In this first blog post, Principal Investigator Professor Mike Braddick reflects on the evolution of the idea for ‘The Politics of the English Grain Trade’ from the 1980s to now.
For me, this project has been a long time in the making. In the later 1980s I did a PhD on tax resistance based around a core of legal disputes in the Court of Exchequer. They used what’s known as ‘English bill’ procedure, which allowed plaintiffs to set out their case at length, to which defendants could reply at equal length, sometimes with further statements on both sides in replications, rejoinders and sur-rejoinders. The issues of fact were then examined using depositions put to local witnesses. The bills, answers and depositions are incredibly rich in evidence about local social relations and opinion (Andy Wood has demonstrated the enormous potential of sources like these in his studies of popular politics, social relations and popular memory). While doing my work on taxation I noticed that there were at least as many cases about local mills, if not more, and I developed a postdoctoral project to examine attitudes to milling and millers in local society and their place in local social relations.
I was awarded funding for work on mills in the 1990s, but did not make much progress due to the pressures of my first teaching job and had to set it aside, returning to it at the end of the decade—thanks to a Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt in 1999. However, other projects, teaching and administrative duties intervened once more (and, I should confess, some unsuccessful proposals to pursue this project) and it was only in 2020 that I was able to put together this AHRC proposal.
I say this partly to acknowledge the support I have had prior to the current project but also to say that the long gestation has led to an expansion of my view of it, particularly through collaboration with the other members of the project team.
Initially I had been interested in the often angular relationship between millers and their neighbours, evident in literary representations as well as legal disputes. Mills were often situated on the edge of villages, attended by unaccompanied women who handed over sacks of grain receiving flour in return. But was it their flour? And was it pure? And was the charge for milling fair? The accusation of adulteration seemed to relate to the persistent charge of actual adultery and predatory sexual behaviour: from Chaucer to the popular ballads of the eighteenth century millers are presented both as commercially and sexually suspect and exploitative.
One way of thinking about this moral unease about commercial interests in the grain trade was to think about the broader meanings of bread and grain: as the staff of life, a basic human entitlement and marker of dignity and decency, the focus of communion and commensality (as in ‘breaking bread’) for example. All these resonances were potentially at odds with treating bread simply as a morally-neutral commodity governed by commercial interests.
These issues remain central to the current project: Mabel Winter and I will be undertaking major empirical work on mill litigation, literary representations of millers and milling, and the shifting cultural associations of bread and grain, and placing our findings against the backdrop of dramatic shifts both of political economy and forms of popular politics.
An important departure in this AHRC project though is to think about the politics of the English grain supply in a transnational context. These issues, of commodification and the effects on production and exchange, operated over a much larger global region: English grain consumption had social, political and economic effects well beyond England. Jessica Dijkman and Matthias Berlandi are looking at the Baltic end of the English grain supply from that perspective—the volume and profile of the trade, its political economy, and the regulatory regime in major Baltic ports. Moreover, now the project is underway we are expanding our interests still further. Mabel is developing work, for example, on skill and patterns of labour in milling and associated trades.
We plan publications on mill litigation and social relations in England; the geography and technology of milling; the structure of the trade in grain to England via the Baltic; cultural attitudes to grain, mills and milling in England; and on the political economic and cultural history of bread and grain in German-speaking areas of the Baltic. Other publications will emerge as we go along. We also plan a major edition of documents and commentary giving an overview of the English grain trade between the fourteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. I hope to blog about that soon.
At times I have been a bit gloomy that I didn’t make more progress with the mill project when the idea first occurred to me, but the current project has benefitted from its long gestation, and from the collaboration of a fantastic team: certainly my own view of these issues has already been extended well beyond my initial interest in millers and local social relations.
Mike Braddick
The Politics of the English Grain Trade, 1314-1815 