Driven by the quality of sources rather than their representativeness, the history of English agriculture has been written primarily from the perspective of well-documented large farms to the neglect of smallholders and cottagers who for centuries cultivated the greater part of the nation’s farmland but left scant records. The superb series recording the mediocre and low crop yields of the expansive demesnes of great lords has long been adopted for the productivity of all medieval England’s arable and is deeply embedded in economic and social histories and calculations of economic growth and the welfare of the population. Yet no convincing justification for this supposition has ever been made, and an increasing flow of research and analysis indicates that the productivity of land varied markedly in accordance with the size and function of farms, with the output per acre of large farms constrained by the need to control costs in order to sell surpluses at a profit, while smallholders, at the cost of low and frequently abysmal labour productivity, produced higher yields by striving to maximize output using abundant family labour to secure subsistence from meagre acreages. An appraisal of farming across the centuries and the continents from the Middle Ages to modern times clearly shows that an inverse relationship generally prevailed between farm size and land productivity.

中文翻译：

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中世纪及以后的农民生产力和福利

英国农业的历史主要是从有据可查的大型农场的角度出发，而不是受其代表性的驱动，而忽视了小农和佃农，他们几个世纪以来耕种了国家的大部分农田，但留下的土地却很少。记录。这部精彩的系列记录了大领主广阔领地的平庸而低下的农作物产量，长期以来一直被用来衡量中世纪英格兰所有耕地的生产力，并深深植根于经济和社会历史以及对经济增长和人民福利的计算中。然而，这一假设还没有令人信服的理由，越来越多的研究和分析表明，土地生产力随着农场的规模和功能而显着变化，大型农场每英亩的产量受到需求的限制。控制成本，以便出售剩余产品以获取利润，而小农则以劳动生产率低下且往往很糟糕为代价，通过利用丰富的家庭劳动力以微薄的土地维持生计，努力实现产量最大化，从而获得更高的产量。对从中世纪到现代几个世纪和各大洲农业的评估清楚地表明，农场规模和土地生产力之间普遍存在反比关系。