Ora et Guberna. The Economic Impact of Benedict’s Rule in Medieval England

• In Event: Poster Session: Religion and Politics & Political Networks
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Religion and the State

Abstract

Question and contribution

Medieval Benedictine monasteries were characterized by the strict adherence to Benedict’s rule, establishing that the Abbot was an elective office, that his powers were constrained by the Rule itself and that he had an obligation to consult with the community on important decisions. At the same time, monasteries were feudal landlords, alongside with secular noblemen, governing over a wide range of manors. Were those (relatively) more democratic institutions making a difference in the way manors were governed?
To answer this question, we compare economic outcomes of secular and monastic owned manors in medieval England, analysing data from the Domesday Book. Preliminary results, from a regression with more than 700 local district fixed effects and from a diff-in-diff approach that exploits the change in manors ownership that followed the battle of Hastings, show that manors ruled by Benedictine monasteries experienced a significantly larger income growth. Those results are robust to coarsened exact matching.
This is the first paper that identifies the causal effect of being governed by a monastic institution. Moreover, as we compare economic outcomes of entities ruled by institutions with a different degree of “democratization”, this paper addresses the question on the economic effects of democracy at an unprecedented disaggregated level.

Background

The Benedictine order was composed by the set of Monasteries that were committed to follow the Rule wrote by Benedict in the Early middle age. They quickly become the most important monastic order in Europe, at least until the Cistercensian reform of the XII c.
Each individual monastery was an autonomous entity (there was not a “head of the order”) run by an Abbot. He was elected by the monks and his power was not absolute, as it was constrained by the Rule. Moreover, he had an obligation to consult with the monastic community on important decisions.
English Benedictine monasteries grew rapidly and acquired control over a number of manors: partially because of endowments and partially because of direct assignment of the Anglo-saxon kings.
At the same time, the feudal structure of the society was becoming more and more established, with secular landlords having absolute control over various manors (granted by the King, mainly in exchange for military service).
In 1066 William, the Norman duke of Normandy, invaded England and conquered it after the Battle oh Hastings. He replaced the Anglo-saxon elite with his own people and, 20 years later, he commissioned a complete survey of the manors of his reign. The result is known as Domesday book.

Data

We assembled a new dataset merging information from the Domesday Book, the British Monastic Archive and a variety of geographic controls. We have data for around 18000 English manors collected in 1086. We know the manorial income (in 1086 and in 1066), population, geographic location and the name of the landlord pre and post the Norman conquest. Moreover, we can trace whether this landlord was a Monastery, a secular nobleman or a bishop. In the first case, we know the date the Monastery was created and the name of the religious house it belonged to.

Empirical Strategy and Results

In order to isolate the causal effect of being governed by a monastery vis-à-vis a secular landlord, we use a wide range of statistical techniques.
First, we run a fixed effect regression with more than 700 local district fixed effects and geographic controls, using the manorial income growth rate as outcome variable and a dummy for Benedictine-controlled manors as a treatment. Being controlled by a Benedictine monastery is associated with a 7% increase in the growth rate of manorial income, and it is robust to the introduction of different controls, different sets of fixed effects and coarsened exact matching techniques.
Secondly, we exploit the fact that, with the Norman conquest, the pre-existing Anglo-saxon elite was almost entirely replaced by Norman noblemen (and bishops). As a consequence, manors belonging to Anglo-saxon landlords were re-assigned by King William after the Battle of Hastings. Some of them were assigned to new secular landlords, other were assigned to Monasteries.
We focus our attention on the subsample of manors owned by Anglo-saxon landlords that changed ownership with the Norman conquest. We use those assigned to Benedictine Monasteries as “treatment group” and the rest as control group. The outcome variable is manorial income pre and post the Norman conquest. This regression suggest that manors re-assigned to Benedictine monasteries experienced a 6% higher income than those assigned to Norman secular landlords. We perform the same exercise using manors re-assigned to bishops (vis-à-vis secular landlords) and we find a much smaller and only marginally significant effect.

Authors

• Domenico Rossignoli, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

• Federico Trombetta