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


受来源质量而不是代表性的驱动，英国农业的历史主要从有据可查的大型农场的角度来书写，而忽视了几个世纪以来耕种该国大部分农田但留下的记录很少的小农和农舍主。这本精彩的系列作品记录了大领主广阔的领地平庸和低下的农作物产量，长期以来一直被用于提高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经济增长和人口福利的计算中。然而，这一假设从未提出过令人信服的理由，越来越多的研究和分析表明，土地的生产力根据农场的大小和功能而发生显著变化，大型农场的每英亩产量受到控制成本的需要的限制，以便出售盈余以获取利润。 而小农户则以低下且经常糟糕的劳动生产率为代价，通过努力利用丰富的家庭劳动力来最大化产出，从而从微薄的土地上维持生计，从而生产出更高的产量。对从中世纪到现代的几个世纪和各大洲的农业的评估清楚地表明，农场规模和土地生产力之间通常呈负关系。