Agrarian Change in Seventeenth-Century England: The Economic Historian as Paleontologist

Abstract

The seasonality of weddings molded itself to regionally specific patterns of labor in early-modern England. Advantage can thus be taken of the widely available if unlikely source of parish registers of marriages to reveal the timing of regional specialization, defined narrowly as the ability of regions to forgo the production of the staples of local consumption and concentrate on whatever production best suited local resources of land and labor.