estate accounts are not the only documents which can be used, and there are many trails still to be explored. Let us give two examples. French historians have perhaps not paid enough attention to sources which, while not really serial, are often very precise and entirely suitable for the study of the gross product over the short and medium term. These include, for example, the declarations of income made by the priests of France in the eighteenth century: in 1701 the general assembly of French clergy, which was responsible for deciding how much each diocese had to contribute towards the king's don gratuit, organized a national survey. On at least three occasions in the eighteenth century (in 1728, 1751 and 1760) the priests returned information on their income and these documents, preserved partly in the Archives Nationales, in G8, and partly in the departmental archives, enable us to make cross-sections and to form some impression of the gross product.

On the whole, despite many fluctuations, the product of the tithe became more stable during the seventeenth century. We can, if we like, talk of a general crisis in the seventeenth century, but the situation, at least in France, was not the same as that produced by the dramatic collapses of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century cereal production did not necessarily fall permanently below the ceilings reached in the sixteenth century (or, shall we say, below the levels of recovery equal to those which had been reached before the Black Death of 1348). But it often fluctuated around levels distinctly lower than these ‘ceilings’, at least during a few particularly dangerous periods. In any case, cereal production, at least in France, did not often exceed the levels mentioned above. It would be more accurate to talk of a period of stagnation or stability (stabilization or ‘normalization’) rather than of ‘general crisis’ in the seventeenth century.

As far as the medium, as opposed to the long, term is concerned, one thing is clear: whatever the differences in timing between one European country and another, there was a general crisis in Europe around 1640–50 – the result of wars, taxes, the weather, occasional revolutions and possibly a shortage of precious metals for minting.

After 1670 in Spain and after 1715 in France there was very distinct increase in the agricultural product. This rise was paralleled by a certain increase in population. In France, and perhaps in other Western European countries as well, this economic revival was particularly significant. From the 1320s to the end of the seventeenth century it seems that the population of France scarcely exceeded a maximum of 20 or 21 million inhabitants. In the eighteenth century, for the first time, this figure was to be substantially surpassed: around 1788–9 the population of France reached 27 million. This demographic development clearly provided a very positive stimulus to agricultural production. However, if one looks at agricultural growth in the eighteenth century over the whole of Central and Western Europe, then the factors responsible for this growth seem less obvious and more divergent than they had been between 1450 and 1560. One of the indications is that the demographic trends underlying the agricultural expansion were not the same. In the eighteenth century the population rose less dramatically, in percentage terms, than it had done during the period from 1450 to 1550. In France in this earlier period the population had increased by 100% or possibly more, whereas it rose by only 29% between 1700 and 1789. Generally speaking, agriculture did not expand in a uniform manner during the eighteenth century.