The Feudal Origins of Manorial Prosperity: Social Interactions in Eleventh-Century England
利用《末日审判书》数据，将十一世纪英格兰封建体系重构为基于共同所有权的网络，发现庄园繁荣与封建同侪的财富紧密相连，揭示了封建协调在降低交易成本中的作用。
Does the prosperity of medieval manors depend on their position in the feudal system? How large are these effects? And what are the underlying economic mechanisms? Using Domesday Book, a unique country-wide survey conducted by William the Conqueror, we reinterpret the eleventh-century English feudal system as a network in which manors are linked to one another based on their common ownership structure. Both a reduced-form and a more structural approach reveal the existence of external economies of scale: manorial prosperity was closely intertwined with the fortune of feudal peers. Our findings quantitatively establish the existence of feudal coordination in High-Medieval agricultural activities, revealing how institutionalized interactions could serve to mitigate transaction costs.