This book contributes new dimensions to our understanding of late medieval Durham by analysing the great church institutions and also lay society at all levels from earls to cottagers. The first two chapters on the estate management of Durham priory and the bishops might seem old-fashioned, but in this thoroughly modern book the estates are treated comparatively, and the emphasis is on the mentality of the institutional lords and of their tenants. Also in modern style, the book covers a period on both sides of the customary dividing lines around 1500, and a constant theme is the contrasting economic background of recessions and crises in the fifteenth century, and expansion and inflation after 1540. In the period before 1500, the priory converted the holdings of its customary tenants to leasehold, and although its income dipped severely and the tenants’ arrears mounted in the middle of the fifteenth century, a recovery was achieved after about 1470. The bishops, however, retained copyhold tenure, and made no great effort to recover rent income after the recession. Instead they diversified by exploiting the pasture resources of their parks, and made good money from coal mines.

After the Reformation, the Dean and Chapter (the reconstructed priory) came into conflict with their leasehold tenants, but were able to keep ahead of inflation by charging large entry fines, while the bishops were afflicted by a long-term fall in their real income as their copyholders enjoyed fixed rents, while estate assets were leased for seventy years or more at rents set before the rise in prices. Brown shows how administrative choices made in the middle ages were still having strong effects on the two estates in 1640, and he explains their experiences in terms of path dependency.

The rise and fall of the lay estates, in the absence of detailed accounts, have to be examined by counting their manors. A consistent story emerges of the expansion of a handful of larger estates between 1350 and 1500, and a reduction in the number of lesser gentry dependent on a single manor, but in 1540 to 1640 their fortunes were reversed as the magnates made political errors and spent unwisely, while the gentry profited from rising prices. A new dimension in landholding in the north of the county came from Newcastle merchants who bought manors not in order to become country gentry, but for investment. The tenants in the villages on the church estates, called peasants by some historians, prospered after the Reformation as agricultural profits increased. On the priory estate, land was quite evenly distributed, but a wealthy elite emerged on the bishopric manors, another consequence of ‘path dependency’.

This important and convincing story is told with clarity, helped by the number of tables and graphs, and there is plenty of historiographical context, from ‘the rise of the gentry’ to very recent works. The churchmen and laity are kept apart in this study, but one wonders about the role of the gentry as administrators of the church estates: perhaps different paths were chosen because of their advice.