Urban population in late medieval England: the evidence of the lay subsidies

Was there a growth in the proportion of the population living in England's towns in the later middle ages? Uncertainty about national population trends and about the taxation multipliers needed to arrive at population totals has made it difficult to answer this question. A direct comparison of the proportion of taxpayers that was urban in 1377 and 1524 suggests that the urban share of population was static or may even have declined in this period. However, such decline provides no simple index of urban prosperity or decay: a decline in urbanization could be the product of rural buoyancy rather than of urban recession.     

Patterns of morbidity in late medieval England: a sample from Westminster Abbey

A comparison between secular hospitals and monastic infirmaries introduces a discussion of the duration and seasonality of the illnesses of the monks of Westminster in two periods: 1297/8 to 1354/5 and 1381/2 to 1416/17. A change in the duration of illnesses is related to change in the conventions of treatment after the Black Death of 1348/9. The resemblance between the seasonal pattern of morbidity in this sample and that of mortality among male adults in the early modern period is discussed. It is suggested that the latter pattern may extend into the late middle ages.     

Wool and cloth production in late medieval and early Tudor England

Estimates of wool production based on the exports of wool and cloth, and an assumption that domestic cloth consumption was, optimistically, constant, suggest that wool production fell by almost a third from the early fourteenth to the mid‐fifteenth century, and had not fully recovered even by the mid‐sixteenth century. However, after the Black Death, much of England's arable was converted to pasture, mainly for sheep, and this process accelerated after 1470. These two observations are contradictory. This article provides new numbers of adult sheep based on estimates of domestic cloth consumption, cloth exports, the changing weight of cloth, and fleece yields. The conclusion is that the adult sheep population only declined by around 13 per cent from 1310 to 1440, and had risen dramatically by the mid‐sixteenth century.     

Storage in medieval England: the evidence from purveyance accounts, 1295–13491

As a contribution to the long‐running debate concerning the extent and motivation of medieval storage, this article uses purveyance accounts to examine such facilities in England prior to the Black Death. Three hundred and fifteen cases of predominantly urban storage were recorded for 97 communities for the products of agriculture purchased by the purveyors, mostly threshed grains. When these 315 cases were analysed using an Excel database, it was found that, in contrast to the often magnificent barns on monastic and other lordly estates, this storage was much smaller and informal, often indistinguishable, it seems, from the domestic storage for families themselves. As modest as it was, however, it likely played an important role in the increasing commercialization of medieval England, even perhaps to the extent of making society at the time more susceptible to subsistence crises.     

The expansion of the south‐western fisheries in late medieval England

This article argues that the expansion of marine fishing in south‐western England from the late fourteenth century to the early sixteenth was part of the maritime sector's critical, but unappreciated, contribution to the rising prosperity of the region. Revenues from fishing represented a substantial supplement to the income of the fisher‐farmers who dominated the industry; promoted employment in ancillary industries such as fish curing; improved the seasonal distribution of maritime work; and stimulated capital investment in ships, nets, and other equipment because of the share system that characterized the division of profits within fishing enterprises. In offering what was probably the chief source of employment within the maritime sector, fishing also provided the ‘nursery of seamen’ so prized by the Tudor navy, and built the navigational experience that underpinned later voyages of exploration.     

Institutions and economic performance: evidence from the labour market

We analyse the institutional determinants of economic performance,taking European labour-market institutions as a case in point.European economic growth after the Second World War was basedon Fordist technologies, a setting to which the continent'sinstitutions of solidaristic wage bargaining were ideally suited.They eased distributive conflicts and delivered wage moderation,which in turn supported high investment. The wage compressionthat was a corollary of their operation was of little consequenceso long as the dominant technologies were such that firms couldrely on a relatively homogeneous labour force. But as Fordismgave way to diversified quality production, which relied moreon highly skilled workers, the centralization of bargainingand the compression of wages became impediments rather thanaids to growth. Assuming that growth will rely even more inthe future on rapidly changing, science-based, skilled-labour-intensivetechnologies, countries with centralized labour-market institutionswill have to move still further in the direction of decentralization.Whether Europe in particular can accommodate these demands willhelp to determine whether it is able to re-establish a fullemployment economy in the twenty-first century.     

Wages and prices in England in the later Middle Ages

Abstract

In recent years the economic development of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been the subject of much attention in international historical research. The results of local and of national studies are now for the first time being discussed within their European framework.¹