Entrepreneurship in Wiltshire, England, almost 1,000 years ago

In the eleventh-century England, the principal economic activity was agricultural production on manorial estates. The paper exploits the Domesday Survey data, collected in 1086, to investigate the entrepreneurial ability of managers of the main classes of estate, king’s, ecclesiastical and lay estates. Wiltshire data are used to assess whether similar production functions describe production on the three classes of estate. Then, data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods are used to assess whether, after controlling for factors that could have affected efficiency, one class of estate was worked more efficiently. Finally, the Wiltshire results are compared with those from an earlier study of Essex. The Wiltshire analysis confirms the conclusions of the Essex study. In both counties, despite differences in institutional structures, there was little difference between production processes and management performance on the three classes of estate.