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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
A century after its publication, R. H. Tawney's The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century remains as imaginative, spirited and passionate as ever. For a long time, the book was neglected by early modern historians. The dismissal of The Agrarian Problem, often by those unacquainted with it, grew from Eric Kerridge's denunciation of it in 1969. Adopting a schoolmasterly tone, Kerridge chided Tawney for spending too little time in the archives (‘Time which he might have given to studying history was devoted instead to the Fabian Society and the Labour Party’) and condemned The Agrarian Problem as mere socialist propaganda. More recently, the tables have turned. The last twenty years have seen a flowering of work on customary law, much of it conducted under the influence of E. P. Thompson's 1991 book Customs in Common. This work has recaptured some of the qualities of The Agrarian Problem, most notably its recognition of the political characteristics of custom. Tawney characterised the politics of custom as follows:
The custom of the manor is a body of rules which regulates the rights and obligations of the peasants in their daily life. It is a kind of law. It is a kind of freedom. And since it is the custom [of the manor] which most concerns the mass of the peasantry, it is not the state, or the law, but the custom of the manor which forms their political environment and from which they draw their political ideas.[…]
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