Parishes affected by the Dissolution of the English monasteries, 1535, experienced a rise of the gentry & had more innovation, higher yield in agriculture, more population working outside of agriculture, & ultimately higher levels of industrialization

The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries. Leander Heldring, James A Robinson, Sebastian Vollmer. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 136, Issue 4, November 2021, Pages 2093–2145, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjab030

Abstract: We use the effect of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries after 1535 to test the commercialization hypothesis about the roots of long-run English economic development. Before the Dissolution, monastic lands were relatively unencumbered by inefficient feudal land tenure but could not be sold. The Dissolution created a market for formerly monastic lands, which could now be more effectively commercialized relative to nonmonastic lands, where feudal tenure persisted until the twentieth century. We show that parishes affected by the Dissolution subsequently experienced a rise of the gentry and had more innovation and higher yield in agriculture, a greater share of the population working outside of agriculture, and ultimately higher levels of industrialization. Our results are consistent with explanations of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions which emphasize the commercialization of society as a key precondition for taking advantage of technological change and new economic opportunities.

JEL N43 - Europe: Pre-1913N63 - Europe: Pre-1913N93 - Europe: Pre-1913O14 - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of TechnologyQ15 - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment

6 Conclusions

In this paper we conducted what to our knowledge is the first empirical investigation of one aspect of the salient commercialization thesis about the causes of industrialization and the industrial revolution in England. Though we cannot test the idea that it was commercialization that caused the industrial revolution, we used the impact of the Dissolution of the monasteries in England between 1536 and 1540 as a source of variation in the extent of commercialization within England. Tawney (1941a,b) first proposed that the Dissolution and subsequent sell off of church land, representing around 1/3 of agricultural land in England, created a huge shock to the land market with profound consequences. We argue that this can be viewed as a natural experiment in the modernization of economic institutions and we hypothesized that the subsequent thickening of the land market would have had a major positive impact on resource allocation and incentives. This was particularly because monastic lands were relatively free of customary perpetual copyhold tenancies which were a direct legacy of feudalism. To investigate this we digitized the 1535 Valor Ecclesiasticus, the census that Henry VIII commissioned on monastic incomes.

Using the presence of monastically owned land at the parish level as our main explanatory variable we showed that the Dissolution had significant positive effects on industrialization which we measured using data from the 1838 Mill Census, the first time the British government collected systematic data on this driving sector of the Industrial Revolution.

We also showed the Dissolution was associated with structural change, specifically the movement of labor out of agriculture and into more industrialized sectors of the economy.

We then examined several channels which might link the Dissolution to these longrun outcomes. We showed that the Dissolution was associated, as Tawney hypothesized, with social change and the rise of a new class of commercially minded farmer. It was also associated with faster conversion from Catholicism, another factor plausibly linked to better economic performance.

We further found the Dissolution to be associated with greater agricultural investment, measured by parenting and land enclosures, and higher wheat yields. All in all, our findings support a quite traditional theory of the industrial, and perhaps the agricultural, revolution; that it was at least partially caused by the increasing commercialization of the economy which had a series of institutional, social and economics effect.