A reappraisal of the freehold property market in late medieval England

Abstract

This article re-examines the late medieval market in freehold land, the extent to which it was governed by market forces as opposed to political or social constraints, and how this contributed to the commercialisation of the late medieval English economy. We employ a valuable new resource for study of this topic in the form of an extensive dataset on late medieval English freehold property transactions. Through analysis of this data, we examine how the level of market activity (the number of sales) and the nature of the properties (the relative proportions of different types of asset) varied across regions and over time. In particular, we consider the impact of exogenous factors and the effects of growing commercialisation. We argue that peaks of activity following periods of crisis (Great Famine and Black Death) indicate that property ownership became open to market speculation. In so doing, we present an important new perspective on the long-term evolution of the medieval English property market.

The First Real Estate Bubble? Land Prices and Rents in Medieval England C. 1300-1500

“…1096. This is reflected in the level of activity in the freehold land market; the number of transactions per year falls to a new low between 1412 and 1423, but appears to have recovered almost to its previous level by 1431 (Bell, Brooks and Killick, 2019b). This theory is supported by evidence of London merchants as particularly active in purchasing property during this period (Bell et al, 2019a).…”

“…Bell et al land, analogous cashflows would be based on the prices of output that would arise from use of the land. For this purpose, we employ wool and grain (Bell et al, 2019b Table 2). 5 In each case, we run a regression of the actual price on a constant and the fundamental measure, with the residuals then representing the non-fundamental component.…”

“…The individual assets of each property have been categorised into seven broad groups: Land, Buildings, Manors, Goods, Livestock, Services (feudal revenues) and Tenants. These are further divided into sub-categories, of which there are 87 in total (see Bell et al, 2019b, Table 1 for summary of dataset and Figure 4 for evidence of transactions in Manors). In addition to data on the property, the database contains 92,652 records relating to the buyers and sellers.…”

“…For additional background to this current paper -specifically on our testing for a bubble in the land market in medieval Englandwe are also able to provide context from two other papers utilising the same underlying dataset and that underpin the findings described here. Bell et al (2019b) describes an extensive dataset on late medieval English freehold property transactions. They present analysis of this data and examine market activity and the nature of the properties across England between 1300 and 1500.…”

“…First, models are estimated based on rents (which are akin to dividends for stocks in representing the direct reward to investors of holding the asset) -see, for example, Roche (2001) or Himmelberg et al (2005). A second method is to run a regression of actual property prices on the fundamental factors thought to drive those prices, such as the supply of land, general inflation, interest rates, and employment (Brunnermeier and Hulliard, 2008;Black et al, 2006).…”