I would like to thank Jane Cottis, Nick Crafts, Stanley Engerman, Sir John Habakkuk, Michael Havinden, Paul Hohenberg, Peter Lindert, Joel Mokyr, Cormac Ó Gráda, Mark Overton, Patrick O'Brien, and Michael Turner for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The remaining errors are my own. I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support.

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⁴ Intuitively, the expected yield should be estimated by dividing the average pre-harvest value per acre of standing grain by the average post-harvest value per bushel of grain in the barn. Overton derives his more complex formula from a nonparametric model of the joint sampling distribution of the two sets of values.

⁵ Overton, , “Estimating Crop Yields,” p. 373; and “Agricultural Productivity in Eighteenth Century England: Some Further Speculations,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 37 (05 1984), p. 250, fn. 37, mentions this problem but does not systematically deal with it.Google Scholar

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⁹ Havinden read through the Oxfordshire probate inventories and extracted those that distinguished the acreages of the various crops. I have read the inventories for the people that he lists (in Havinden, Michael A., “The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire, 1580–1730,” [B. Litt. thesis, Oxford University, 1961])Google Scholar and recorded the acreages of the crops, their valuations, and the livestock owned by the farmers. (The inventories are now deposited at the Oxfordshire County Record Office, and I am grateful to its staff for expediting my access to them.) Sixteenth-century inventories were taken from the printed collection in Havinden, M. A., Household and Farm Inventories in Oxfordshire, 1550–1590 (Oxfordshire Record Society, 1965), vol. 44. The data sets analyzed here generally consist of all the relevant, usable inventories so obtained.Google Scholar

¹⁰ The wholesale prices were computed by linking (at their overlap in the 1640s) the national annual index numbers for wheat and barley/malt given in Thirsk, Joan, The Agrarian History of England and Wales (Cambridge, 1967), vol. 4, pp. 816–21, and vol. 5, pt. 2, pp. 828–31.Google Scholar To convert the indices to shillings per quarter, the average values for the south midlands for 1640–1749 were used as bases (Thirsk, , Agrarian History, vol. 5, pt. 2, pp. 864–66).Google Scholar

¹¹ Why Tudor farmers valued corn at the price of the seed alone, while later farmers did not, is an interesting question. Although Tudor farmers were annually involved in the grain market, they were probably infrequently involved in land and labor markets. Consequently, the opportunity cost of seed sprang immediately to mind while the opportunity cost of the farmer's labor and land would have required more reflection. Later farmers more frequently involved in factor markets would have spontaneously thought of other costs.

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¹⁴ Thirsk, , Agrarian History, vol. 4, p. 864, and vol. 5, pt. 2, p. 877, reports winter wage rates for male agricultural laborers in Oxfordshire by decade from 1450 to 1750. Harvesting costs for each decade from 1550 to 1727 were computed by deflating Batchelor's harvesting costs by the ratio of Thirsk's winter wage for the decade to Batchelor's winter wage.Google Scholar

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