Neilson, Nellie

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NEILSON, Nellie

Born 5 April 1873, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 26 May 1947, South Hadley, Massachusetts

Daughter of William G. and Mary Cunningham Neilson

The first woman to serve as president of the American Historical Association (1943), Nellie Neilson was an outstanding authority on medieval English agrarian economy. Her major concern was the influence of local custom on the development of English common law and on the development of the agrarian economy, especially in Kent. Much of Neilson's work was in the form of scholarly articles. A charter member of the Medieval Academy of America, she was for years the sole woman fellow and served eventually as president of the society.

Economic Conditions on the Manors of Ramsey Abbey (1898) was Neilson's doctoral dissertation. In this work, Neilson seeks to give a "full, connected statement" of conditions on a set of church manors during the 12th and 13th centuries. She provides a comparative study of conditions in the two centuries, concluding that there was "an appreciable steady depression in the condition of the villeins" over that period. The decline is particularly evident in the rapid evolution of precariae, or boon work.

Another major work was Customary Rents (1910), one of two monographs in the second volume of Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History. As Paul Vinogradoff noted in his introduction, Neilson approaches her subject as a student of records. She focuses on three sets of obligations of the typical villein: rents arising from manorial customs, rents originally royal in character, and church rents. Both the latter two had become manorialized in a sense, but they still retained something of their public character. For the study of manorial rents, Neilson contended, the best sources are the custumals of the church manors and the records kept by manorial officers.

Neilson traces the complex relationships of five different rents, determined according to origin. As to the royal rents, she notes it is difficult to determine the original principle of assessment, in part because the superimposed manor "confused the old arrangements of the vill." Furthermore, since manorial, royal, and church rents were all received by the lord in one capacity or another, few distinctions were noted in the records. The guides she provides form a basis for classifying and comparing various kinds of rents.

In 1920 Neilson edited A Terrier of Fleet, Lincolnshire, and in 1928 she edited A Cartulary and Terrier of the Priory of Bilsington, Kent. The introductory monograph for the latter was a study of customs of the forests and marshes of Kent, based on extensive manuscript research. Of a quite different nature is Medieval Agrarian Economy (1936). This work, part of the Berkshire Studies in European History, was designed for use in college classes in general European history.

Neilson notices the greatest difference between medieval life and modern life in the prominence of agriculture in daily medieval affairs and the closeness to nature. She deals with three levels of life: the village settlement itself, the people and their conditions of life and interrelationships, and the relation of the village to two outside agencies: the government and the church. The general focus is on the pattern of life customary in England and France during the 12th and 13th centuries, with much briefer reference to conditions in central Europe. Neilson stresses the role of customary law as the moderating force on arbitrary will. As her focus is on the village, her primary concern is how the outside agencies are encountered there.

A thorough and painstaking scholar, Neilson won the respect of medievalists in both Great Britain and the United States. She was an indefatigable researcher, and the variety of approaches she used and the effective comparisons drawn give her work strength and depth. Neilson's skill in combining the roles of scholar and teacher is part of her hallmark.