A Prospering Society extract
Table of Contents
1 The county and beyond
2 Regions and people
3 Landlords and estates
4 Agriculture before the Black Death
5 Agriculture c.1380–c.1440
6 The leasing of the demesnes
7 The demesne lessees
8 Tenant mobility and the decline of serfdom
9 The land market and the village economy
10 Towns and trade
11 The growth of the cloth industry
12 Growth and recession: a chronology
Extract from A Prospering Society
Taken from Chapter One: The county and beyond
The national context Behind the continuities of rural life, late medieval England witnessed immense social and economic change. Much of these developments were driven by population change. Historians may disagree about the precise scale of this fourteenth-century demographic shrinkage,1 but the general trend is clear, and witnessed by records throughout much of the country. The impact of these changes varied; and economic historians, like their political counterparts, have held contrasting pessimistic and optimistic views of the period.2 On a national scale, this seems a period of gloom: of falling production, shrinking settlements and a retreat from arable land, a time of difficulties for the large-scale demesne agriculture that had characterised farming in the thirteenth century. But this gloomy national situation provided opportunities for the generation of greater individual prosperity. Now, the balance between lord and tenant had shifted: the bargaining position of tenant and wage-earner had greatly strengthened, and the period also saw the erosion of the unfree status of villeinage. The improved economic situation of the bulk of the population increased the demand for luxuries or more wasteful forms of agriculture: more meat and ale rather than bread and porridge. The changing circumstances offered the peasantry new opportunities for self-improvement, by acquiring a tenancy or by accumulating several holdings. As people became better off, they became increasingly dependent on manufactured goods and services produced by others. Each individual was now engaged in more commercial transactions and had a wider range of available choices.3
Such social improvements were both general and subject to regional variations. Analysis of the distribution of tax assessments from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth century shows a marked regional change in the rankings of taxation per 100 acres. Some areas, such as the east midlands, Lincolnshire and Norfolk, declined in relative assessed wealth and others, such as the west country, prospered. Wiltshire rose from fourteenth to fifth in the rankings.4 This was to be one of those periods in English history, like the nineteenth century or the interwar years of the following century, when growth and decline were to be immensely regional in character. Much of this regional divergence showed the impact of commercial growth, above all in the cloth industry. This was the period when England shifted from being an exporter of wool (a raw material) to an exporter of cloth (a manufactured product) and began to benefit from the value of the labour inputs that transformed wool to cloth. This industrial growth increased the demands on agriculture for wool, grain, meat and other foodstuffs, as well as boosting the demand for labour and consumer goods. Moreover, the expansion of the cloth industry was not spread evenly throughout the country, but was concentrated in particular areas, above all in the west country, and in Essex and Suffolk, areas which consequently showed the greatest rise in wealth according to the ranking of counties by taxation. The new industries required trade and towns, to sell their manufactured products and to use their surpluses to buy food and consumer goods. Consequently, specialism grew in both town and countryside. Towns might shrink and urban land become vacant as the population contracted, but there were also signs of urban prosperity, redevelopment and new building.
Thus, behind the dramatic falls in both population and gross national product lay a very different England. For those who survived the traumas of plague there were great opportunities for self-enhancement in the countryside. The consequent improved standards of living generated increased demand for particular foods, and more land was available. The cloth industry generated new demands both for labour and for agricultural products. Towns might have shrunk, but they were needed nevertheless, and there was little sign that shrinkage was greater than that of the population as a whole. Wiltshire, like many, but not all, parts of the country, prospered during the later Middle Ages.
1. J. Hatcher, Plague, population and the English economy, 1348–1530 (Basingstoke, 1977); R. Smith, ‘Human resources’, in G. Astill and A. Grant (eds), The countryside of medieval England (Oxford, 1988), 188–212; B.M.S. Campbell, English seigniorial agriculture, 1250–1450 (Cambridge, 2000), 399–410.
2. Compare the views of M.M. Postan, in e.g. ‘The fifteenth century’ in his Essays on medieval agriculture and general problems of the medieval economy (Cambridge, 1973), 41–8; and those of A.R. Bridbury, Economic growth: England in the later Middle Ages (London, 1975).
3. For a recent and positive view of the period see C. Dyer, An age of transition? Economy and society in England in the later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005). Dyer’s arguments are clearly of considerable importance in relation to those put forward here and provide welcome reassurance from a much wider perspective.
4. R.S. Schofield, ‘The geographical distribution of wealth in England, 1334–1649’, EcHR, 2nd series 18 (1965), 483–510.