Before the Black Death: studies in the 'crisis' of the early fourteenth century 9780719039270, 9780719032080

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For the participants of the Anglo-American seminar on the medieval economy and society, Chester, 1989

edited by BRUCE M. S. CAMPBELL

Studies in the ‘crisis’ of the early fourteenth century

(1D) Manchester University Press UD Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 1991 Whilst copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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Reprinted in paperback 1992 British Library cataloguing in publication data Before the Black Death : studies in the “crisis” of the early fourteenth century 1. Great Britain, 1327-1377 I. Campbell, Bruce M. S. 941.037 Library of Congress cataloging in publication data Before the black death: studies in the ‘crisis’ of the early fourteenth century / edited by Bruce M. S. Campbell.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0—7190-3208-3 1. England—Economic conditions—Medieval period, 1066—1485. 2. England—Population—History. 3. Agriculture—Economic aspects—England—

History. 4.England—Industries—History. 1. Campbell. B.M.S. HC254.B44 199]

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Contents

List of figures, appendix and tables page vi Preface Bruce M. S. Campbell, Lecturer in Economic and Social History

at the Queen’s University of Belfast Vii

Abbreviations Viil 1 Introduction: the ‘crisis’ of the early fourteenth century Barbara F. Harvey, Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and

University Lecturer in Medieval History ]

2 Demographic developments in rural England, 1300-48: a survey Richard M. Smith, Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, and

Director of the Wellcome Foundation 25

3. The agrarian economy of south-east England before the Black Death: depressed or buoyant?

Oregon at Eugene 79

Mavis Mate, Professor of Medieval History at the University of

4 Industrial transformations in the north-west European textile trades, c.1290 —c.1340: economic progress or economic crisis? John H. Munro, Professor of Economic History in the

Department of Economics, University of Toronto 110 5 The crown and the English economy, 1290-1348

W. M. Ormrod, British Academy Research Fellow, }

St Catherine’s College, Cambridge 149 6 Perimpetum maris: natural disaster and economic decline in

Cambridge 184

eastern England, 1275—1350 Mark Bailey, Tutorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College,

Index 227

Consolidated bibliography 209

Vv

Figures, appendix and tables

Figures

in the text 78

2.1 Malthusian dynamic equilibrium page 27 3.1 South-east England: location of places mentioned Appendix

4.1 Textile prices in Mediterranean and Polish markets

during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries 143 Tables

c.1310 andc.1370 A9 2.2 Heriots on four English manors, 1307-24 54 2.1 Population estimates for a sample of English manors,

1307-18 54 c.1350 82

2.3 Heriots on certain manors of the bishop of Winchester, 3.1 Agrarian practices followed on some Sussex manors,

3.2A Udimore, Sussex: replacement rates (calculated from

obituaries recorded in court rolls) 99

3.2B Udimore, Sussex: incidence of filial and non-filial heirs

(calculated from obituaries recorded in court rolls) 99 4.1 The cost of Ghent and Wervik woollen broadcloths in sold florins and in daily wages of a master mason in

Bruges, 1368 and 1465, and in Antwerp, 1465 142

5.1 Direct subsidies paid by the laity, 1290-1348 153 5.2 Direct subsidies paid by the clergy, 1290-1340 161

1294-1334 163 5.5 The wool tax of 1341-42 178 1275-1348 190 5.3. Papal taxes on the English clergy received by the crown,

5.4 Royal revenue from the customs, 1307-36 168 6.1 Incidence of recorded sea-floods in eastern England,

Preface

If the historical interest and significance of a period is determined by the number of extreme events which it encompassed, the first half of the fourteenth century must rank high. Between c.1290 and 1350, war, famine, tempest, flood, and pestilence of man and beast occurred with devastating frequency and on an unprecedented scale. The demographic and economic toll which these disasters exacted was considerable and to document and assess this remains a key task of the historian and one of the prime functions of the essays in this volume. But it is also a responsibility of the historian to offer an interpretation of events. Here, the first half of the fourteenth century presents a major challenge, for the events in question were in part exogenous to, and in part endogenous to, the prevailing socio-economic order. Moreover, endo-

genous circumstances (population levels, socio-property relations, technology, etc.) invariably determined the response to exogenous events (flood, drought, tempest, and disease mortality). To evaluate their causal relationship and respective importance is consequently no easy matter. Yet the task is of no

small significance, for the events in question stand at the chronological watershed between the expansive demographic and economic trends of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the contraction and stagnation which

characterised the later fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. Several

historians have thus been tempted to read into the difficulties experienced during the half-century before the Black Death the working-out of deep-rooted processes of historical development. Were the various crises of the early fourteenth century a punishment for over-expansion during the previous two centuries? Was the contraction and stagnation of the later Middle Ages inevitable, irrespective of the advent of plague? These are some of the wider issues which inevitably underpin all discussion of this period and provide the sub-text of most of the essays in this volume.

Some twenty-five years ago, when controversy about the pre-Black Death period first flared, Barbara F. Harvey authored a seminal essay which has

provided a focus for much subsequent thought and discussion. The intervening years have seen the advent of new interpretations and much careful

archival research, in the light of which she now contributes her revised thoughts on the period in an introductory essay specially written for this volume. The other five papers were all originally presented at a residential seminar on the medieval economy and society held at Chester in July 1989 under the auspices of the Historical Geography Research Group of the Institute of British Geographers. That by John H. Munro, the guest speaker at the seminar, serves as a reminder that the ‘crisis’ of the early fourteenth century was a

European as much as an exclusively British phenomenon, hence any truly Vil

PREFACE satisfactory general explanation must hold valid at this wider scale. His paper offers one such explanation which will provide food for thought and discussion for some time to come. The remaining four papers — by Richard Smith, Mavis Mate, W. M. Ormrod, and Mark Bailey — formed the basis of a wide-ranging discussion symposium (chaired by Barbara Harvey) specifically devoted to this enigmatic and controversial period. They deal respectively with population, agriculture, taxation, and the effects of climatic change, reviewing existing

knowledge and offering the results of fresh research. None claims to be definitive, as much archival research remains to be done, but if the volume asa whole helps to focus and motivate further historical investigation it will have served its purpose well. Iam grateful to all the contributors for the co-operation which they have given at every stage in the preparation of this volume for publication. At an early stage Charles Withers acted as broker and negotiated the contract with Manchester University Press, from whose staff I have reéeived every possible

assistance. Valerie Fawcett rendered invaluable practical help with wordprocessing, Ian Alexander drew Figure 3.1, and the British Academy funded John Munro’s attendance at the Chester Seminar. Above all, lam grateful to the

Committee of the Historical Geography Research Group for its continued support of the triennial series of seminars which have provided sucha welcome fillip to research into this most fascinating and formative period and without which this volume would not have been possible. Bruce M. S. Campbell Easter Monday, 1990

Abbreviations

BL British Library

CCR Calendar of Close Rolls CFR Calendar of Fine Rolls CIM Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls CTR Calendar of Treaty Rolls EcHR Economic History Review, 2nd series IESRO _ Ipswich and East Suffolk Record Office Ing. Non. Inqutsitiones Nonarum

PRO Public Record Office VCH Victoria County History Vili

BARBARA F. HARVEY

Introduction: the ‘crisis’ of the early fourteenth

century’ | The problem

It is widely agreed that Western Europe experienced a crisis of a dramatic kind in the first half of the fourteenth century. Yet still, fifty

years and more since such a crisis took shape in the writings of H. Pirenne, M. Bloch and W. Abel, the evidence in the case is not as plentiful or as conclusive as we could wish, and the possibility that the

discovery of a little more will alter perspectives is still quite strong. | In modern historical writing, the word ‘crisis’ often signifies nothing more precise than a general malaise in the range of human experience that happens to be under consideration. A crisis in this sense of the word can last a very long time, and several lasting a century and more have now been admitted to the canon of historical studies. Applied to the early fourteenth century, however, the word retains the specific sense of turning-point or ‘conjuncture’ — the convergence of trends to

produce a new situation. Rather a long ‘early fourteenth century’ is normally envisaged, beginning not later than c.1290 and extending to the very eve of the Black Death of 1347-50. In this period, it is argued,

the expansive economic trends of the earlier Middle Ages were first halted and then put into reverse. The earlier expansion expresses itself in rising rents and prices, the extension of the area under cultivation, the growth of towns and industries — especially the textile industry — and a rise in population on a dramatic scale; the contraction after 1300, in opposite symptoms — falling rents and prices, a reduction in the area

under cultivation, empty tenements in towns and falling demand in industry. As the economy contracted, so did population begin to 1 Tam greatly indebted to Dr Bruce Campbell and Dr Richard Smith for their comments

on a draft of this introduction. My debt to many of the participants in the Chester Symposium will be clear to those present. However, I must acknowledge a particular debt to Dr E. A. Wrigley. 1

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

decline. But the decline in population was at first slower than that in the economy, and in consequence standards of living, as measured by per capita incomes, declined. Eventually, however, the latter began to rise: as the recession tightened its grip, ordinary people began to do relatively well. Far different was the experience of landlords, who saw their rents fall with the fall in the demand for land. Thus a ‘feudal crisis’ was a concomitant of the crisis in the economy.”

All this happened, it is suggested, before the Black Death of 1347-50 and the catastrophic mortality of those years. This point, on

| the face of it so simple, takes us to the very roots of historical explanation in this fundamentally important area of studies, for bubonic plague, which principally occasioned the mortality of 1347-50, was a new disease, unknown in the West for several hundred years previously, if not longer. It exemplifies all those factors bearing

on the economic life of the period which originated outside the economic system itself. Climatic change, well represented in this volume, is a factor of this kind.’ An earlier generation of historians described these as the fortuitous factors in economic life. Today they are commonly described as exogenous, and those factors influencing

economic life but originating within the economic system — for example, levels of technology, investment, and taxation — are the so-called endogenous factors. Whatever the labelling system in use, to 2 A bare summary of a complex thesis. For the foundations, laid in the 1930s, see H. Pirenne, ‘Le Mouvement économique et social’, in H. Pirenne, G. Cohen, and H. Focillon, eds., La Civilisation Occidentale au Moyen Age du XIe au Milieu du XVe Siécle, (G. Glotz, ed., Histoire Générale: Histoire du Moyen Age, VIII, Paris, 1933), pp.

, 165-9, (reprinted in Pirenne, Histoire Economique et Sociale du Moyen Age, Paris,

1969, pp. 165—9, and in other editions); W. Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur in Mitteleuropa vom 13. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1935, pp. 7 ff., or 3rd edn., Berlin, 1978, trans. O. Ordish, under the title Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, London, 1980, pp. 17 /f; M. Bloch, Les Caracteres Originaux de l’Histoire Rurale Francaise, Oslo, 1931, chaps. 3-4, or 2nd edn., Paris, 1955, I, trans. J. Sondheimer, under the title French Rural History: an Essay on its Basic Characteristics, London, 1966, chaps. 3-4. For an influential essay characterising the situation in the early fourteenth century as ‘stagnation’, see E. Perroy, ‘Al’origine d’une économie contractée: les crises du xiv* siécle’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, IV, 1949, pp. 167-82; reprinted

in translation as ‘At the origin of a contracted economy: the crises of the 14th century’, in R. Cameron, ed., Essays in French Economic History, Homewood, Illinois, 1970, pp. 91-105. For the historiography of the early fourteenth-century crisis in England, see N. Hybel, Crisis or Change: the Concept of Crisis in the Light of

, Agrarian Structural Reorganization in Late Medieval England, Aarhus, 1989, pp. 138. 7. 3 Below, pp. 90-2, 100, 185-91.

2

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY determine the importance of the exogenous factors in relation to others

is the most important task facing the historian of this sequence of events.

Among all the factors at work, one, it is commonly agreed, was primary or fundamental. There were, of course, secondary factors, not everywhere the same, and trigger mechanisms which operated here

early, here late. But it has been common ground between many participants in the debate that, among all the variables in the situation,

one holds the key and serves to define the underlying nature of the crisis. The latter has, in fact, a general explanation. Moreover, this all-important variable fulfilled that role in economic life over a much

longer time-span than the early fourteenth century.’ If, therefore, we could but identify this factor, we might understand why pre-industrial

societies in a more general sense have lacked a capacity for self-

sustaining growth. |

Belief in an all-important primary factor is quite essential to the conception of the crisis as a turning-point of secular significance in economic life. If we are to conclude that such a point was rounded in the

early fourteenth century, we must be able to think of that century as a coherent period in economic history and identify developments in the second half as the natural sequel to developments in the first half: they must not appear to be a separate episode which might have assumed a quite different form but for the Black Death. But a century divided by a demographic disaster of the order of magnitude of the Black Death is not easily seen as a single period. An appeal to the existence of a primary factor in the changes of the opening decades overcomes this difficulty,

for the factor normally envisaged is actually a fatal flaw in the socio-

economic conditions created in the earlier centuries of expansion. Whatever fresh developments should occur in the years around 1350 or later, the basic mould of economic life, given this flaw, was already set, and not to be altered by subsequent events. It is not by chance that the more tentative the belief of historians in such a flaw, the more hesitant has been their perception that the break in economic development is in fact to be placed in the early decades of the fourteenth century.° 4 An underlying assumption of, for example, much of the so-called ‘Brenner debate’: see T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge, 1985, passim. > See, for example, L. Genicot, ‘Crisis: from the Middle Ages to Modern Times’, in M. M. Postan, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 1, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, 2nd edn., Cambridge, 1966, pp. 660 7.

3

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

The Postan thesis What, then, was the all-important factor, the thread holding everything together? All recent work on this subject has started from the seminal writings of M. M. Postan on the period. The crisis, Postan believed, was

essentially in agrarian production, but not the less universal in its consequences for that reason, since the vast majority of the population of Western Europe at this time were peasants. His thesis, which found the key to the situation in the interaction between population change

and economic resources in the years before and after 1300, may be summarised in the following way.°

The economic expansion of the earlier Middle Ages was accompanied by relatively little qualitative change in the economy or technological improvement. In the absence of significant technological change, expansion was made possible by a rise in population. Yet the very conditions of this rise made economic decline inevitable later. ‘Expansion’, in fact, often meant little more than the extension of the area under cultivation by existing methods. The colonising movement brought land under cultivation roughly in its order of merit for arable cultivation, the best lands first, the worst, described as ‘marginal lands’, last. By the second half of the thirteenth century, if not earlier, the new assarts were of an absolutely inferior kind, and they quickly failed. The

failures are betrayed in our sources by the term ferra frisca, ‘uncultivated land’. Population, however, was slow to respond. The proliferation of small holdings which were inadequate for the support of

a household, the rise of rents to levels which the tenants in question could not possibly afford, and an increase in the number of the landless — all these circumstances point to over-population and a fall in stan-

dards of living in consequence. As standards of living fell, mortality rates rose, and by the early fourteenth century these were high enough to determine the overall trend in population. The Great Famine of the ° M. M. Postan, ‘Some economic evidence of declining population in the later Middle

Ages’, EcHR, tI, 1949-50, pp. 221-46 (reprinted as ‘Some agrarian evidence of declining population in the later Middle Ages’, in idem, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy, Cambridge, 1973, pp.

186-213); idem, ‘Note’, in EcHR, XII, 1959-60, pp. 77-82; idem, The Medieval Economy and Society, London, 1972, especially pp. 31-9; with J. Z. Titow, ‘Heriots and prices on Winchester manors’, FcHR, XI, 1958-9, pp. 392-417 (reprinted in Postan, Essays, pp. 150-85); with J. Hatcher, ‘Agrarian class structure and economic

development in pre-industrial Europe: population and class relations in feudal society’, Past and Present, LXXVIII, 1978, pp. 24—37 (reprinted in Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, pp. 64-78).

4

, THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY years 1315-17 marked, not a fluctuation in demographic history of a familiar, though unusually severe kind, but the turning-point between the early medieval rise in population and the late medieval decline. The |

equilibrium which had once existed between population and the economy was shattered well before the Black Death, and the explanation is to be found within the economic system: the search for it, as Postan wrote in a memorable passage, leads us to ‘the essential processes of a society held in by physical, or if the term is used in a broad sense, Malthusian checks’.’ On this interpretation of developments, the capacity for economic growth in the Middle Ages was always strictly limited, and the behaviour

of population at critical junctures is explained by the behaviour of the

economy itself. It is in these senses that Postan’s thesis is neoMalthusian. A decline in population, beginning c.1300, is essential to

the argument, since it demonstrates the degree of over-population existing at the time: given the latter, a rise in mortality — in Malthusian terms, the positive check — was necessary, and it now took effect. The

failure of the marginal lands, the absolutely poor assarts of the thirteenth century, and the decline of arable yields to which this and other evidence may seem to point are also indispensable to the argument, for

these circumstances ensured that the decline in agrarian production was, for the foreseeable future, irreversible. They explain why the decline in population was long-lasting and how it is that we can regard the decline occurring before the advent of plague in the late 1340s and that occurring after that date as, in the deepest sense, a single movement. How well has this thesis withstood the thirty years and more of

further debate that it has inspired? In the course of this period, new kinds of evidence have become accessible in the study of population change, and this circumstance has affected the discussion in a funda-

mental way. :

Down to the 1960s, population change and economic change were normally studied in the same kinds of evidence, for population studies

themselves depended for nearly all their illumination on emissions from economic data, and principally from the movement of wages, prices, and rents. In this phase of studies, when the evidence was largely

indirect, broad trends of growth or decline in population could be ” Postan, Essays, p. 213. The proto study of the waste lands in medieval Europe is: W. Abel, Die Wiistungen des Ausgehenden Mittelalters, 2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1955.

5

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH | considered, but the processes underlying these were elusive: for these, direct evidence of the life-cycle of identifiable men and women, and of sroups, is needed. Moreover, in the Middle Ages, wages, prices, and rents often betray the influence of the social system as clearly as that of changes in supply and demand. For this reason they can be a fallible

guide to population change, particularly over short periods of time. Except in one notable study, to be considered shortly, Postan relied on

economic evidence in his analysis of population trends, though he regretted the necessity, as it then appeared, of doing so.°

Since the 1960s, the study of changes in population has been transformed by the opening up of demographic evidence in the strict

sense of the term. This evidence relates to individuals at stated moments: on marriage, when transacting land in the manorial court, when paying taxes to any of the authorities, whether local or national, which were now competent to levy such imposts, and, finally, at death. In ways described by Richard Smith below, this evidence can be made to

yield information relating, not only to the rate of population change in the particular group under scrutiny, but also to the processes which explain such change: fertility, mortality, and migration.” The use of such evidence has introduced a new precision into studies of the rate of population change itself and opened up the possibility that the relatively short periods where economic evidence is at its most fallible can be accurately observed. Demographic studies published since c.1960 lend considerable support to Postan’s belief that population declined in many parts of

Western Europe in the early fourteenth century. They are far from suggesting that this trend was universal — far, too, from being, as yet, sufficiently numerous for confident generalisations to be drawn — but

they do suggest that decline was common and may have been the prevailing trend. Thus a declining or sagging trend can be observed in urban and rural settlements alike, and in the north of Europe as well as

the south. It has been identified in, for example, urban and rural Tuscany, in Normandy, and in Provence.'? Where a rise is still reported 8 Postan, Essays, p. 188. For the exception, see below, pp. 8-9. ° Below, pp. 37-76. '° D. Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: the Social History of an Italian Town, 1200-1430, New Haven and London, 1967, pp. 64-6; idem and C. Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families: a Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427, New Haven and London, 1985, pp. 62-3; E. Baratier, La Démographie provencale du XIIle au

6

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY after 1300, the rate was often slower than in the closing decades of the thirteenth century.'! In some of the places where population was still growing after 1300 — as, for example, Norwich —the growth may have owed more to immigration than to natural increase.’ Was there, as Postan also believed, a long-term rise in mortality

rates in the same period? Or was the main regulator of population change at this time fertility? In Malthusian terms, did the positive check operate, or the preventive one? This question is profoundly important,

for it concerns the extent to which the changes which occurred were foreseen and desired at the time. A rise in mortality rates would imply involuntary change, that could not be avoided by those most intimately involved, but only endured. If, however, fertility rates fell, we must, almost certainly, envisage an underlying change in marriage practice. The latter implies the exercise of foresight, and in general voluntary,

rather than involuntary, change.’’ In the kinds of societies under XVIe Siécle, Paris, 1961, pp. 80-1 (recording an earlier, and more pronounced decline

in upper Provence than in the lower Provence); G. Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern Normandy, c.1300—1550, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 50-3. (For the first edition of the last of these studies, see Bois, Crise du Féodalisme, Paris, 1976.) For the falling trend at Redgrave and Rickinghall and the rising trend at Coltishall — all three East Anglian settlements — see below, pp. 44—5, and references given there. Cf. B. F. Harvey, ‘The population trend in England between 1300 and 1348’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XVI, 1966, pp. 23-42. The weight of the evidence now seems to me to point to a different conclusion on the population trend in the early fourteenth century from that reached on the basis of economic evidence in this paper. 1! Z. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270-1400, Cambridge, 1980, p. 34 (table 4). On the Halesowen data see also L. R. Poos and R. M. Smith, ‘ “Legal Windows onto Historical

Populations”? recent research on demography and the manor court in medieval England’, Law and History Review, Il, 1984, pp. 138-42.

2 E. Rutledge, ‘Immigration and population growth in early fourteenth-century Norwich: evidence from the tithing roll’, Urban History Yearbook 1988, pp. 22-7. Cf.

Taunton, where the remarkable growth of population in the thirteenth century, as

evinced by payments of the hundred-penny fine, may to some extent reflect immigration, since Taunton, a discrete manor, had a small town at its centre and one or two of its members may have possessed suburban characteristics. However, the hundred-penny totals themselves relate to the manor excluding the town. See T. J. Hunt, ed., The Medieval Customs of the Manors of Taunton and Bradford on Tone,

Somerset Record Society, LXVI, 1962, pp. xi, 3-28, and note in particular the suggestive name of the tithing extra portam. For the hundred-penny payments, see J. Z. Titow, ‘Some evidence of the thirteenth-century population increase’, EcHR, XIV, 1961-2, pp. 218-24. See also below, pp. 38-9. 3 T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 6th edn., 2 vols., London,

1826, I, pp. 12-14, 397-405; ibid., II, pp. 239-41. Cf. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1st edn., London, 1798, pp. 61-70.

7

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

consideration, mortality, being so often brought about by epidemic

| disease, could affect the demographic situation very quickly. Fertility operated, in general, less dramatically, and therefore more slowly. It follows, therefore, that the speed of demographic change at this time is

also involved in the choice between the preventive check and the positive check.

In arguing for a rise in mortality rates, Postan relied heavily on one set of data, namely payment of the tax known as heriot on five manors belonging to the see of Winchester. On these manors, some tenants, or their families, were required to hand over an animal when the tax was due, but others paid in cash. In a famous essay, Postan and J. Z. Titow analysed these payments over a period of almost exactly a century: from 1245 to 1348. The statistical conclusions which they derived from the data have been substantially modified by G. Ohlin. However, if the payments in question were indeed death duties, the corrected figures, like the original ones, point to a rise in mortality rates

after 1300: in the period 1245—99, the crude death rate was, on this assumption, 27 per 1000 per annum; but between 1300 and 1348, it was

as high as 50 per 1000 per annum.’° Mortality was, it appears, intimately related to the price of grain and tended to peak in the years of scarcity. Moreover, in these years tenants paying money heriots, whom Postan and Titow identified with smallholders, and therefore with the poor, suffered more than others.

Postan and Titow did not, in fact, assume that heriot on the Winchester manors was invariably a death duty — a tax payable only on the death of a customary tenant. It was always entirely clear from the

evidence that some such payments were made in the course of land transactions inter vivos. They did assume, however, that heriots were

normally death duties and that they were paid in the case of land transactions inter vivos only if the vendor of the land was old — that is, if

in the natural course of events he would soon have paid a heriot anyhow.?° * Cf. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction, London, 1981, pp. 229-36. 15 G. Ohlin, ‘No safety in numbers: some pitfalls of historical statistics’, in H. Rosovsky, ed., Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gerschenkron,

New York, 1966, pp. 84-9 (reprinted in R. Floud, ed., Essays in Quantitative Economic History, Oxford, 1974, pp. 73-7). Cf. Postan and Titow, ‘Heriots and prices’, pp. 399-400 (pp. 159-61 in Postan, Essays). © Postan, Essays, pp. 152-7.

8

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY As far as we know, a convention whereby the elderly, but nobody else, paid heriots on selling land would have been very unusual indeed,

if not unique, in the manorial customs of the period, and, it may be suggested, a strange convention for a lord of this period to permit. Ina society where many people died, not in old age, of the degenerative diseases, but of epidemic disease in the prime of life, it would have been very hard for manorial officials to predict who, among the tenant body, would die shortly and who would not. If, on the other hand, heriots were

normally payable on the Winchester manors on all land transactions inter vivos —and, of course, on the death of a tenant dying in occupation of land —the data would show that land transactions as well as mortality peaked during subsistence crises. Several studies of the land market in England undertaken since the publication of Postan’s and Titow’s essay point to this correlation between intensive periods for the transacting of land and subsistence crises.’’ This correlation is intrinsically important

and to be taken into account in any analysis of economic conditions at

this time. Yet the data to which it relates do not provide us with mortality rates for the period in question.

Other difficulties, too, in addition to that referred to in this paragraph, lie in the way of accepting the conclusions which Postan and

Titow derived from the Winchester data, and these are considered in Richard Smith’s essay below.’® At present, the mechanism of change

which brought about a widespread fall in population in the early fourteenth century is an open question. Equally, the underlying reasons for the decline in population are

uncertain. Postan believed that the decline was explained by soil exhaustion on the marginal lands, the inferior lands which were colonised late and failed quickly, and it was suggested above that this belief is essential to his thesis as a whole.'? However, the marginal lands have proved scarcely capable of sustaining the role assigned to them.

,9

Little that is known about colonisation in early medieval Europe

suggests a close correlation between the chronology of this movement 1” B. M. S. Campbell, ‘Population pressure, inheritance and the land market in a fourteenth-century peasant community’, in R. M. Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 110-117, figure 2.4; R. M. Smith, ‘Families and their land in an area of partible inheritance: Redgrave, Suffolk, 1260-1320’, in idem, Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, pp. 151-2; Z. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270-1400, Cambridge, 1980, p. 37, table 5. 18 Below, pp. 57-8.

19 P5.

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

and type of soil or suitability for arable cultivation. On the contrary, distance from the centre of operations, or from the market, probably did

as much as the intrinsic quality of the soil to influence the colonist’s choice.”° In any case, the fertility of soils is not a given and exhaustible

quantum, as the thesis of soil exhaustion implies, but a variable dependent on many other factors, including inputs of labour, rotation courses, and climate. The notoriously low and, in some places, falling yields obtained on some manorial demesnes in the years around 1300 may have a correspondingly complex explanation.*! As for the term terra frisca —‘uncultivated land’ — occurring in sources of this period, it

records only the bare fact that the land in question was not currently under the plough and does nothing to explain this circumstance. The explanation may be, not that the soil in question was ‘exhausted’, but that changes in the market made other uses more profitable. Nearly all recent work on changes in land-use and the pattern of

settlement in this and later periods has pointed to the primacy of regional and local factors and the inadequacy of general explanations. On the regional and local basis, it has tended to loosen the ties so often perceived in the pioneering days of these studies between changes of these kinds and population change. The ‘waste lands’, for example, already present in north-west Germany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were not, it appears, suffering from soil exhaustion. They resulted from two complementary developments: afforestation by lords who banished the existing occupiers from the lands in question; and the rearrangement of settlements which became necessary as the woodpasture economy hitherto practised by the peasants of the region gave way to cooperative forms of arable husbandry.” In England, as C. Dyer 20 M. Bailey, ‘The concept of the margin in the medieval English economy’, EcHR, XLII,

1989, pp. 1-17; idem, A Marginal Economy? East-Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 1-25. *! Cf. J. Z. Titow, Winchester Yields: A Study in Medieval Agricultural Productivity,

Cambridge, 1972, p. 12-24; D. L. Farmer, ‘Grain yields on Westminster Abbey Manors, 1271-1410’, Canadian Journal of History, XVII, 1983, pp. 335-6; idem, ‘Prices and wages: statistical appendix’, in H. E. Hallam, ed., The Agrarian History of

England and Wales, II, 1042-1350, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 796-8. For the critical difference between the yield-ratio method of calculating yields and calculation of yields per acre, see B. M.S. Campbell, ‘Arable productivity in medieval England: some evidence from Norfolk’, Journal of Economic History, XLII, 1983, pp. 379-404.

22 A. Timm, Die Waldnutzung in Nordwestdeutschland im Spiegel der Weisttimer: Einleitende Untersuchungen tiber die Umgestaltung des Stadt — Land-Verhaltnisses im Spdatmittelalter, Cologne, 1960, pp. 7 /f.; cited in G. Duby, Hommes et Structures du Moyen Age, Paris, 1973, pp. 317-18.

10

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY

has pointed out, soils that were difficult to cultivate were not, in seneral, affected earlier than easy soils by the late medieval retreat of cultivation and settlement: both were affected concurrently.”° ‘Great commerce’ and the monetary thesis In Postan’s view, agriculture was not only the source of livelihood of most of the inhabitants of medieval Europe —an incontrovertible fact — but also —and this is not quite the same thing — the dominant sector of

the economy. His understanding of the crisis of the early fourteenth century as acrisis in agrarian production followed naturally from these

premisses. He wrote in the first instance to refute an existing interpretation of the late medieval recession which was opposed at every vital

point to his own and which, in particular, identified changes in the market as the fundamentally important factor. In the 1970s and 1980s, the work of J. Day, N. J. Mayhew, and J. H. Munro — to mention only three names ina galaxy — has made it necessary to reconsider this older body of ideas.”4

In the Middle Ages, as at the present day, marketing was conducted at several different levels. We must envisage for the moment the

highest, exemplified in long-distance trade, large-scale transactions, and the monetary, credit, and exchange systems which alone made business on this scale possible —in a phrase, we must envisage Pirenne’s

‘Sreat commerce’. Those who appeal to the importance of this market do not question the fact that the vast majority of the population of late

medieval Europe were peasants. They argue that, even so, rural influences were not dominant in economic life: for the dominant influences we must look to the specialised sectors just mentioned, and 23 C. Dyer, ‘ “The retreat from marginal land”: the growth and decline of medieval rural settlements’, in M. Aston, D. Austin and C. Dyer, eds., The Rural Settlements of Medieval England, Oxford, 1989, pp. 48-57. 24 J. Day, The Medieval Market Economy, Oxford, 1987, especially pp. 185-218; J. H.

, 11 Munro, ‘Monetary contraction and industrial change in the late-medieval Low Countries, 1335-1500’, in N. J. Mayhew, ed., Coinage in the Low Countries (880-1500), British Archaeological Reports, International Series, LIV, 1979, pp. 95-161; N. J. Mayhew, ‘Numismatic evidence and falling prices in the fourteenth

century’, EcHR, XXVII, 1974, pp. 1-15; idem, ‘Money and prices in England from Henry II to Edward III’, Agricultural History Review, XXXV, 1987, especially pp. 126-132. Among earlier contributions, W. C. Robinson, ‘Money, population and economic change in late medieval Europe’, EcHR, XII, 1959-60, pp. 63-76, provoked a rejoinder from Postan in which he expounded the critical importance, in his view, of the colonisation of marginal lands in the thirteenth century (’Note’, pp. 77-82).

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH ultimately to the supply of circulating medium. This being so, it is easy to see why the historians in question are commonly known as ‘monetarists’. In fact they are no more guilty of thinking only of money as the explanation of economic change than ‘neo-Malthusians’ are of thinking

only of population. But the money supply is the bed-rock of their argument, and in this sense they are appropriately described as ‘monetarists’. In the later Middle Ages, so the argument runs, ‘great commerce’ proved incapable of sustaining the levels of production which, in an earlier period, it had been instrumental in calling into existence. There ensued a long-term depression, evinced and, to a large extent, brought about by a fall in prices. Behind the latter was a decline in Europe’s supplies of precious metals, and therefore — since precious metal was a component of every circulating medium — of money. Nevertheless, the

depression began, not in the early fourteenth century, but c.1370: earlier developments are to be interpreted as a short-term crisis, largely attributable to the effects of famine or war, if not both. Here, then, from the monetarists, is a suggestion that the crisis of the early fourteenth

century amounted to something much less than a turning-point of secular significance.

The rural market The market where the merchant elite of medieval Europe watched the movement of prices and the supply of bullion had several poor relations, and these included the rural system of exchanges. The rural market was a small-scale affair, comprising the precarious enterprises of countless petty traders, operating in villages and small towns that were themselves little more than villages. As an English historian may say, this was the market in Britnell and Hilton country.”° Yet despite the fact that everything was on a small scale, this market now influenced every 2° R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: the West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century, 2nd edn., Cambridge, 1983, chap. 7; idem, ‘Lords burgesses and hucksters’, Past and Present, XCVII, 1982, pp. 3—15; idem, ‘Small town society in England before

the Black Death’, Past and Present, CV, 1984, pp. 53-78; R. H. Britnell, ‘The proliferation of markets in England, 1200-1349’, EcHR, XXXIV, 1981, pp. 209-21; G. Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, Columbia and London, 1968, pp. 126-65 is fundamental. For some possible definitions of ‘market’, see R. Hodges, Primitive and Peasant Markets, Oxford, 1983, passim; and for an exploration

of the consumer market in the countryside, a neglected topic, see C. Dyer, ‘The consumer and the market in the later Middle Ages’, EcHR, XLII, 1989, pp. 305-27.

12

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY

part of the peasant economy. Its essential feature was not the use of money, for at the peasant base of society, as at higher levels, it was perfectly possible to devise mechanisms of exchange that avoided the use of circulating medium.”° The essential feature was the acceptance of competition where previously family or lord, and sometimes both acting together, had controlled arrangements. Competition flourished

best in a cash economy, and the remarkable progress of the latter in rural society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may be regarded as evidence that the former was also present or in the offing. Circa 1300, a competitive market existed in land, labour, and produce, although the degree of its development varied regionally.

If ‘great commerce’ has long claimed a place in discussion of trends in the early fourteenth century, the rural market has never received quite the attention it deserves. Too often, even at the present day, when the pervasive character of the institution is perfectly obvious,

discussion is influenced at this point by an earlier tradition which considered one aspect of the cash economy to the virtual exclusion of others. This favoured topic was the commutation of labour services into money rents — the agreement on the part of lords and their servile tenants to use the latter instead of the former.” It is hard to think of any development in the medieval countryside which was more important than this change, unless it was the concurrent decision to replace the renders in kind, formerly owing by peasants to their lords, by money

payments. Together, these two changes revolutionised relations between lords and their tenants and much else beside. But over large areas of Western Europe the substantive developments occurred long before 1300. Thus, in both France and England money rents had in seneral triumphed over labour dues and renders in kind by the thirteenth century, and in many places by the twelfth.2° Narrowed in this 2° C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c.1200—1520, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 184-7. 27 For a recent example, see R. Brenner, in Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, p. 25. However, Brenner is far from seeing labour dues as the quintessential feature of serfdom itself. 28 M. Bloch, French Rural History, chap. 3; E. A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century, Oxford, 1956, pp. 156-63, 178—96. For the importance of money rents in the Ile de France —a region to which Bloch devoted _ considerable attention — see G. Fourquin, Les Campagnes de la Région Parisienne a la Fin du Moyen Age, Paris, 1964, chap. 3; and on labour services there, ‘bid., p. 188

aos the suggestion that labour services — in England often commuted in the twelfth

13

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

way, the market inevitably seems unimportant in the making of the crisis of the early fourteenth century, since the relevant changes were too far in the past to have influenced the turn of events in the critical decades. Study of the produce market or the land market, but especially the

latter, often points to a very different conclusion, and we sometimes find here the sense of gathering crisis that is conspicuously absent from the history of money rents and labour services in this period. Examples

drawn from the land market in East Anglia will illustrate this point. They relate to Coltishall, in Norfolk, and Redgrave, in Suffolk.7”

By 1300, in these places, the entire pattern of landholding was determined in the market and not by family or feudal regulation, and the new arrangements were proving to be a slippery slope, taking many of those who ventured on it to the poverty line and beyond. Although,

even in a normal year, turnover was brisk in these villages, the more

intensive times for the transacting of land were the years of poor harvests and high grain prices. The typical seller at such times was a small peasant seeking a measure of liquidity to tide him over the crisis. But he purchased liquidity at the expense of the long-term viability of his holding as an adequate means of livelihood for a household. Moreover, if the sellers were small people, the buyers were often smaller.

Hence the remarkable fact that at Redgrave about 44 per cent of the holdings now in existence, and at Coltishall a larger percentage, were probably below two acres in size.°? In both villages many who engaged in the land market must have depended for a competent livelihood on additional, and always precarious, earnings in by-employment. Clearly, . although prudential checks probably existed, making the possession of land a condition of marriage and of attaining the status of independent householder, the standards of living which the former were designed to century — were used again in preference to money rent in the thirteenth century, see M. Postan, ‘The chronology of labour services’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, XX, 1937, pp. 186-9 (reprinted in W. E. Minchinton, ed., Essays in Agrarian History, 1, Newton Abbot, 1968, pp. 86-8; and Postan, Essays, pp. 101-3). Although the progress of commutation was probably checked in the early thirteenth century, little of the extant evidence suggests that services formerly commuted were

now reimposed. For comment see P. D. A. Harvey, ‘The English inflation of 1180-1220’, Past and Present, LXI, 1973, pp. 20-1. 2° Campbell, ‘Population pressure’, pp. 87-134; Smith, ‘Families and their land’, pp. 135—95. See also below, pp. 44-5, 55-6, 76. 3° Smith, ‘Families and their land’, pp. 104-5, 143. However, some peasants at Coltishall

were able to build up relatively large holdings in the land market there. Cf. Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 124.

14

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY

protect were, in material terms, so modest as to be in many cases indistinguishable from the bread-line. A market economy and a subsistence level of production — this could be a most unfortunate combination, and those who lived with it lived dangerously.*! Moreover, the dangers were greater at the end of the thirteenth century than

at the beginning, for a village land market capable of affecting the distribution of land in a radical way was probably not in existence before 1200, if as early.”

If, however, in East Anglia the land market now tended to fragment holdings, in some other parts of England it seems to have been still at an earlier stage of development and to have operated quite differently. E. King’s study of the land market on manors belonging to Peterborough Abbey, in Northamptonshire, reveals societies in which feudal authority and family sentiment actually combined to preserve customary holdings from fragmentation and opened only a periphery of free land to the market.*° In general, our sources convey a very clear sense of the pervasive influence of the environment on the degree of development of the village land market. Family and feudal control over land transactions tended to be weak where the dependence of livelihoods on arable husbandry was itself relatively weak, but strong where

this dependence was also strong. If livelihoods eked out in byemployment were always precarious, the danger was very unevenly 5! R. Fossier, trans. J. Vale, Peasant Life in the Medieval West, Oxford, 1988, pp. 188-9.

For some speculative remarks on peasant involvement in the grain market see, Kosminsky, Studies in Agrarian History, pp. 323-8. Kosminsky neglected sources of cash income other than sales of produce; but the problem which he raised — how did peasants obtain the cash needed for money rents? — is still unresolved. For soundings,

see Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 109-118. E. Clark, ‘Debt litigation in a late medieval English vill’, in J. A. Raftis, ed., Pathways to Medieval Peasants, Toronto,

1981, pp. 247-79, relates to a later period, but the indebtedness of peasants which underlies the cases in this article was probably as old as the cash economy itself. 32 P_R. Hyams, ‘The origins of a peasant land market in England’, EcHR, XXIII, 1970, pp. 18-31; cf. Harvey, ‘Inflation of 1180-1220’, p. 19. 33 EF. King, Peterborough Abbey, 1086-1310, Cambridge, 1973, pp. 123-5; cf. Smith, Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, pp. 13—16. For the classic exposition of the land market in medieval England as a primitive institution serving to distribute land between ‘natural sellers’ and ‘natural buyers’ according to the dictates of the family life-cycle, see M. M. Postan, ‘The charters of the villeins’, in idem and C. N. L. Brooke, eds., Carte

Nativorum: A Peterborough Abbey Cartulary of the Fourteenth Century, Northamptonshire Record Society, XX, 1960, pp. xxviii-lx (reprinted in Postan, Essays, pp. 107-149). Cf. Postan, Economy and Society, p. 33. For the peasant land market, see also P. D. A. Harvey, ed., The Peasant Land Market in Medieval England, Oxford, 1984, passim; and for a telling illustration of the deceptive character of the

15

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

distributed in rural society. The active land market at Redgrave, for example, had been nurtured in an environment possessing above average resources of pasture, fen and woodland, and hospitable towards a whole range of by-employments which would have been unheard of in

many other parts of the country.” The Brenner thesis Postan’s most persistent critics have seen the early fourteenth century

through Marxist eyes. Though sharing his belief that this period | experienced a profound crisis, they have seen the difficulties in agrarian

production to which he gave pride of place as mere symptoms of a fundamental malaise in the social system itself. Among these social, as distinct from economic, interpretations of the crisis, R. Brenner’s is distinguished by its emphasis on the supreme importance of one feature of the medieval social system — the structure of property rights.°> Still, more than a decade after the publication of the first of the two articles in

which Brenner developed this theme, the seam of enquiry that he opened up has not yet been exhausted. Brenner’s thesis is part of a wide-ranging survey of pre-capitalist economies in general. Despite regional diversities, however, and the

long time-span involved, the features of the medieval social system which he brings under scrutiny can be reduced to two: a base consisting

of unfree peasants, the direct producers, and an aristocratic superstructure supported by rents which were extracted from the former. This critical process of extraction was possible because the lords owned pattern of holdings in a manor where land transactions infer vivos were common, see M. K. McKintosh, ‘Land, tenure, and population in the royal manor of Havering, Essex, 1251—1352/3’, EcHR, XXXIII, 1980, pp. 17-31.

34 Smith, Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, pp. 138-9. On Coltishall, see ibid., pp. 89-92. °° R. Brenner, ‘Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial

Europe’, Past and Present, LXX, 1976, pp. 30-75; idem, ‘The agrarian roots of European capitalism’, Past and Present, XCVII, 1982, pp. 16-113. Both these essays were reprinted in Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, pp. 10-63, 213-327. For two early interpretations of trends c.1300 written from Marxist viewpoints, see R. H. Hilton, ‘Y eut-il une crise générale de la féodalite?’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, VI, 1951, pp. 23-30, and E. A. Kosminsky, ‘The evolution of the feudal rent in England from the XIth to the XVth centuries’, Past and Present, VII, 1955, pp. 32-3.:'For the classic exposition of a crisis in seignorial revenues in the later Middle Ages, where, however, very different conclusions are drawn about the burden of peasant rents from Brenner’s, Hilton’s and Kosminsky’s, see Bloch, French Rural History, chap. 4.

16

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY

the land: the peasants, at best, possessed parts of it, and since the economic power conferred on lords was reinforced by political and legal privileges of an exclusive character, serfs might not apply to any court

other than their lord’s for a remedy. Strengthened in this way, lords were able to extract from their tenants a great deal more than economic rents: they could and did extract nearly the whole of the surplus product which had been wrested from the soil. It was this excessive burden of rent, not the excessive growth of population, that prevented sustained srowth in the medieval economy, and it was the feudal system, with all its constraints on rights in property, that enabled lords to impose sucha

burden. However, the extraction of rent was never easy, and, as economic growth slowed down towards the end of the thirteenth century, the struggle for it was intensified. The late medieval crisis in seignorial revenues was not amere concomitant ofa more general crisis in the economy: it was the very eye of the storm. Most historians who have made a study of agrarian society at this time will probably have encountered one or two of Brenner’s landlords, and they will be aware — or should be so— that the issue of jurisdiction was fundamental for many peasants of the period. Not every lord used

these rights vigorously, if at all, but as long as serfdom and quasiserfdom lasted, they were always there — always in reserve. The absence

of any right of appeal beyond the seignorial court no doubt helps to explain how it was that lords in thirteenth-century England could, if

they so wished, put an end to customary arrangements on villein holdings and substitute new arrangements giving them a much higher income from the land in question.*° Had the lord not been the owner of the soil and in possession of jurisdiction over it, a great many villein rents in England might have become as uneconomically low, ina period of rising prices, as the fixed rents of free peasants. If, however, we are to find the key to developments in general in the years around 1300, in the feudal system of rights in property, it is

essential that most of the peasants forming the productive base of society at the time should actually have been of servile status. Yet even in ‘feudal’ England, in the counties covered by the Hundred Rolls of 3° For examples, see E. Miller, Abbey and Bishopric of Ely, Cambridge, 1951, pp. 110-11; R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages, Oxford, 1975, pp. 148-55. Cf. Harvey, ‘Inflation of 1180—1220’, pp. 22—3. As it was — as Hilton points

out — both parties gained from some of the new arrangements. See also Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 136-8.

17

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH 1279, as many as two households in every five may have been free: by

Kosminsky’s reckoning, 40 per cent of the land now occupied by peasants was free land, and approximately the same percentage of peasant households was free.*’ These proportions remind us that when the line between free and unfree in England was clearly drawn for the first time, as happened in the second half of the twelfth century, a large number of peasants fell on what was, from the lord’s point of view, the

wrong side of the line: they managed somehow to establish their freedom.*® Moreover, the effectiveness of seignorial control of tenant land, where the latter was still in the hands of servile tenants, differed

regionally and from estate to estate, as did the capacity of lords to

maintain the real value of rents over long periods of time. Such differences are exemplified, on the one hand, in the relatively strong feudalism to be found in England, and, on the other, in the relatively weak feudalism of Normandy: in Normandy, rents were already falling in the second half of the thirteenth century; in England the fall was in general delayed until the fourteenth century was well advanced.*” The differences serve to underline the importance of lordship where it was strong. But they greatly weaken the appeal to feudal exaction as a universally valid explanation of economic malaise at this time. In the end, we are left, not questioning the existence of the feudal system of rights in property, but asking why so many lords failed to exploit the tempting possibilities of the system, even when they might have done so

without interference from external authorities. Other considerations, too, make it seem unwise to lean heavily on feudalism as an explanation of the economic difficulties of this period. For example, the distribution of wealth in England in 1334, when the definitive assessment for taxes on movables was made, does not lend

itself to a social interpretation: if ‘free’ Norfolk was a relatively rich 57 Kosminsky, Studies in Agrarian History, p. 205. The figures for households relate toa sample taken from ten hundreds. See also Postan and Hatcher, in Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, pp. 70-2. 38 P. R. Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants in Medieval England: the Common Law of Villeinage in the Tweflth and Thirteenth Centuries, Oxford, 1980, pp. 221-65. For the different routes taken by jurisdiction over, respectively, free and unfree tenures in

England in the years around 1200, see S. F. C. Milsom, The Legal Framework of English Feudalism, Cambridge, 1976, pp. 183-6. 3° Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism, pp. 218-224; G. Bois, ‘Against the neo-Malthusian orthodoxy’, Past and Present, LXXIX, 1978, p. 65; reprinted in Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, pp. 107-118 (where English feudalism is characterised as backward and that of northern France as advanced).

18

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY county, so also were ‘feudal’ Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire.*° Nor, if other circumstances were favourable, was it necessary to possess rights of jurisdiction in order to exploit one’s tenants. The urban investors in land in the confado of Pistoia, whose fortunes have been traced by D.

Herlihy, had little to learn from feudal lords about the business of extracting from the soil rents which it could hardly sustain.*! In Flanders, the monopolists of the urban textile industry in Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres did quite as much to strangle growth in the country-

side as any feudal lord of the period could have done.” There are, indeed, parts of Europe in this period where the cost of towns to the surrounding countryside is as conspicuous as the cost to it of feudal lords, if not more so.” Was there actually a crisis? In the end, every attempt to identify a primary factor bringing about irreversible change in the economy in the early fourteenth century runs into difficulties, and this is hardly surprising, given the fragmented

condition of the economy of Western Europe at this time, and the diverse social structures then in existence. To identify such a factor is to generalise at a high level of abstraction. Yet, as pointed out above, belief in its existence has played a very important part in discussion of trends at this time.** What does ‘the crisis of the early fourteenth century’ look like if we cease to build this hypothesis into our models? Was it more

than a short-term crisis, of a kind all too familiar in societies where most producers work at the margin of subsistence? Does the evidence,

as distinct from @ priori reasoning, suggest that it was indeed the turning-point between early medieval expansion and late medieval decline? Or is a position between these two extremes the appropriate 4° R. S. Schofield, ‘The geographical distribution of wealth in England, 1334-1649’, EcHR, XVIII, 1965, pp. 504—7; reprinted in Floud, Essays in Quantitative Economic History, pp. 97-100. By Schofield’s reckoning, Oxfordshire ranked second in respect of lay wealth in 1334, Norfolk, third, and Gloucestershire, eighth. However, if lay and clerical wealth are taken into account, Gloucestershire drops to sixteenth. 4. Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia, pp. 133-44. 42 1). Nicholas, ‘Economic reorientation and social change in fourteenth-century Flan-

ders’, Past and Present, LXX, 1976, pp. 10, 17; cf. idem, Town and Countryside: Social, Economic and Political Tensions in Fourteenth-Century Flanders, Bruges,

44 p 3. : | 1971, pp. 93 #. 43 Cf. below, pp. 157-8.

19

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH one?

These questions are essentially about the changes which occurred

in the standards of living of ordinary people in the course of the _ fourteenth century: in the present context, other aspects of the socioeconomic system matter only in so far as they affected these. What, then, were the significant changes, and do they form a single, if long

drawn-out, episode originating in the first half of the century, but continuing into the second half, along lines already determined before the intervention of the Black Death?

The belief that at the beginning of the fourteenth century resources were strained to a degree that lowered existing standards of living is shared by historians of widely differing ideologies and of none. The strain was most severely and poignantly evinced in the famine occasioned by the widespread failure of the harvest in 1315 and again in 1316.*° Yet there are signs before that event of the impoverishment of many who had previously lived a little above the poverty line. In many parts of Western Europe population pressure was a factor at this time: already, by 1300, as Postan argued, population and the economy were entering a period of disequilibrium. Hence, for example, the extreme sensitivity of grain prices to fluctuations in the quality of the harvest, and the proven capacity of a small decline in yields to bring about a disproportionately large rise in prices.*° Grain prices in England now possessed, in D. L. Farmer’s memorable phrase, a ‘hair-trigger sensitivity’ to fluctuations in yields.*’ If anything holds together the instances

of increasing poverty that we encounter in this period and presents them to us as part of asingle movement, it is the pressure of population.

Yet, as Postan insisted and Smith reiterates in the present volume, population is not an autonomous factor in historical change: we have always to look for the underlying explanation.*® In the years 45 For the authoritative account of this famine in England, see I. Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine and agrarian crisis in England, 1315—1322’, Past and Present, LIX, 1973, pp.

46 DL Farmer, ‘Prices and wages’, in Hallam, Agrarian History, pp. 716 ff; D. L. Farmer, ‘Crop yields, prices and wages in medieval England’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, V1, 1983, especially table I (pp. 123-4). Farmer’s magisterial studies must supersede all earlier work in this field. See also idem, ‘Some grain price movements in thirteenth-century England’, EcHR, X, 1957-58, pp. 207-16, and especially figure I (p. 214). All recent discussion on prices has been indebted to the data in this article. 47 Farmer, ‘Crop yields, prices, and wages’, p. 137. 48 Postan, Essays, p.213; below, pp. 30-1.

20

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY

around 1300, population pressure is as much symptom as cause of the distress of contemporary society, and the circumstances enabling it to reach the level it did may have been different in different places and

regions. Among them was, no doubt, the pervasive cash economy, which so often made it possible to evade a useful degree of family or feudal control at vital moments in the peasant life-cycle. Given the pressure of population now in existence, any additional factor of an adverse kind was to be feared, and two that may well have

had important consequences are discussed in this volume: they are climatic change and war. Mark Bailey’s essay, bringing together dramatic evidence for losses to the sea in eastern England between 1275 and 1350, makes very modest claims for climatic change in general in the life of the period.* Yet the notoriously unstable weather conditions of the opening decades of the fourteenth century may reflect a long-term deterioration in the climate, and certainly made a dramatic impression on events in the Great Famine of 1315-17. Between 1290 and 1340, as W. M. Ormrod shows, the burden of taxation for war was heavy enough in England to affect the economic well-being of ordinary people, and

especially the inhabitants of rural England, in a general sense.” War, John Munro argues, explains a fundamentally important shift in the long-distance textile trades of north-western Europe, from cheap and light cloths to luxury products — a shift that could only damage the interests of the small producer of low-grade cloths.?! Mavis Mate’s essay

suggests that the burdens of war and the hazards of climatic change were deeply felt by some of the peasants of Kent and Sussex in this period.” If, by 1300, population was pressing too hard on resources, the beginning, at about this time, of a widespread decline in population suggests that a process of adjustment may soon have been under way. We must attribute much of the rise in real wages which probably occurred in England in the 1330s and early 1340s to the effects of a scarcity of money on the price of consumables.” Yet the fact that grain 49 Below, pp. 205-8. °° Below, pp. 182-3. >! Below, pp. 121-7. 52 Below, pp. 90-103.

°3 Farmer, in Hallam, Agrarian History, pp. 774-7; Farmer, ‘Crop yields, prices, and wages’, table III (a) and (b) (pp. 146—7); Mayhew, ‘Money and prices’, pp. 128—9; E. H.

Phelps Brown and S. V. Hopkins, ‘Seven centuries of the prices of consumables, compared with builders’ wage-rates’, reprinted in E. M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in

21

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH prices in this period were not only in general lower than prices earlier in the century, but also less volatile may mean that the fall in population was now beginning to ease the worst pressures on supply. The long-term consequences of this early phase of demographic

adjustment are lost to our sight for ever through the intervention of plague mortality in the late 1340s. We can only guess at the probable outcome of these early changes had the Black Death of 1347—50 and the

later epidemics of plague never occurred. But for this dramatic turn of

events, would population and the economy have returned to their former equilibrium or to a state nearly resembling this? If so, the level of real incomes in the second half of the fourteenth century might not have been significantly different from the level obtaining in the years around 1300. Or is it conceivable that, even without the intervention of plague mortality, the changes already underway by the 1340s would have acquired a momentum sufficient to bring abouta rise in per capita incomes comparable to that which did in fact occur? If we depend on suesswork for the answers to these questions, the course of events in the second half of the fourteenth century suggests that some guesses will be nearer the mark than others. In the second half of the fourteenth century, as at the beginning of

the century, population and resources were ill adjusted, but the imbalance was now of a very different kind from that obtaining earlier. In the later period, there were too few people for the available employment, not too many, and per capita incomes, measured by real wages, rose:c. 1400, real wages in England were 20 to 30 per cent higher than in the decades before the Black Death; between 1300 and 1400, the rise

was 45 to 60 per cent.’ The rise is not to be attributed solely to the decline in population: regionally, for example, new growths in industry and commerce played a part, and landlordism lost much of its former sting in this period. Population change, however, was now the constant

and all-important factor, and other factors had their full effect only because this one was present on such a scale. Economic History, Il, London, 1962, pp. 184, 193 (originally published in Economica, XXIII, 1956, pp. 296-314; also reprinted in Phelps Brown and Hopkins, A Perspective

of Prices and Wages, London, pp. 13-59); cf. M. C. Prestwich, ‘Currency and the economy of early fourteenth-century England’, in N. J. Mayhew, ed., Edwardian Monetary Affairs (1279-1344), British Archaeological Reports, XXXVI, 1977, pp. 50—3. But the evidence for this period is hard to interpret. °* Farmer, ‘Crop yields, prices and wages’, table III (a) and (b) (pp. 146-7). Cf. Phelps Brown and Hopkins, ‘Seven centuries of the prices of consumables’, pp. 184, 193-4.

22

THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Although standards of living eventually rose by a considerable margin, the rise was slow, and perhaps never quite commensurate with the transformation which had in fact occurred in the supply of land and that of labour. If real wages in England rose by 20 to 30 per cent between

the third and fourth decades of the century and the decades around 1400, they rose hardly at all before 137 0.°° Slow, too, was the formation

of the large peasant holdings which were to become a conspicuous feature of the countryside before the end of the Middle Ages.°° The slow

pace of change in the two or three decades immediately following the Black Death is indeed a truism of recent studies on that period. Clearly,

feudal constraints, reflected in high rents and to some extent in oppressive labour laws, help to account for these puzzling features of the economic scene after 1350: in the generation after the Black Death, many a lord may have come nearer to taking the surplus product of his servile tenants than his predecessors in title had ever done.’ And even

where feudal pressure did not impede the process, it was hard for peasants with generations of subsistence activity in their past to put together the capital resources that were needed for farming on a larger than subsistence scale.

Yet no one can read far in the sources of the period without sensing that some other factor was also at work. ‘Work-when-time-is’ was the rather unusual name of Piers Plowman’s wife.® This, surely, was one of the pieces of actual social criticism in William Langland’s poem, for if only half of what was said and writtten about the idleness of the wage-labourer after 1350 was true, a great many people now set a higher value than Piers’ wife on leisure. The desire to consume what the

extra days’ work would have brought within reach may have been present, but not in as large a measure as dislike of the work itself.°” Many a small farmer of the period no doubt chose to remain at the old subsistence level of activity, when other things were possible, for a similar reason.

These attitudes remind us that there was more to medieval °° See previous note. °° For examples, see J. Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall,

1300-1500, Cambridge, 1970, p. 139; B. F. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1977, p. 267. °7 G. A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-Century England, Cambridge, 1957, pp. 114-15; Harvey, Westminster Abbey, pp. 263-4. °8 C. Passus, ix. 80. °° Cf. Hodges, Primitive and Peasant Markets, pp. 12-13.

23

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

standards of living, as perceived at the time, than the material wealth which historians so consistently use as the appropriate measure for them.®°° But they also suggest that, left to its own devices, the early fourteenth-century economy would not have proved capable of fundamental long-term changes, comparable to those which actually took place in the very different circumstances created by the Black Death. Such changes would surely have been impossible without a long-term and large-scale decline in population, going far beyond the decline which we glimpse in the first half of the century. If, in the absence of plague, the positive check of rising mortality was not to bring about such a fall, the preventive check of falling fertility had to operate, and on

a quite dramatic scale. But why should fertility have fallen on such a scale, if not to secure for those who practised the new restraint a higher standard of living than would otherwise have been available?®! This kind of economic ambition is precisely the vital ingredient of improvement that seems to have been, in general, absent from the agrarian base of society in the critical period. If we are right, the most likely outcome of the phase of economic and demographic change which we know as ‘the crisis of the early fourteenth century’ was a return to the status quo ante, or toa situation nearly resembling this. If so, it was in fact the advent of plague, an

exogenous factor, that transformed the economic life of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, and the changes which actually occurred after that event could not have been predicted in the first half of the century. As for the crisis itself, it was, without doubt, more thana mere fluctuation in economic life — the changes were too long drawn out to be dismissed as a fluctuation — but, quite probably, it was less than a turning-point of secular significance. We should perhaps regard it as a mid-term crisis.

°° Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 222-9. For the argument in principle, A. Sen, The Standard of Living, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 1-38. °! Cf. Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, 6th edn.., II, p. 239. In the event, a decline in fertility may have occurred concurrently, or just after, the rise in mortality in the mid-fourteenth century, thus exemplifying the so-called demographic lurch identified by E. A. Wrigley in a later period: Smith, Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, p. 128; E. A. Wrigley, ‘Family limitation in pre-industrial England’, EKcHR, XIX, 1966, pp. 82-109, especially pp. 102-6. 62 An exemplification, if so, of the homeostatic model of economic and demographic development. See below pp. 26-8.

24

2 RICHARD M. SMITH Demographic developments in rural England, 1300-48: a survey

Introduction It is perhaps surprising to discover, given the central position allocated to the demographic factor in the debate over the course of economic and social developments in the half-century before the Black Death, just how little is firmly known about the period’s population history. As other contributions to this volume are devoted to the construction of overviews of key developments in the economy and environment of the period either at the level of the nation or region, this essay focuses on evidence that might be labelled ‘demographic’ to distinguish it from the indirect indicators of population such as rents, prices, holding sizes,

assarts, and land-use changes that have understandably tended to dominate discussion of trends between 1300 and 1348. Before any consideration of this evidence is undertaken it will be necessary to consider the theoretical premises that have been adopted by key participants in this debate. Many of the participants have only reluctantly, and some not even consciously, aligned themselves to a particular school, but following the publication in 1976 of an article by R. Brenner that attacked what he called an ‘orthodoxy’ on this topic, historians, however regrettably, find their arguments pigeon-holed in this way.! Brenner is disposed to identify as Malthusian or neo-Malthusian

those historians of late medieval and early modern Europe who, in seeking explanations of long-term change, appeal to what he terms ‘an autonomous demographic development’.” A distinguished com-

mentator on Brenner’s contribution has noted that he is justified | ‘in referring to neo-Malthusianism (or demographic determinism) as 1 R. Brenner, ‘Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe’, Past and Present, LXX, 1976, pp. 30-74. 2 Brenner, ‘Agrarian class structure’, p. 30.

25

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

the prevailing orthodoxy in historical studies of pre-industrial economies’ and links it to ‘the development of historical demography

since the 1950s as an indispensable contribution to historical studies . . ...° While it is true that it is possible to find some historians who had given to demography a free-ranging role as a prime-mover in European pre-industrial societies and economies, it is actually very rare to observe demographic historians who are well versed in classical

political economy associating such deterministic views with the writings of T. R. Malthus. For, as R. S. Schofield and E. A. Wrigley have

emphatically noted, Malthus’s work can be seen as part of a long tradition ‘treating population behaviour as secondary to economic circumstances’.* Indeed, Malthus along with other classical economists — in particular Adam Smith — regarded the demand for labour as the factor over the long run determining population trends. Presented in its

simplest form, Malthus accepted the classical economic concept of diminishing returns to labour and supplemented it with an explanation of how death and birth-rates were affected by per capita living standards or wages. These components of Malthus’s arguments have suggested to later scholars a way of constructing an account of the pre-industrial economy which portrays it as a long-run equilibrium system, or what is

often termed a homeostatic model of individual behaviour and aggregate market relationships that determine population size and per capita well-being. The basic elements of Malthusian equilibrium can be identified in Figure 2.1. They are contained in three functional relationships. Figure 2.la gives an aggregate production function (AB) showing the standard of living (real wage or income per capita) of a population of given sizes. It is distinguished by diminishing returns to labour which is, as has 5 R. H. Hilton, ‘Introduction’ in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge, 1985, p. 3. The most striking example of this view is to be found in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s inaugural lecture at the Collége de France in 1973, when he stated that ‘from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century inclusive, the economy was servant not master, dictated to and not dictator’. Indeed, he proposed that the economy was subservient to ‘the great forces of life and death’. It should be stressed that in referring to ‘biological phenomena’ he is concerned with the impact of epidemic diseases and the way they ensured that ‘economic change was shaped by demographic change rather than the other way round’. See E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Mind and Method of the Historian, Brighton, 1981, p. 23. + R.S. Schofield and E. A. Wrigley, ‘Introduction’, in R. I. Rotberg and T.K. Rabb, eds.,

Population and Economy: Population and History from the Traditional to the Modern World, Cambridge, 1986, p. 2.

26

ab 3$* 5 g |

DRX

POPULATION BIRTH/DEATH RATE . Figure 2.1: Malthusian dynamic equilibrium

been noted, a fundamental tenet of classical economists other than

Malthus.° Figure 2.1b sets out the rudiments of demographic behaviour. The crude death-rate (DR) rises as the standard of living falls

and represents the Malthusian ‘positive check’. The crude birth-rate (BR) falls as the standard of living falls and represents the Malthusian ‘preventive check’. Population grows when births exceed deaths and falls when deaths exceed births (on the assumption of no net migration).

If population rises this leads via the production function (AB) to a lowering of the standard of living which in turn leads toan enhancement of the death-rate (DR) or a depression of fertility (BR) which eventually curtails population growth. Equilibrium is achieved at zero population growth (BR=DR). At such a point the living standard is steady as well as

the birth and death-rates. The equilibrium is over the medium term stable since any disturbance sets in motion compensatory changes in the form of negative feedback processes. For instance an exogenous expansion in the opportunities for labour might lead to a rise in real incomes to Yj, in the short term through an increase in the supply of capital brought about by colonisation of new land, introduction of new > E. A. Wrigley, ‘Elegance and experience: Malthus at the bar of history’, in D. Coleman and R. S. Schofield, eds., The State of Population Theory: Forward from Malthus, Oxford, 1986, pp. 49-50.

27

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

agrarian technology, or greater agrarian output associated with climatic amelioration (i.e. equivalent to a movement to the right of the production function from AB to CD). As a result of the amelioration of

conditions, mortality would decline to DR, and fertility rise to BR, leading to demographic growth. As population rises above its initial size

P*, it is assumed that more persons seek land and/or employment and thus larger numbers of persons work on each parcel of land and some persons now cultivate land that had previously been idle, and possibly,

but not necessarily, less productive. Consequently, the addition to agricultural output brought about by an extra day’s work falls. The remuneration of labour, declines from Y* to Y» as the labour force increases in size from P* to Po. As a consequence of these shifts in real

incomes demographic adjustments occur, serving to depress fertility from BR» to BR* and increase mortality from DR» to DR*.

The inbuilt tendency to reinstate an equilibrium real wage or living standard (i.e. Y*) is the basis of the pessimism regarding long-run

improvements in well-being which, along with other classical economists, Malthus is traditionally seen as championing. The smooth curves

in Figure 2.1 describe in stylised form the long-run tendencies as specified by Malthus. However, being an undoubted eclectic empiricist,

he did not assume that the equilibrating process would function smoothly or instantaneously, although he did believe that in the long run an equilibrium level would be achieved. As Schofield has reminded

us, Malthus warned that ‘the operation of many interrupting causes’ would introduce irregularities and make the oscillation difficult to identify and measure. Schofield, furthermore, is at pains to emphasise that when Malthus wrote about the ‘facility of combinations among the

rich and its difficulty among the poor’, he showed that he was fully aware that economic relationships based upon power and the wealth structure of the society might impede the freedom or willingness of individuals to respond demographically to economic stimuli.° Malthus

was also insistent in his views about the correlations between ‘prudential habits’ (i.e. the operation of the preventive check) and the existence of civil liberties. For: . ..no people can be much accustomed to form plans for the future, who do not feel assured that their industrious exertions, while fair and honourable, will be allowed to have free scope; and the property which they either possess, or may ° T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, volume | of E. A. Wrigley and

28

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS acquire, will be secured to them by a known code of just laws impartially administered.

Such arguments might well be thought of interest to medievalists familiar with the operation of villeinage and its ways, so frequently claimed to have been arbitrary and uncertain and leading to impositions on the freedom of serfs to marry where and whomsoever they pleased,

or to migrate to preferred localities. Such cautions from Malthus suggest that he was not engaged in constructing his account of population behaviour in pre-industrial societies using a ‘naturalist discourse’, as some Marxist critics have chastised him for doing and some socio-biologists have wishfully strained to see him suggesting; rather, as has been said of Marx himself, he ‘upholds the cardinal principle of historical specificity for each mode of production and each

epoch in history, rejecting any natural or eternal law of human population growth or over-population’.®

While it is possible to reject the charge of demographic determinism that is so frequently laid at the feet of Malthus, it must still

be acknowledged that Malthusian approaches are far from being unproblematic. A central difficulty with using this or any other equilibrium framework to establish co-variations in economic and demographic variables (across time or space), or with using empirical

observations to ‘test’ the model, is the identification of exogenous shocks as distinct from endogenous responses.” R. D. Lee has helpfully distinguished between investigating these

interrelationships in the short, the medium, and the long term, although his analysis has been undertaken primarily on economic and demographic data in the three centuries after 1537.'° His work on this later period obliges medievalists to examine the conceptual premises they have employed when confronting these issues. Lee is in no doubt that over the very long run the decisive factor determining population

: 29 D. Souden, eds., The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, London, 1986, pp. 15 and 16; R. S. Schofield, ‘Through a glass darkly: The Population History of England as an experiment in history’, in Rotberg and Rabb, Population and Economy, p. 16. ’ T_R. Malthus, The Principles of Political Economy, volume V of Wrigley and Souden, The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, p. 184. 8 W. Seccombe, ‘Marxism and demography’, New Left Review, CXXXVII, 1983, p. 32.

.2 —. R. Weir, ‘Life under pressure: France and England 1670-1870’, Journal of

Economic History, XLIV, 1984, p. 28; R, D. Lee, ‘Population homeostasis and English demographic history’, in Rotberg and Rabb, Population and Economy, p. 80. 10 Lee, ‘Population homeostasis’, p. 76.

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

trends and levels is the demand for labour; an explanation much beloved by the classical economists. In the short run (month by month or year by year) he feels that there are grounds for supposing that living

standards determined mortality and fertility, although in the case of early modern England the effect is statistically demonstrable more readily for marriages than for deaths. The major problem surrounds the interpretation of economic and demographic interconnections over the medium term which he defines as decades or half-centuries. Lee concluded that the English economic and demographic data for the period

1541-187] indicate that within this category of ‘time-frame’, it was independent (exogenous) variations in fertility and mortality which led

to the swings in population growth rates and that such swings were strongly, negatively correlated with living standards. Malthus would seem to have envisaged two ways in which the positive check operated. Firstly, associated with declining living standards would be increasing ‘misery and vice’ which would raise mortality and produce a long-term trend in the death-rate that conformed with the smoothly shaped curve (DR) in Figure 2.1a. Secondly, Malthus also expected that there would be sudden mortality crises that would greatly

reduce the population in a year or two and that the probability of mortality crises would increase as the standard of living declined. In the early modern period it has proved easier to detect evidence of the second form adopted by the positive check than the first. Indeed, it would seem that long-run variations in mortality cannot readily be explained within a strictly defined Malthusian framework. Wrigley and Schofield argued

a powerful case for fertility responses between 1541 and 1871 being largely the result of endogenous determinants, although their interpretation is currently the subject of an animated debate which has much life in it yet.1! What should interest the medievalist is that this fertility response, whether endogenously determined or not, was from 154] to 1750 largely the result of changes in the proportions of females

ever-married rather than movements in the age of first marriage.” It may prove profitable to consider further issues raised by demosraphic and economic relationships between 1540 and 1750. Lee, while 11 &. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction, London, 1981. 12D. R. Weir, ‘Rather never than late: Celibacy and age at marriage in English cohort fertility, 1541-1971,’ Journal of Family History, IX, 1984, pp. 340-54; R. S. Schofield, ‘English marriage patterns revisted’, Journal of Family History, X, 1985, pp. 2-20.

30

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

agreeing with Wrigley and Schofield that fertility must have been the proximate demographic factor determining population growth rates, believes nevertheless that it is ‘inescapable that exogenous change in mortality drove the long-run changes in fertility, population and wages ....For Lee this has to be so ‘because mortality is the only variable with substantial extraneous variation’.’° Such an argument, while retaining certain Malthusian interrelationships, is in one fundamental respect ill at ease with Malthus because it gives primacy to exogenous shifts in mortality as provider of the tune to which everything else ultimately dances. Lee, in fact, offers a sophisticated thesis: which would give to population, via mortality changes, a ‘fundamental not incidental’ role in determining the history of the period.'* While this is a view which is contentious and problematic, it forms part of a debate which is not without significance for discussion of the demographic trend between 1300 and 1348. These issues are, for instance, at the heart of Mark ° Bailey’s essay in this volume.!° Furthermore, they did not escape the remarkably alert mind of M. M. Postan. Indeed, he reflected, without

recourse to the jargon that dominates the current debate, on the problem of specifying exogenous shocks and endogenous responses.

When musing on the problems of disentangling the links between prices, population, and agricultural production he wrote: ... their very interaction makes it difficult to single any of them out as the prime mover of economic change. In some ways the movement of population was more fundamental than any of the economic changes; yet it would be difficult to treat the population trends as the sole or final cause. The search for final causes, here as in other fields of history will inevitably result in circular argument. For if the fall and rise in population cause the general fluctuations of medieval economy, what caused the fall and rise in population?!®

Postan went on to ponder the possibility that biological or climatic factors, exogenous in determination and operation, were at work, but rejected such explanations in favour of soil exhaustion, endogenously determined in so far as he regarded it as ‘a natural punishment for earlier over-expansion’.!’ While Postan appears to rule out the role of exogenous influences 13 Lee, ‘Population homeostasis’, p. 100 14 Lee, ‘Population homeostasis’, p. 100 19 See Bailey, below, pp. 184—5. © M. M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy, Cambridge, 1973, p. 12. 1” Postan, Essays, p. 14.

31

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH as responsible for what he believes was a demographic down turn in the first half of the fourteenth century, he was always unclear, not to say evasive, about the forces responsible for demographic growth prior to

1300. In constructing a symmetrical argument in which endogenous explanations retained their primacy for both the demographic up turn and down turn he would have been obliged to seek out certain changes in technology or land availability that would have induced or facilitated

earlier growth. However, there is no reason why an exogenously senerated phase of demographic growth associated with a decline in the virulence of epidemic disease or particularly favourable climatic conditions should not have enabled population expansion. Nor is there any theoretical objection to exogenously driven forces providing the principal influence encouraging demographic stagnation or decline, if that can be demonstrated to have happened in the period under review. But Postan is not alone in leaving us in considerable doubt as to

the determinants of demographic growth prior to 1300. Indeed, both

his supporters and detractors seem to share a common but understandable evasiveness on this subject. There is no space in this present discussion to become embroiled in debates about the roles of fortuitous (exogenous) technological determinism or the Marxist critique of such a position as they bear upon the question of demographic growth in the

period transcending the twelfth to late thirteenth centuries. It is of interest to note that E. Miller and J. Hatcher in their highly regarded and widely used text book opt for an intriguing blend of exogeneity and

endogeneity in their attempts to resolve these problems. They do, nonetheless, acknowledge the difficulties of disentangling the possibility that technological progress was both a cause and a consequence of population growth. They write that ‘we can feel some confidence that the gradual establishment of more peaceful conditions played a part and speculate that the waning of epidemic disease was also a contributory factor, but certainties remain elusive’.’® In exemplary textbook style they combine two views. One, it appears, is very much akin to that of G. Duby who sees over large parts of Europe, through the consolidation of

feudal order and increasing aristocratic ability to extract surplus product, conditions stimulating demographic growth within the peasantry. This is an endogenous explanation. Nonetheless, it has not found complete favour in certain Marxist circles for being one-sided and '8 E. Miller and J. Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change 1086-1348, London, 1978, p. 28.

32

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

paying insufficient attention to resistance by peasants to the removal of

product surplus to subsistence.’ The other is reminiscent of E. Boserup, who has consistently argued that most systems of agricultural intensification proceed from demographic growth. This view is to be

regarded as fundamentally exogenous because Boserup has always interpreted populations to have waxed and waned due to autonomous shifts in mortality. She writes ‘there can be little doubt that the decline and stagnation of population in most of the first millenium A.D. was due to the ravages of major epidemics...these seem to have been so severe because new types of disease appeared, against which the population had not developed resistance’.“° She is also convinced of a period of

demographic growth between the ninth and fourteenth centuries which she regards as a return to a ‘normal’ pattern of slow growth.

In their reflections on the early fourteenth century, Miller and Hatcher adopt an unambiguously endogenous explanation of demographic trends. While they depend rather heavily, and it should be acknowledged hesitantly, upon Postan and J. Z. Titow’s analysis of mortality on the Winchester manors, they argue that the famines that were documented there and elsewhere were ‘an episode in an era of high

mortality that persisted until the Black Death raised it to

unprecedented heights’.”? }

Miller and Hatcher’s textbook was completed before the publica-

tion of the article which inaugurated the ‘Brenner debate’. It is surprising, given the attack mounted by Brenner on population as an

explanatory factor, how little consideration it has received in the ensuing discussion in the pages of Past and Present. Brenner himself, it must be acknowledged, was concerned with presenting an argument

that, while not denying the importance of demographic change, was largely intent upon showing how the prior distributions of property and associated political power determined the economic consequences of population shifts. While G. Bois chastised Brenner quite severely for wilfully ignoring demography in his attack on the so-called Malthusian orthodoxy, the latter later reflected on this matter in limited fashion,

although not without interest, in the long reply that he wrote to his 19 _G. Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century, London, 1974. See the critical comments of R. H. Hilton in ‘Introduction’ to idem, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London, 1976, p. 2. 20 E. Boserup, Population and Technology, Oxford, 1981, p. 21. 1 Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, p. 22.

33

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

critics.*” Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether he prefers to treat population as an endogenously or exogenously determined variable. Brenner most clearly adopts an endogenous interpretation of differences in population density both between English regions and

between England and France at the beginning of the fourteenth century. He reflects on how population ceilings might be lowered or

held down in two ways: directly, as a consequence of immediate subtraction of surplus from peasant consumption for the lord’s unproductive use, and indirectly, as a result of the loss of potential funds for the increase of the peasant’s productive capacity through investment and innovation.”* Consequently, he regards it as noteworthy that regions with a high incidence of free peasantry supported population densities that were greater than those to be found in the highly manorialised areas at the same period. He draws our attention to the contrast between population densities that N. Pounds noted when he observed that ‘the density of population computed for Normandy (where lordship was very weak)...was very much higher than can be possibly ascribed to any major province in contemporary England’.”4 He also notes the particularly high densities in the freer areas of the

Lincolnshire fens; an argument that others have also made about eastern England and Kent more generally. In fact, Brenner believes that it would not seem far-fetched to interpret the relatively high population

densities of much of thirteenth-century France, compared to those of England, precisely in terms of the relative weakness of French lordship and surplus extraction compared to that of England. As a consequence of these differences, Brenner claims that ‘demographic growth appears to have led to overpopulation at very different population densities, at

different points in time and with quite different socio-economic effects’.“° However, he shows himself to be insensitive to Malthus’s own awareness of these very possibilities when he suggests that lordship and

the surplus-extracting relationship between lords and peasants might disable the smooth working of homeostasis. In fact, Brenner suggests that any decline in population in areas of strong lordship would most likely be exacerbated by attempts to extract even greater amounts from 22 G. Bois, ‘Against the neo-Malthusian orthodoxy’, Past and Present, LXXIX, p. 68; R.

Brenner, ‘The agrarian roots of European capitalism’, Past and Present, LXLVII, 1982, pp. 16-113. 73 Brenner, ‘Agrarian roots’, pp. 60-62. 24 Brenner, ‘Agrarian roots’, p. 61. 25 Brenner, ‘Agrarian roots’, p. 25.

34

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

each member of a depleted peasant population which would so disrupt production as to lead to further demographic loss. In these arguments Brenner hints at the possibility of adownward-spiralling process rather than the pattern of self-correction associated with homeostasis. While most of Brenner’s reflections on demographic outcomes refer to the circumstances prevailing at the crest of the demographic wave, he is more equivocal about the reasons for population growth

which he regards as characteristic of both areas of weak and strong lordship and of both free and unfree peasantries. What thoughts he

offers on this matter would appear to rest firmly in the realm of speculation about the marital habits of what he terms a peasantry ‘in

“possession” of the land and tools required to produce their subsistence’.”° He regards their ‘relatively early marriage’ as responsible for comparatively rapid demographic growth-rates.*’ This can,

perhaps, be seen as a rather tenuous attempt to equate the tenurial pattern of a peasant culture with demographic behaviour conducive to demographic growth and may be regarded justifiably as a somewhat

strained attempt to generate an endogenous rather than exogenous explanation of marriage behaviour and associated demographic growth.

Little if any evidence concerning marriage age or incidence is brought to bear on this issue by Brenner, which is unfortunate, for itisa

matter of great significance how marital behaviour should be interpreted in this definitional debate about endogeneity and exogeneity. Malthus himself was aware of the problem as early as the first edition of the Essay and his thoughts are offered in the context of his comments on David Hume’s reflections on the populousness of ancient nations. Hume had supposed that societies in which age at marriage of women

was early, possessed populations which must as a consequence have been very large.”® Malthus, taking age at marriage as endogenously rather than exogenously determined, concluded that the population must, on the contrary, be rather small and living standards relatively high to induce such early marriage. He wrote: If I find that at a certain period in ancient history, the encouragements to have a family were great, that early marriages were consequently very prevalent, and that

few persons remained single, I should infer with certainty that population was rapidly increasing but by no means that it was actually very great; rather, indeed,

| 35

26 Brenner, ‘Agrarian roots’, p. 29. 27 Brenner, ‘Agrarian roots’, p. 31. 28 D1. Hume, Essays and Lectures on Several Subjects, 1, London, 1768, pp. 423-50.

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH the contrary, that it was then thin and that there was room and food for a much

, greater number.”” Of course, Malthus resolved the problem by assuming that if an ancient society such as China did exhibit early marriage, notwithstanding an already densely settled land area, that their population ‘must be repressed by occasional famines and by the custom of exposing children _..’-" In other words, if marriage is unresponsive to material circumstances (i.e. exogenously determined insofar as it takes place according to a biological moment such as puberty) then population adjustments will rest largely on shifts in the positive (endogenous) check. Such considerations direct our debate to the heart of the problem concerning the extent to which in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth century

we possess evidence that would allow us to ascertain whether the marital behaviour of the broad mass of the population would be regarded as exogenously determined in the sense that Hume might have regarded the Chinese peasantry, or endogenously in the style of Brenner’s explanation. There, of course, exists a third possibility, which

is to treat marriage as endogenous in the sense that Malthus thought marital restraint operated ‘in some degree through all ranks of society’ in response to ‘the difficulties attending the rearing of a family’.*'

When in 1965 Barbara Harvey published her paper on the population trend in England between 1300 and 1348 she helped to initiate a debate about the evidence Postan had employed, especially over the previous fifteen years, in developing his thesis concerning the onset of demo-

graphic decline that may have begun by 1290.°* The evidence she deployed in that paper, like much that Postan himself had utilised in his

own accounts, excepting his study with Titow of the covariation of tenant deaths and grain prices, was largely non-demographic in charac-

ter.°° Indeed, much of her paper was devoted to reassessing Postan’s

arguments as they related, in particular, to the value of land and topography of settlement. With the exception of some suggestive 29 Malthus, Population, p. 24. 3° Malthus, Population, p. 25. 31 Malthus, Population, p. 26.

32 B. F. Harvey, ‘The population trend in England between 1300 and 1348’, The Transactions of the Royal historical Society, 5th series, XVI, 1966, 23-42. 33M. M. Postan and J. Z. Titow, [with statistical notes by J. Longden], ‘Heriots and prices on Winchester manors’, in Postan, Essays, pp. 150-85.

36

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

remarks on migration, Harvey did not confront the matter of demosraphy directly. In the quarter century since Harvey read that paper to the Royal Historical Society historical demography has grown as an

important historical sub-discipline, yet whilst its medieval practitioners are identifiable they are a small band in comparison with their early modern colleagues. Furthermore, although demographic questions are frequently tackled by social and agrarian historians in their rural case-studies, there exists only one ostensibly demographic analysis of a rural community that transcends the period upon which our present discussion is focussed and which uses the formal tools of

demography.** Compared with the growth of our knowledge of demesne farming, estate management, agrarian technology, rural land markets, and inheritance practices over the first half of the fourteenth

century, firmly established demographic findings are still in short supply. Evidence that can be utilised to test the ‘grand theories’ that have

been discussed in the first section of this paper is an especially scarce commodity. However, if we proceed by distinguishing between those findings which are concerned with charting the course of population totals at both the local and the national level from those attempting to measure and explain the demographic processes underpinning them, we may gain some sense of the extent of progress and the scale of the tasks yet to be undertaken. Measuring rates of demographic change

Continuous series of statistics that bear some obvious relation to population totals survive for only individual localities and they do not

exist in any one place for particularly extended periods. There are

nonetheless some remarkable data for six manors in central and northern Essex that have recently been brought to light.*° They are unusual in stretching, in some cases, from the late thirteenth into the

early sixteenth centuries and as they relate to a reasonably large number of communities in a geographically circumscribed area their

interpretation can be undertaken without undue fear of distortion 34 7. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish; Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270-1400, Cambridge, 1980. 35 L. R. Poos, ‘The rural population of Essex in the late middle ages’, ECHR, XXXVIII, 1985, pp. 515-30.

37

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

through stochastic variation of a kind that might complicate assessment of the pattern exhibited by a solitary manorial or village case-study. The data concern the totals of resident males over the age of

twelve, registered in the proceedings of leet and manorial courts in these communities. In theory, all males twelve years and over who resided in the frankpledge jurisdiction for at least a year and a day were

required to be sworn into tithing; on each of the Essex manors frankpledge jurisdiction was performed by a number of tithings containing a specified number of chief pledges and their tithingmen who might vary in number from five to twelve.”® The tithings were also liable

to make a per capita cash payment of either a halfpenny or a penny.

Provided that these money series can be checked against the administrative procedure being employed in the view of frankpledge it is possible to regard the annual sums of tithing-penny as a theoretical count of the resident adult and adolescent males. These data suggest that the last quarter of the thirteenth century and the first decade of the fourteenth century were distinguished by no apparent trend in population numbers. However, the years of harvest deficiency between 1315 and 1317 registered a noticeable impact on numbers. While decline was variable across the sample, ranging from 20.6 per cent in Great Waltham (320-254 for the years 1306-19) to only

3.2 per cent in Chatham Hall (63-61 for 1308-18) the mean loss of resident males was approximately 15 per cent. What is particularly noticeable, is that the following three decades are marked by sustained

decline by almost 30 per cent before 1348-49, when in just a few months population appears to have fallen by approximately 45 per cent. Another data set, known for some time, is directly analogous with the tithing-penny series for late-medieval Essex and has received considerable attention. It relates to the Somerset manor of Taunton held by

the bishops of Winchester.°’ In this case the evidence suggests that those males entitled to an aquittance of rent were released from liability

to pay tithing-penny so that these figures err by under-estimating resident adult males at any given time. It is evident that the resident male population more than doubled between 1209 — the first year of the series — when it was 506, and 1311 — the year of its maximum value —

when it stood at 1359. Taunton lost 9.3 per cent of its population 3° Poos, ‘Rural population’, p. 318. 3” J. Z. Titow, ‘Some evidence of thirteenth-century population growth’, EcHR, XIV, 1961, pp. 218-23.

38

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

between 1313 and 1319. Furthermore, the rate of increase was much , greater in the first two-thirds of the thirteenth century than it was thereafter. The annual rate of growth between 1209 and 1268 was 1.3 per cent and only 0.5 per cent from 1269 to 1311. By 1330 the resident male population stood at approximately the same total as in 1319, but

higher than that for 1300. However, net growth over the first three

decades of the fourteenth century was minimal. From 1330 the hundredpenny sum became frozen so the demographic trend in the remaining two decades before the arrival of plague is unknown. Titow’s remarks on the uniqueness of the series as a demographic record that is

non-tenurial in character remain true until the 1270s when the Essex evidence begins. We would, however, be rash to suppose, on the basis of

one manor in the west of England, that everywhere in the first part of the thirteenth century experienced demographic growth in excess of 1

per cent per annum. What, perhaps, is of greater relevance is that Taunton was an anciently settled manor and that its growth may have

slowed or been terminated earlier than occurred on-manors with greater quantities of colonisable land. The anciently settled manors of

northern and central Essex most likely shared these characteristics with Taunton and may well represent one of a number of chronologies of demographic change in post-Conquest England. Unfortunately, it seems that evidence for this particular demosraphic experience is the most reliable that has been derived to-date.

Other patterns have been encountered but they are the product of techniques of demographic estimation which are not without their _interpretational problems and their detractors. One technique, highly

tempting to employ, if the manorial court rolls are reasonably complete, is to trace the numbers of males appearing in the proceedings

of manorial courts and assume, given the wide area of matters of everyday concern over which the court has jurisdiction, that all males who are resident on a manor will appear in the court’s proceedings over a specified period of years. Such enumerations are assumed to approxi-

mate to population totals of adult males, in particular, and whilst unable to pinpoint year-by-year change might be supposed to yield a valuable index of change if individual ‘appearances’ are aggregated ona 38 For contrasts between population growth rates in ‘anciently’ and ‘more recently’ settled areas in the thirteenth century see, J. B. Harley, ‘Population trends and agricultural developments from the Warwickshire Hundred Rolls of 1279’, EcHR, XI, 1958, pp. 8-18.

39

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

quinquennial or decennial basis. Z. Razi has used this technique on court rolls of unusually full detail that survive for the Worcestershire manor of Halesowen.®” He finds that adult male population totals show

an annual rate of growth between 1270 and 1315 of 0.8 per cent per annum. Whilst a 15 per cent drop in numbers is observed between 1315 and 1321, growth was resumed again in the period from 1321 to 1349 but at a much reduced rate of 0.4 per cent per annum. Over the period 1300-49 net growth was about 4 per cent compared with a net growth of 38 per cent from 1271 to 1301. Similar exercises have been performed

with the manorial court rolls of other manors, most with a documentary record of inferior quality to that of Halesowen. The court records of the Huntingdonshire manor of Broughton suggest that in this community adult males seemed to decline at an annual average rate of 0.4 per cent throughout the period from 1280 to the arrival of plague in 1349.*° A more fragmented series of records from two other nearby

manors of Holywell-cum-Needingworth and Houghton-cum-Wyton suggest that the population was falling by the second decade of the fourteenth century.*! Holywell’s population of resident adult males may have dropped by approximately 30 per cent from 1300 to 1332. Decline in Houghton-cum-Wyton may have been even more marked

since an estimate suggests a fall in numbers of adult males from marginally more than 200 in the first decade of the fourteenth century to fewer than 100 in the decade prior to 1349. Similar techniques when applied to the Northamptonshire manor of Brigstock in Rockingham Forest suggest that there, by 1348, the number of resident adult males may have been 25 per cent fewer than in the first decade of the century,

although the decline had been far from linear in trend.*” On the Buckinghamshire manor of Iver this same technique reveals some srowth between the late 1320s and the late 1330s but very sharp decline — over 30 per cent — between 1336 and 1349

Other historians in manorial case-studies have compared the numbers of recorded tenant holdings in specified years and attempted 39 Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 27-32. 40 E. Britton, The Community of the Vill: a Study in the Family and Village Life in Fourteenth-Century England, Toronto, 1977, pp. 132-43.

41 BB: Rewind, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth, Toronto, 1971, pp. 42 JM. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague, Oxford, 1987, pp. 228-9. 43 Bennett, Women, pp. 13-4 and 224-5.

40

| DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS to compute a fairly coarse index of rates of change of numbers over the interim. Such techniques have been used extensively by H. E. Hallam in

comparisons of recorded tenant numbers on a manor in Domesday Book with numbers recorded for what purports to be the same manor at a later date.** In the chapters he contributes to the recently published

Volume II of the Agrarian History of England and Wales Hallam presents the results of a county-by-county attempt to utilise this tech-

nique. He concludes that ‘on the whole evidence of a fourteenthcentury decline before the Black Death is hard to come by’.*° Unfortunately, his presentation of the evidence is exceptionally difficult to assess and at times appears contradictory. On the one hand, he writes

‘there is... no support for the argument that population declined in the period 1280-1350 in any part of the East Midlands, and such

evidence is also entirely lacking in eastern and south-eastern England’.*° On the other hand, he observes that: in five out of the eight regions stagnation or decline took place in the halfcentury before the Black Death, but there are insufficient figures for 1325-50 and for the highland zones to be quite sure of this. In the most populous and advanced regions of eastern and south-eastern England there was no decline down to 1310 and 1315 respectively, this may well have taken place in the generation before the Black Death.*’

The latter suggestion, apart from being incompatible with the former, contains statements which lead one to suppose that nothing can be said

about eastern England after 1300 and south-eastern England after 1315. Furthermore, when one consults the detailed descriptions and lists that Hallam provides in such copious detail it appears that for the populous counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and Essex, he was unable to locate surveys for any manors at two points in time between c.1280 and c.1350 upon which comparisons of tenant numbers could be based. The same problem seems to afflict his analysis of the south-eastern counties, of Middlesex, Surrey, Kent and Sussex,

the east-midland counties of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, 44 See H. E. Hallam, Settlement and Society: a Study of the Early Agrarian History of South Lincolnshire, Cambridge, 1965, pp. 197-207; H. E. Hallam, Rural England 1066-1348, London, 1981; and most extensive use of this technique in H. E. Hallam, ‘Population movements in England, 1086-1350’ in idem, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Il, 1042-1350, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 508-93. #9 ‘Population movements’, p. 511. 46 Hallam, ‘Population movements’, p. 511.

47 Hallam, ‘Population movements’, p. 536. . Al

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

Northamptonshire, and Huntingdonshire as well as Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Hertfordshire. Hallam frequently appears to regard growth after 1300 as proven if a comparison of tenant numbers

on a manor in 1086 and, for instance, any year after 1300 indicates

growth. Given the population growth that is likely to have been experienced over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it is almost inevitable that a survey of any manor taken in the early fourteenth century would reveal tenant numbers that exceeded by a large margin those of the late eleventh century. Such a method can be of minimal

assistance in enabling the calculation of demographic trends in the first half of the fourteenth century.

These somewhat negative comments concerning the use of tenant surveys or extents should not be thought to apply to all studies

that have adopted these sources for the purposes of investigating demographic change. Local ecological conditions and _ earlier settlement histories clearly led to divergent experiences over quite short distances. M. McKintosh has made very cautious use of tenant numbers as a surrogate for population data on the south Essex manor of Havering.*® In 1086 eighty-seven tenants are recorded on this manor

with almost 5,000 acres of land; in 1251 the number of direct tenants and sub-tenants had risen to 368, a figure which by 1352-53 had grown still further to 493. McKintosh shows herself more perceptive than many who have employed such data for demographic purposes in

suggesting that the multipliers used to inflate such numbers into population totals are likely to have varied over time. On applying a multiplier of 4.5 in 1251 and one of 3.0—3.5 in 1352, the latter to take account of likely demographic disruption caused by the plague death toll, she argues that population in 1352/3 stood at between 1,500 and

1,750, slightly below the 1,800 to 2,000 of 1251. Having made an allowance for a plague mortality of 33 per cent (perhaps a low figure) in

1348-49 she concludes that there was ‘considerable growth after 1251’.*° Havering had been a lightly populated manor at Domesday and 48 M. K. McKintosh, Autonomy and Community: The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200-1500, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 126-30. 49 It is noteworthy that at Halesowen Razi’s estimates show net demographic growth of 42 per cent from 1270-75 to 1345-49. See, Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 25. Making an allowance of mortality of 45 per cent rather than the 33 per cent assumed by McKintosh suggests net growth between 1250 and 1348 in Havering of less than 30

per cent. From these data, it is impossible to establish whether a population maximum in Havering, as in Halesowen, was achieved in the quinquennium prior to

42

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

over 3,000 acres had been assarted between 1086 and 1251 with a further 1,000 acres added over the course of the following century. The

area of north-central Essex to which we have already referred had a quite different settlement history being more anciently settled and

lacking large reservoirs of land into which thirteenth-century colonisers could move. The two manorial case-studies of Halesowen and Havering appear to display demographic trends indicative of substantial net population srowth in the later thirteenth and, in the case of the latter community, the early fourteenth century. They are both communities distinguished by their relatively low population densities. In Halesowen a population, at its maximum of close to 1,000 persons, inhabited 10,000 acres of land and at Havering in c.1349 2,500 persons had access to almost 9,500

acres of land, much of which was recently colonised, in addition to niches in a local economy which was functionally diversified. In both these cases ratios of land to labour were more favourable than those revealed by the central Essex manors of Great Waltham and High Easter

and the Huntingdonshire manors of Broughton, Holywell, and Houghton. Taunton, in terms of land availability per capita, seems to display a pattern intermediate between the two ‘experiences’ described above: unlike Great Waltham and High Easter in Essex, Broughton, Holywell-cum-Needingworth, and Houghton in Huntingdonshire, and Brigstock in Northamptonshire, it evidentally grew demographically until the second decade of the fourteenth century.”

A potentially illuminating measure of population trends, pioneered initially by S. L. Thrupp, has also been applied to the records of manorial courts.°? This technique involves the use of the numbers of

surviving sons who are alive at their father’s death to compute a the ‘great famine’ of 1315-17 or immediately prior to the Black Death. Neither case-study provides unequivocal support for local population totals in 1348 that exceeded those of 1315. °° Comparisons of this kind are difficult to make because of the tenurial basis of many population estimates. It seems that maximum early fourteenth century population

densities of 150-70 persons per square mile were characteristic of that area of north-central Essex containing the manors of Great Waltham and High Easter where population totals are obtained from evidence relating to tithing-penny payments. See

L. R. Poos, While This World Lasts: Essex After the Black Death, Cambridge, forthcoming, chapter 2. Densities ranged between 60 and 100 persons per square mile at Halesowen and Havering, although these latter estimates depend upon evidence which is exclusively tenurial in character. °! S. L. Thrupp, ‘The problem of replacement rates in late medieval England’, EcHR, XVIII, 1965, pp. 101-19.

A3

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH replacement rate or ratio. When used in combination with evidence for the numbers appearing in manor courts or of tenants listed on manorial extents or surveys, it may prove to be suggestive of demographic trends. Those who have employed this measurement assume that rates or ratios of unity or more imply that the populations concerned were replacing themselves or growing. At Halesowen, with the exception of the decade of agrarian crisis between 1310 and 1319, the average ratio of sons to fathers exceeded unity when calculated for the entire period from 1270

to 1349. It was therefore concluded that Halesowen families in the pre-plague period were able not only to replace themselves from generation to generation but also to produce sufficient surplus offspring to maintain population growth.” Nevertheless, replacement rates were consistently lower 1310-49 than 1270-1309, and even at their best — during the decade 1330-39 — they failed to match the rate calculated by Razi for the earlier period. An important study of the small east Norfolk manor of Hakeford Hall in Coltishall obtained replacement rates in addition to measuring

demographic trends by using the record of nominative listings of tenants entered in the manorial courts rolls in 1314 and 1349.°° It was concluded that population growth took place until the Black Death struck in 1349 in spite of tenant-to-land ratios of almost one per acre

and a population density approaching 500 per square mile. Replacement rates, based on the deaths of 163 tenants over 68 years, of 1.2 (somewhat higher than at Halesowen) persisted through to 1348. Bruce Campbell in this study also makes use of arather more subtle and demographically less ambiguous measure that records the distribution

of direct heirs and heiresses.°* The use of an average number of survivors as in the replacement rate is vulnerable among other things in small communities to distortions introduced by the survival of a small number of particularly large families. It has been established by simple simulation techniques that a population is stationary in size, assuming no net migration, when in 20 per cent of cases men have no surviving sons or daughters at their death, 60 per cent or more have one or more son surviving them, and in the remaining 20 per cent of cases daughters

°° Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 22-34. |

‘3B. M. S. Campbell, ‘Population pressure, inheritance and the land market in a fourteenth-century peasant community’, in R. M. Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-cycle, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 95-6. °4 Campbell, ‘Population pressure’, pp. 97-101.

44

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

only survive.’ At Coltishall, until the arrival of bubonic plague, it would seem that well over 60 per cent of fathers were survived by at least one son and demographic growth was assured.” This particular East

Anglian situation is in marked contrast to that encountered further

south in north Suffolk where on the manors of Redgrave and Rickinghall well before 1315 only 50 per cent of men had surviving sons

as their heirs.°’ Similarly, at Great Waltham and High Easter comparable patterns of heirship applied well before 1349, with the tithing-penny evidence revealing no detectable demographic growth before 1315 and marked decline in numbers between 1320 and 1348.°°

Mavis Mate has, in her contribution to this volume, deployed the replacement rate on a sample of tenant deaths that unfortunately is precariously small from a statistical point of view.°” For the Sussex manor of Udimore she derives a replacement rate and a proportion of men succeeded by sons that are very close to those derived for Coltishall

by Campbell, during at least a couple of years in the early 1320s. The results that Thrupp reported in 1965 suggested a downward drift in

replacement rates in all communities for which these could be computed over the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. All of these manors were in Suffolk, Norfolk, and Essex, although in the case of the closely situated north Suffolk manors of Redgrave and Hinderclay rates apparently did not descend below unity. Before too much weight is placed upon these findings from the replacement rates, it should be noted that there has been considerable discussion of the difficulties of interpreting this seductive demographic statistic even when it can be supposed that the record of surviving sons is complete. These difficulties are indeed considerable. To illustrate this | °° J. Goody, Production and Reproduction: a Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain, Cambridge, 1976, pp. 86-98; E. A. Wrigley, ‘Fertility Strategy for the Individual and the Group’ in C. Tilly, ed., Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, Princeton, 1978, pp. 135-54; R. M. Smith, ‘Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England 1250-1800’ inidem, Land, Kinship and Life-cycle, pp 40-5. °° Campbell, ‘Population pressure’, p. 98. °” R. M. Smith, ‘Families and their land in an area of partible inheritance, Redgrave, Suffolk 1260-1320’ in idem, Land, Kinship and Life-cycle, p. 49. °8 Smith, ‘Families and their land’, p. 54; Poos, ‘Rural population’, p. 522. °° See below pp. 97-9.

°° Thrupp, ‘Replacement rates’, p. 106, Table 1. The replacement rates that Thrupp computed for Redgrave, presumably from samples, imply a far smaller proportion of men dying without sons (5/40 or 12.5 per cent) compared with estimates made by Smith for the same manor (134/280 or 47.9 per cent). See Smith. ‘Some issues concerning families’, p. 49, Table 1.5.

A5

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH point, the theoretically straightforward case may be taken of exactly one son living at the father’s death: in this case the generations will replace

each other only if (on average) the son himself is, at that point, at the age when (again on average) his own son would be born. In more formal demographic terms, expectation of life at mean age of paternity must be equal to mean age at paternity. If, however, the father’s life expectancy

is shorter, his son will be ‘too young’ at the father’s death (relative to generational length) and a replacement rate of greater than unity is necessary to achieve a stationary population. Conversely, if the father’s life expectancy is greater than his mean age at paternity, a stationary - population can result with a replacement rate of less than unity. If it so happened that life expectancy had been falling and the mean age of paternity had been rising in the early fourteenth century a replacement rate in excess of unity would have been required before demographic growth could be assured. Even if replacement rates can be reliably calculated, therefore, one must possess data on adult life expectancy and mean age at paternity to draw meaningful demographic inferences. None of these measures can be derived for the communities whose replacement rates have been discussed above.°! The same difficulties of interpretation apply to the estmates of the male replacement rates of tenants-in-chief of the crown calculated by T. H. Hollingsworth from Inquisitiones Post Mortem.™ In this ingenious exercise, following J. C. Russell, Hollingsworth uses information on

the numbers of daughters identifiable as heiresses to estimate the number of sons, which because of primogeniture would not be fully revealed in successions to the father’s estate. The replacement rates obtained by this procedure are generally in excess of unity for the whole

period from 1270 to 1348, although falling from 1.4 in the period 1270-1300 to 1.2 for the period 1301-48. Such rates might superficially suggest that this social group displayed greater demographic resilience

or buoyancy than most of the manorial populations assessed to-date

along similar lines. Such conclusions can only be reached very tentatively in so far as, unlike those historians making estimates from manorial court rolls, Hollingsworth and Russell include as direct heirs srandsons as well as sons of the deceased tenant-in-chief which serves 61 Indeed, manorial court proceedings and testamentary records, lacking information on births, cannot yield these necessary statistics. 62 J.C. Russell, British Medieval Population, Albuquerque, 1948, pp. 236-45 and T. H. Hollingsworth, Historical Demography, London, 1969, pp. 375-88. A6

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

to inflate the replacement rate thereby calculated. Furthermore, differences in marriage ages and marital fertility rates could well mean that mean ages of paternity among those to be found in the Inquisitiones Post Mortem differed from the broad mass of the rural populace.

How much of the variation in demographic trends from community to community and from social group to social group that we have reviewed above has in the last analysis to do with variation in the quality of the evidence is extremely hard to establish. There would seem to be reasonably reliable evidence that populations on certain manors noteworthy for being concentrated in north-central Suffolk and northcentral Essex may well have been in decline, at least from the second decade of the fourteenth century. These manors also reveal little evidence of growth at least from the 1270s or 1280s. However, in northeast Norfolk we would seem to have an instance of noteworthy demo-

graphic growth through the first half of the fourteenth century. In Halesowen actual demographic decline between 1300 and 1348 seems unlikely, although growth may have been minimal. While many of the

manors that have so far been studied and which also appear to have exhibited demographic decline were within the estates of the large Benedictine houses, like Bury St Edmunds, Ramsey and perhaps St Albans, others were held by lay landlords not all of great political consequence.” This somewhat limited evidence does not immediately endorse Brenneyr’s view that ‘different balances of power and property between lords and peasants in different regions...led to overpopulation

at very different population densities, at different points in time...’, although the case of Coltishall, where demographic growth seems securely established, remains tantalisingly supportive of one plank in his argument.™ Some would regard it as essential to conclude this discussion of

local rates of demographic change with some thoughts on their °S An indication of demographic trends on the Hertfordshire manors of Park and Codicote within the estate of the abbot of St. Albans is provided by evidence of a quasi-demographic character. Leon Slota utilises information on the relative importance of inter-vivos to post-mortem land transfers and transfers from the lord to his tenantry; the latter thought to indicate an unwillingness or inability to take up land. A

decline in infer-vivos transfers and a rise in both post-mortem and seigneurial transfers to tenants inclines him to conclude that in both places ‘population was on the wane at least by the second quarter of the fourteenth century’, L. Slota, ‘The land market on the St. Albans manors of Park and Codicote 1237-1399’, unpublished University of Michigan Ph.D. thesis, 1984, p. 146. 64 Brenner, ‘Agrarian class structure’, p. 25.

47

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH implications for national population totals. What Postan with justifiable derision regarded as ‘the lure of aggregates’ is perhaps the most problematic area of endeavour in medieval demography.°? Consequently, the following discussion is undertaken with the greatest reluctance, for

the application of growth rates derived from investigations of local population to the task of generating national population totals is an especially risky pursuit. Most attempts to secure national population totals have not employed local studies and have involved working backwards to 1347 from a national demographic estimate obtained from the Poll Tax of 1377. The former total is derived by inflating that latter total so as to compensate for the major mortality crises associated with the plague outbreaks of 1375, 1369, 1360-61 and 1348-49. The margins for error are, of course, very large in any one of these calculations depending, for instance, on the extent of demographic recovery between epidemics, whether a favourable view is adopted of the level of

under-enumeration of taxpayers (i.e. 5 rather than 25 per cent) and whether a relatively ‘mature’ age structure (i.e. 35 per cent rather than

50 per cent under fourteen years of age) is adopted. Estimates for a population in 1347 ranging between 3.7 and 6.5 million have thereby been created. A range for these estimates between two extremes of almost 3 million is hardly a good advertisement for the acceptability of this kind of statistical manipulation. Proceeding to obtain a population total for 1300 isa more blatant example of journeying into the unknown and can generate totals that range between 3 and in excess of 7 million depending on whether the period between 1300 and 1348 is assumed to be one of demographic growth or decline.

The difficulties with, and the problematic status of, these exercises are highlighted by the earlier discussion of local demographic

trends. If the trends exhibited by those communities which evidently lost population were more common than those where growth appears to have been documented, then a population total substantially higher than 5 millions in 1300 must seriously be entertained (See Table 2.1). In 65 M. M. Postan, ‘Medieval agrarian society in its prime: England’, in idem, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 1, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, 2nd edn., Cambridge, 1966, p. 561, where he writes of these endeavours incurring ‘the risk of errors on a truly heroic scale’.

66 Postan, ‘Medieval agrarian society in its prime’, pp. 561-63; J. C. Russell, ‘The pre-plague population of England’, Journal of British Studies, V, 1966, 4—21; J. Z. Titow, English Rural Society 1200-1350, London 1969, pp. 66—73; and J. Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, London and Basingstoke, 1977, pp. 68-72.

A8

1370

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

Table 2.1 Population estimates for a sample of English manors, c. 1310 andc.

c. 1310 c. 1370 Manor Estimate A Estimate B A:B

Coltishall? 119 (1314) 33 (1370) 3.6 Halesowen” 485 (1311-15) 289 (1371-75) 1.7 Great Waltham? 320 (1306) 162 (1377) 2.0

High Easter? 306 (1306) 135 (1377) 2.3 Margaret Roding” 55 (1318) 25. (1365) 2.2 Chatham Hall° 63 (1308) 29 (1378) 2.2 Sources: ‘ Based on numbers of tenants: see, Campbell, ‘Population pressure’, p. 96, Table 2.1. * Based on counts of adult males in manorial court proceedings: see, Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 25, Table 1. 5 Based on males over 12 years of age in tithing: see, L. R. Poos, ‘Population and resources in two fourteenth-century Essex communities: Great Waltham and High Easter 1327-1389’, unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1983, pp. 309-20.

central Essex the tithing-penny evidence suggests a population in 1300 most probably twice that of 1377. But even those communities where populations exhibited growth or no net decline between 1300 and 1348 had populations in 1377 very much smaller than those of 1300. In the case of Halesowen, where population growth was apparently achieved in the aftermath of the difficulties of the 1310s, Razi’s population estimate for the quinquennium 1311-15 exceeded that for 1371—75 by a ratio of

1:1.76. Even at Coltishall in eastern Norfolk where demographic growth was particularly evident between 1320 and 1348 the tenantry in

1370 were less than a third of the number listed in 1314. Of course, these ratios are based upon what is only a handful of communities and subject to the qualification that they are founded upon population estimates that are themselves surrounded by considerable doubts. Nonetheless, if in the broadest sense they incorporate the range of experiences they strongly suggest that the English population total prior to 1310 is very unlikely to have been less than 5.0 million and most probably exceeded 6.0 million. Sucha demographic total would have been equal to and could well have exceeded that which was reached after the next period of sustained 49

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

demographic growth in the late sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. The more refined and firmly based estimates for the later period suggest that an English population of 5.2 million was achieved in the 1650s and that it was not until the 1760s that the population exceeded 6

million.°’ Are we to suppose that the ‘equilibrium’ level of the early fourteenth century was a million greater than in the mid-seventeenth century? This possibility has seriously to be entertained. At present we can only speculate on reasons for the probable higher equilibrium population in 1300 compared with that of 1600 or 1650. One highly

plausible contributory factor may be the much lower level of urbanisation in the earlier period. Estimating town populations at any period before 1801 is especially difficult, but even allowing for the inaccuracy that is bound to occur, there would appear to be striking contrasts between the two eras. Recent estimates show that the proportion of the population resident in towns above 10,000 more than tripled between c.1500 and c.1650 when national population approximately doubled.°° Much of this relative decline in the non-urban share of the population was a product of London’s remarkable growth so that by 1650 it approached about 200,000 and by 1650 was close to 400,000 when the national populations were 4.1 and 5.2 million respectively. Growth elsewhere in the urban hierarchy was less impressive but most likely managed to keep pace proportionally with the upward march of national population totals.

Recently there have been distinctive signs that students of English medieval towns in the fourteenth century are beginning to mark up their estimates of the populations of major centres. In particular, we should be alert to D. Keene’s forcefully argued case fora London population of c.80—100,000 in 1300 based on comparisons of property values and building density in Cheapside. Earlier estimates of London’s size suggested that it contained 40—50,000 persons in 1300. To this enhanced figure for London, should be added Keene’s figure of

11-12,000 for Winchester and a very recent estimate of 25,000 for Norwich.” This latter city had previously been assumed to have a 6” Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp, 207-12. 68 EA. Wrigley, ‘Urban growth and agricultural change in England and the Continent in the early-modern period’, in Rotberg and Rabb, Population and Economy, p. 147. °° For estimates of London’s population see D. Keene, ‘A new study of London before the Great Fire’, Urban History Yearbook 1984, p. 20 and ‘Medieval London and its region’,

The London Journal, XIV, 1989, p. 99; for Winchester see D. Keene, Survey of

50

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

population under 10,000 in the early fourteenth century.’° Notwithstanding this recently encountered enthusiasm for urban population srowth, it is unlikely that in 1300 more than 250,000 persons lived in settlements over 10,000 in size which would mean that they contained between 3 and5 per cent of the total population. These figures should be compared with Wrigley’s estimates of 6.0 and 10.8 per cent for 1600 and

1650 respectively.” The redistribution of persons into densely settled

urban communities increased the proportion of the population in ‘unhealthy’ environments and was a factor contributing to a decline in

national life expectancy in the seventeenth century.” Infants and young children, in particular, paid the ‘urban penalty’. The downward-

effect on national life expectancy caused by urbanisation was exacerbated because of the unusually low levels of mortality in the Tudor and Stuart countryside. ’° Infant mortality rates in rural parishes in late Tudor and Stuart England were rarely in excess of 150 per 1000 which is an especially favourable figure by the standards of most pre-industrial populations. As will be shown in the following section of this essay, our complete lack of information on infant mortality for any class of the

population in early fourteenth century England inhibits sure-footed comparisons of the two periods. Another important contrast between the first halves of the seven-

teenth and fourteenth centuries concerns the levels of national net migration. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England witnessed sizeable flows of emigrants to Ireland and North America which in Medieval Winchester, Winchester Studies, II, Oxford, 1985, p. 368; for Norwich see E. Rutledge, ‘Immigration and population growth in early fourteenth-century Norwich:

evidence from the tithing roll’, Urban History Yearbook 1988, p. 27. For a recent estimate of Norwich’s population, suggesting rapid growth from 11,000 in the late sixteenth century to between 22,000 and 25,000 in the 1620s and 1630s see J. Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, Chichester, 1988, pp. 28-30. For instance, J. Campbell suggested a figure of 5,000 to 10,000 in his ‘Norwich’, in M. D. Lobel, ed., The Atlas of Historic Towns, Oxford, 1975, p. 10. “ Wrigley, ‘Urban growth and agricultural change’, p. 148. See, too, the comments of R. H. Britnell, ‘England and northern Italy in the early fourteenth century: the economic contrasts’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XXXIX, 1989, p.

168, where, using a somewhat small national population total (4.5 million), he emphasises the low level of urbanisation in England in the early fourteenth century when comparisons are made with northern Italy. ” Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, p. 45. *3 R. S. Schofield and E. A. Wrigley, ‘Infant and child mortality in England in the late Tudor and early Stuart period’, in C. Webster, ed., Health, Medicine and Mortality in

the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, 1979, p. 75-7, and E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, ‘English population history from family reconstitution: summary results’, Population Studies, XXXVII, 1983, pp. 178~9.

5]

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

addition to the simultaneous fall in life expectancy contributed to a

slowing down of demographic growth and eventual population decline.“ We know very little about English net migration trends in the first half of the fourteenth century but there is no reason to suppose that

rates as high as 1.5-2.5 per 1000 were experienced. Indeed, midseventeenth-century rates were as high as any that held in the nineteenth century. England in the first half of the seventeenth century was

an extremely ‘open’ society and economy in so far as it was greatly affected both by imported diseases — whose circulation in society were sreatly intensified by the relatively high level of urbanisation — and by

the willingness or ability of the population to emigrate and thereby relieve the domestic build-up of demographic pressure.” Redistribution of persons from ‘healthy’ to ‘unhealthy’ areas and

emigration were of notable significance in enabling a fall in seven-

teenth-century demographic growth rates. Nevertheless, as determining factors the latter played a supporting role to the principal influence emanating from a substantial decline in the proportions of the population ever marrying. Recent estimates suggest that a large drop in proportions marrying shadowed the sharply worsening real

wage rate in the half century prior to 1650.’° The most powerful equilibrating demographic force in early seventeenth-century England was most definitely the Malthusian ‘preventive check’. Accordingly, we must proceed to review the evidence bearing on its relative importance in early fourteenth-century England. Identifying the Malthusian ‘checks’ between 1300 and 1348 We will consider the ‘positive check’ first of all since it has dominated the debate and is at the heart of Postan’s interpretation of demographic “* Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp. 227-8. *S Migrations into Wales, Ireland, and Scotland had all taken place during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the last two had certainly ceased by the first half of the fourteenth century. Furthermore, it has been suggested that in Wales most of the districts conquered by Edward I’s enterprise were ‘too inaccessible and unattractive

to tempt English colonists to settle there, in numbers’, R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change. Wales 1063-1415, Oxford, 1987, p. 370. For some discussion of the wider demographic consequences of emigration in seventeenthcentury England see, R. M. Smith, ‘Exogenous and endogenous influences on the ‘preventive check’ in England 1600-1750: some specification problems’, EcHR, forthcoming. © Schofield, ‘English marriage patterns revisited’, p. 16; J. Goldstone, ‘The demographic revolution in England: a re-examination’, Population Studies, XL, 1986, p. 11.

52

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

and economic trends from 1300 to 1348. As Harvey noted, Postan’s: ... isa thesis that must affect our whole understanding of European life in the

fourteenth century, for it makes a rise in the death-rate the mainspring of economic change more than a generation before the Black Death. It is distinctive, too, in that it makes the population trend turn upon the conditions of agrarian production, appeals boldly to the likelihood of soil exhaustion . . i

Agricultural historians have debated and continue to debate the extent to which the process of demographic growth led to the use and eventual mining of poor-quality soils with attendant loss of fertility and falling crop yields. It can be said that there has been a virtual explosion of data on this matter and the most convinced Postanian would now be obliged to accept that the ecological catastrophe that was supposed to distinsuish the fourteenth century is hard to detect. Demographic historians,

to-date a smaller group of practitioners than their colleagues in agricultural history, have in the face of considerable data problems considered the extent to which the cultivators themselves were punished for their ‘reproductive success’ or, indeed, implied lack of demosraphic prudence. As with yield ratios or land abandonment, mortality has been very frequently employed as an indicator of the well-being of

the nation’s human capital. Such views have often been based on a

much-cited study of tenants on certain manors of the bishops of Winchester that employs evidence relating to heriots (i.e. death duties levied on the holdings of customary tenants) and grain prices.” In this study Postan and Titow considered the relationship between heriots and

Srain prices to derive the rough contours of mortality, much in the same way as historical demographers of the early modern period use the | frequency of deaths recorded in parish registers to establish an index of the susceptibility of populations to mortality surges in years of sharply rising food prices. This evidence relating to manors on the bishops of Winchester’s estates seems unambiguous in showing that years of high

prices such as 1258, 1272, 1289, 1297 and above all 1309-19 saw

| 53

marked rises in the numbers of recorded deaths, especially among the

poorer tenants who because of their lack of livestock resources paid _ their heriots in cash rather than in kind. I. Kershaw, in a wide-ranging overview, noted that comparable

associations of heriots and prices were not found in other parts of “T Harvey, ‘The population trend in England’, p. 24. 78 Postan and Titow, ‘Heriots and prices’, pp. 164—71.

Aa BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

Dates Rickinghall’ | Redgrave* _—_ Chesterton? Halesowen*

1307-09 7 13 (4) 18 1310-12 28 24 (22) 23 13 38

1313-15 15 17 (18) 18 15 1316-18 38 34 43 1319-21 10(1)232911

Note: Figures in parentheses for Redgrave are merchets. Sources: ! British Library Add. Roll 63419-35. * University of Chicago, Joseph Regenstein Library Bacon Ms. 11-14. 3 Clarke, ‘Peasant society and land transactions’, p. 104. * Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 37.

Dates Fareham Warham Meon Wargrave Taunton (Hants.) (Hants.) (Hants.) (Berks. ) (Som.)

— 1307-09 25 71 29 4] 91 1310-12 25 53 50 43 111 1313-15 20 51 34 37 97 1316-18 43 82 71 AQ 19] Source: Postan and Titow, ‘Heriots and prices’, p. 175, Table 9.1.

England.” On the other hand, more recent work would seem to confirm that it is rare to find, in analyses of obituary evidence, the absence of a mortality rise in the wake of the more notorious harvest failures of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the quantity of such systematic demographic research is small, indeed minuscule, when set alongside the work that had been done on the decades of severe harvest failure in Tudor and Stuart England such

as the 1580s, 1590s, and 1620s.°° Early modernists are able, in ” I. Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine and the agrarian crisis in England 1315-1322’, Past and Present, LIX, 1973, p. 37.

6° A. Appelby, Famine in Tudor and stuart England, Stanford, 1978, pp. 164-71; J. Walter and R. S. Schofield, ‘Famine, disease and crisis mortality in early modern society’, in idem, eds., Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern 5A

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

calibrating the intensity of acrise de subsistence, to compare the rise in the number of deaths in the year beginning with a deficient harvest with the number of deaths in ‘normal years’. Manorial court rolls do not lend themselves so readily to this procedure, partly because of the irregularity of survival and holding of court sessions and because only the deaths of adult land-holders (predominantly male) are recorded. However, when deaths are compared in dearth years or decades containing crisis-ridden episodes some indication of the operation of the positive check can be gauged. In Table 2.2 data on tenant deaths taken from the manorial court rolls for the two contiguous Suffolk manors of Redgrave and Rickinghall, for the Cambridgeshire manor of Chesterton, and for Halesowen (Worcestershire) are presented. In Table 2.3 data for the five Winchester manors, originally studied by Postan and Titow and distributed in Hampshire, Berkshire, and Somerset are presented. These data are arranged in three-year periods extending from 1307 to 1318 for no

other reason than to allow comparison with the published evidence from Halesowen. One feature that stands out from these data is that, with the single exception of Wargrave, the three-year period, 1316-18,

records the largest number of deaths. In fact, in Redgrave and Rickinghall twenty-two and twenty-eight respectively of the thirty-four and thirty-eight deaths for the period 1316—18 are registered in 1316. Of

the twenty-nine deaths from 1316-18 at Chesterton twenty-three occurred in the harvest year 1316-17. These findings contradict Hallam’s view that in regions where barley was the predominant breadgrain, diets were somewhat protected from the effects of wet summers.®*! There is, however, some reason to suspect that the surge of deaths as a whole was less dramatic on East Anglian manors than in the majority of localities within the Winchester sample and at Halesowen.

Campbell has already reminded us that the obituary evidence from Coltishall records no apparent rise in mortality, although a detectable increase in proportions of men dying with under-age heirs or without filial heirs in the period 1315-22 may indicate ‘some excess mortality’ .*”

| 55

Society, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 28-41; P. Galloway, ‘Basic patterns in annual variations in fertility, nuptiality, mortality and prices in pre-industrial Europe’,

Population Studies XLII, 1988, pp. 290-91; R. D. Lee, ‘Short-term variations in vital rates, prices and weather’ in Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp. 356-410. 81H. E. Hallam, ‘The climate of eastern England, 1250-1350’, Agricultural History Review, XXXII, 1984, p. 132. 82 Campbell, ‘Population pressure’, pp. 98-9.

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

Relative to the number of heriots taken in the first three-year period in Tables 2.2 and 2.3, it would seem that the Suffolk manors of Redgrave and Rickinghall, and Halesowen in Worcestershire, suffered more in the wake of the harvest failure of 1310 than did many of the communities in the Winchester sample. Clearly much more work is needed on the relationship between short-term mortality and harvest

failure in the first quarter of the fourteenth century than has been completed to-date. The second quarter of the century may well have been less susceptible to mortality surges comparable to that of 1316, although epidemic diseases seem to have been capable of causing sharp

but highly localised rises in mortality such as in 1343 in Halesowen

when a surprisingly large number of females appear among the deceased tenants.®° One feature of East Anglian manors that is particularly striking in

both the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is the very considerable number of land transactions in the wake of harvest failures.** It remains to be established whether this feature should be

interpreted as just another index of the desperate plight of an impoverished tenantry, or whether in this highly commercialised region these ‘distress sales’ provided a means of remedying liquidity problems and served in some sense to even out consumption streams in these periods of adversity. Campbell in his study of Coltishall through the less crisis-ridden 1330s and 1340s has shown that while there was a

striking propensity to part with land during periods of economic hardship there was a notable indication of recovery when conditions improved.® Such evidence suggests the presence of a possible ‘upside’

counterpart to catastrophes or at least recognisable symmetry in the processes of gain and loss. The more muted volatility of mortality in Coltishall and perhaps elsewhere in the eastern regions may be linked to such structural features of the land market. Of course, it could be that large numbers of infer-vivos or pre-mortem transfers may have served

to reduce the number of recorded heriots in the sense that impoverished men who had sold their last parcel of land would on their

83 Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 42. 84 Smith, ‘Families and their land’; Campbell, Population pressure’; C. Clarke, ‘Peasant

society and land transactions in Chesterton, Cambridgeshire, 1277-1325’, unpublished University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1985. , 85 Campbell, ‘Population pressure’, pp. 116 and 120.

56

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS death not be ‘at risk’ to pay heriot.®° It should, however, be possible to isolate this effect on manors where it was the practice for ceders of land

to pay heriot when they made their very last transfer which left them completely bereft of customary property.

If we can certainly detect evidence of short-term surges in mortality, can we identify any trend in the level of ‘background’ mortality? Postan and Titow thought they could; they attempted to go

further than assessing the susceptibility of the tenantry to ‘crisis mortality’ and made efforts to compute crude death-rates and life expectancies.°’ In the early fourteenth century they suggest that the crude death-rates on these manors (Taunton in Somerset, Fareham, Waltham and Meon in Hampshire, and Wargrave in Berkshire) approached 70 to 75 per 1000. That calculation, it should be stressed, was based on deriving a death-rate for ‘adults’ and then projecting it downwards to produce an implied rate for younger age groups. Such levels of mortality are exceedingly high and given the reproductive capacity of most societies that generally cannot exceed 50 per 1000, would inevitably lead, if persistent, to severe demographic decline.

What is more, a crude death-rate of this order is equivalent to an expectation at birth of only fifteen years.°° Doubts do surround the plausibility of such findings for they are based firstly on an assumed tenant population on the five manors of 1,725 and do not make allowance for the likely effect of sub-division of holdings or the fact that cash heriots (treated as deaths) might often have ‘anticipated’ death duties paid by substantial rather than poor tenants when engaging in infervivos transfers of land. What is critical is that both influences tended to increase the size of the population at risk and, hence, an assumption that it was unchanging tends to allow, in the calculation of the death-

rate, the numerator to rise but the denominator to remain fixed with

8° R. M. Smith, ‘Transactional analysis and the measurement of certain institutional determinants of fertility: a comparison of communities in present-day Bangladesh and pre-industrial England’, in J. C. Caldwell, A. G. Hill and V. J. Hull, eds., Micro-approaches to Demographic Research, London, 1988, pp. 215—26. 87 Postan and Titow, ‘Heriots and prices’, pp. 159-64. 88 Such rates are far worse than the harshest mortality levels encountered in model life tables. For instance, the ‘Model West Level 1’ life-table with an expectation of life at

birth for males of 18 years indicates that to ensure a stationary population, crude death-rates and birth-rates would have to be equal at 50 per 1000. See, A. J. Coale and P. Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables, London, 1983, p. 42 and p. 55.

57

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH , the consequent result that the index of mortality is exaggerated.*° Linked to an estimate of the crude death-rate was an attempt to

calculate life expectancies of tenants on entry into property.”? It is assumed that such expectations relate to the years elapsing between accession to land at age twenty (i.e. the legal age of majority) and death. Such intervals declined from twenty-four years in the 1240s to twenty

years or less in the first half of the fourteenth century. A similar technique, based upon the assumption that property was acquired at age twenty, has been employed by Razi in his attempt to calculate adult mortality at Halesowen.”! This study, careful in adjusting the estimate

by taking account of the bias introduced by the greater amount of evidence relating to the more substantial tenants, produces an overall estimate for the period 1270-1349 of a life expectancy at birth (eo) of twenty-five years which, while far less extreme than Postan and Titow’s estimate, is still suggestive of very severe mortality. What is more, the evidence seems to suggest very considerable discrepancies between the life expectancies of tenants at age twenty; the more substantial ‘well

documented tenants’ whose deaths are recorded in the Halesowen courts between 1300 and 1348 lived on average a further 30.2 years after

entering their land; poor tenants (those holding under a quartervirgate) are shown to have lived a further 20.8 years; those almost destitute such as cottagers survived a further ten years. While Razi should be applauded for attempting to calibrate the demographic handicaps carried by the smallholders and landless sections of Halesowen society in the early fourteenth century, the evidence is ultimately unable to resolve the question of whether the computed discrep-

ancies are exaggerated by differential age of acquisition of land by economic status group, with the poor obliged to wait longer than the

sons of the better-off tenants.”

Alongside these estimates of mortality that derive from manorial

sources should be placed those produced by Russell from the Inquisitiones Post Mortem.” They are, however, no more securely 89 G. Ohlin, ‘No safety in numbers: some pitfalls of historical statistics’ in R. Floud, ed., Essays in Quantitative Economic History, Oxford, 1974, pp. 73-77. °° Postan and Titow, ‘Heriots and prices’, pp. 81-3. 9! Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 34-45. %2 L. R. Poos and R. M. Smith, ‘ “Legal windows onto historical populations’’?: recent

research on demography and the manorial court in medieval England’, Law and History Review, Il, 1984, pp. 140-4. 83 Russell, British Medieval Population, pp. 93-117.

58

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

based, depending on assumptions about nominative linkages from inquisition to inqusition and reported ages of heirs of questionable

accuracy. Furthermore, they provide information that is almost entirely confined to males over the ages of fifteen or twenty and reveal

nothing of value concerning infants and children. Nonetheless, Russell’s estimates of age-specific mortality rates for males between the ages of twenty and forty display considerable changes between the birth cohorts prior to 1276 and those from 1276 to 1300 and between 1301

and 1325. Those male tenants-in-chief born prior to 1276 appear to have experienced mortality rates that compare favourably with the British peerage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, mortality rates among males aged between twenty and forty and born between 1276 and 1325 rose quite markedly. Indeed, life expectancy at age twenty-five (eos) in Russell’s estimates fell to the particularly low

level of twenty in the early fourteenth century. It is important to acknowledge that these age specific rates are extremely volatile, in part

a reflection of the small numbers of years and deaths as well as the problematic evidence upon which they are based.” These problems become even more significant when it is realised that expectations of life at twenty, of twenty-five years or less, depending at what rate the population was growing, will, if resort is made to model life tables, imply male expectations of life at birth of eighteen to twenty-two years. Deriving eo from ego in this way presumes that the relationship between adult mortality and mortality at younger ages was similar to that defined in such model life tables as those produced by the United Nations or by A. J. Coale and P. Demeny.” Yet this is unlikely

because it is widely encountered in work on European historical populations that although societies might have comparable adult mortalities, their associated infant and child mortality rates are less bya

degree that may imply that adult expectancies underpredict life expectancy at birth by as much as ten years.”° Uncertainties therefore abound. It would appear that we still lack demographic evidence that is %* Russell, British Medieval Population, pp. 199-207. For life expectancy with the sixteenth-century peerage see T. H. Hollingsworth, The Demography of the British Peerage, supplement to Population Studies, XVIII, 1964, pp. 56-7. For some sceptical reflections on demographic use of the inquisitiones post mortem see Ohlin, ‘No safety in numbers’, pp. 61-6. °° Coale and Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables, and United Nations, Methods for Population Projections by Sex and Age, New York, 1956. 2° Ohlin, ‘No safety in numbers’, pp. 68-9 and Schofield and Wrigley, ‘Infant and child mortality’, pp. 61-95.

59

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH sufficiently unambiguous to permit us to draw any conclusions about the shift in either the death-rate or the expectation of life at birth over the course of the first half of the fourteenth century. Certainly there are no data relating to death-rates or life expectancies that can be seen to provide a sound basis for Miller and Hatcher’s view that ‘the famines of these years were an episode in an era of high mortality that persisted until the Black Death raised it to heights beyond all precedent’.?’ Nor can we share their apparent confidence when they state that ‘we may take as a right order of magnitude the estimate that at birth even the children of gentry and noble families might on average have expected a life span of no more than 22-28 years’.”® If we are inclined to accept the exceedingly low life expectancies at

birth implied by attempts to measure adult life expectancy among the

tenants of the bishops of Winchester in southern England or on a Worcestershire manor we must note that they stand perhaps eight to ten years lower than comparable measures for rural parishes in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England when real incomes had plummetted. Such a discrepancy is important to contemplate for Razi

argues that the population of Halesowen, notwithstanding such a bruising regime of mortality, managed an annual rate of growth of almost 0.5 per cent for the period from 1270 to 1348 as a whole. To produce this level of growth with such mortality penalties and in the absence of immigration would have required gross reproduction rates considerably in excess of those for sixteenth-century England. In short, such an argument implies the existence in early fourteenth-century Halesowen of a ‘high pressure’ demographic system in which severe mortality was counterbalanced by high fertility.°?? Accepting such a conceptualisation of basic demographic interrelationships suggests that demographic growth when it slowed down or terminated most likely derived from a severe rise in mortality to such a level that fertility,

because of physiological limitations on reproductive capacity, was unable to rise in a compensatory fashion. Positive checks served therefore in this argument as the prime demographic determinant. Indeed, the most authoritative overview of the period from 1315 to 1349 would

seem to adopt this position in stating that ‘it looks as though the increased death-rate may have reduced, however marginally, the 9” Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, p. 243. %8 Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, p. viii. ° Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp. 528-9.

60

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS intensity of consumer demand, and done something to damp down both competition for land and competition for employment by stabilizing or thinning the number of competitors’.’°°

The culling of numbers by death-rates intensified by an inadequacy of economic resources in phases of harvest failure is of course a central plank in the Postan model of demographic-economic change. Differential mortality contingent upon the intensification of social differences with respect to access to land and resources is fundamental to Razi’s argument although it is not presented in his case-study as leading to demographic decline. For, in this approach, the survival chances of the smallholders is poor, and the more successful strategies of social reproduction displayed by richer tenants is achieved largely through the colonisation, by sons of wealthy kulaks, of holdings vacated by cottagers and quarter-virgators who sold out in desperation or died

without surviving offspring. In presenting social processes in these terms we are given a model that implies far greater variation across the

rural social strata in life expectancy than in fertility. Indeed, we can perceive in Razi’s portrayal of demographic conditions a set of processes reminiscent of the animal world as described by Charles Darwin when he wrote of the gaps in the ‘economy of nature’ formed ‘by thrusting out weaker ones’ which resembles the views of Alfred Russel Wallace who, when reflecting in the context of his own ideas on evolution, considered why some die and some live and stated that the ‘fittest would survive’.*?! Such ideas link with Adam Smith’s writing also, for he thought that it is

‘among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species’ by ‘destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce’.1°2

Of course, the medieval demographer is ultimately severely restricted in his evaluation of Adam Smith’s argument by not being able to study infant and child mortality which is unequivocally hidden from view in the sources. Evidence is, however, more readily available for

assessing another approach to the mechanisms by which economic constraints on fertility served to limit demographic growth in the late 100 Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, p. 244.

101 R. Keynes, ‘Malthus and biological equilibria’, in J. Dupaquier and A. FauveChamoux, eds., Malthus, Past and Present, London, 1983, pp. 359-61. 102 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, E. Cannan, ed., Chicago, 1976, p. 89.

61

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. We may firstly take our cue from the students of animal populations who are inclined to distance themselves from the Darwinian emphasis on mortality differentials as a means of achieving demographic restraint and focus instead on fertility

limitation.'°° There has been some recent stirring of interest in the possibility that birth-control in the form of ‘the appreciable practice of

coitus interruptus’ became more visible at the turn of the thirteenth century in acontext of ‘poverty, increasing numbers and concern about the problem’ in Western Europe as a whole.” The evidence mobilised in this provocative study relates primarily, indeed exclusively, to texts

written by churchmen and priests’ manuals that, because of their

subject matter and tone, suggest to P. P. A. Biller that church authorities, in particular, were preoccupied with what they saw as a widespread social problem. Unfortunately, the demographic data that would be needed to identify such activities among the English rural populace of the early fourteenth century are totally lacking. In much the same way that the short-run responsiveness of deaths to harvest conditions and food prices could be tested utilising year-byyear variations in the number of heriots, a search might be made of the

variations in the number of marriages recorded in manorial court sessions. In fact, Razi, in investigating the demography of Halesowen

before 1349, provides the only published study that attempts to measure the short-term working of the preventive check. For this purpose he utilises the license fees or merchets paid by the daughters of the Halesowen villeins. As he acknowledges, the use of these fees for this purpose is problematic because of the ever-present suspicion that variations in such fines would be just as likely to reflect fluctuations in

the administrative practices or efficiency of the manorial court as actual marital propensities. Nevertheless, his findings were suggestive in that in periods immediately following years of high mortality the number of

merchets rose as opportunities to enter vacated holdings presumably increased. The subsistence crisis of 1316-17, he believes, was so severe

that although land did become available the incidence of marriage remained low and only later in the 1320s did the marriage-rate pick up. But when it did, Razi argues, it reached exceptionally high levels that 103 V. Wynne-Edwards, Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour, Edinburgh and London, 1962.

104'P. P. A. Biller, ‘Birth-control in the West in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries’, Past and Present, LXLIV, 1980, p. 20.

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DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

were sustained through the 1330s and 1340s to such a degree that the population recovered from the buffetting it had received in the first twenty-five years of the century.!™ Razi’s data on this matter do seem to be highly plausible. Indeed, in Redgrave, variations in the number of merchets may also reflect the

movements in both mortality and economic conditions. For instance,

the rise in deaths in 1310-11 may well have led to a subsequent improvement in marriage prospects, for the court rolls contain references to merchets paid by or on behalf of twenty-two females in the

three year period, 1310-12, compared with only four from 1307-09. Likewise, the improved conditions between 1313 and 1315 leave evidence of a further eighteen marriages whereas only one merchet is paid in the most difficult years from 1316-18 when recorded tenant deaths reach a maximum number.’°° Notwithstanding these suggestive inter-

relationships, it would be wise to treat marriage fines with circumspection. E. Searle, on observing fluctuations in their number on the Yorkshire manor of Wakefield, has shown how susceptible their number could be to the influence of seigneurial whim and financial

predicament.’”’ In fact, there has been considerable discussion in recent years of the degree to which daughters of villeins, although in theory liable to pay merchet, did indeed do so. Implied marriage-rates computed from merchet payments on a number of manors in the early fourteenth century seem to be implausibly low.'°° In Razi’s own sample

from Halesowen, the annually recorded merchets constituted a marriage-rate that rarely exceeded five per 1,000. In late sixteenth century England, when population growth rates were often in excess of 0.7 per cent per annum, crude marriage-rates were three times as high

as those in Halesowen, although one in four may have been remarriages.'”’ If merchets are used as an index of marital incidence in the English countryside before the Black Death it implies a marriage-

rate of half that found even under a European regime. They surely cannot be used, and what is more, they relate disproportionately to 105 Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 45-50. 106 University of Chicago, Joseph Regenstein Library Ms. 11-14. 107 E. Searle,’The seigneurial control of women’s marriage: the antecedents and function of merchet in England’, Past and Present, LXXXII, 1979, p. 28. 108 R. M. Smith, ‘Women’s property rights under customary law: some developments in

the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XXXVI, 1986, pp. 170-1. 109 Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp. 531-5.

63

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH women drawn from the upper levels of the manorial tenantry, judging from the quantities of land held by the families of the women concerned

or from the landholdings they themselves received in the form of dowry.!'° For instance, on certain of the Winchester manors, the daughters of full virgators were more likely to pay a marriage fine than

daughters of quarter-virgators or smallholders by a factor of almost fifteen at Ivinghoe and almost four at both Adderbury and East Meon.""!

Fifty years ago the Harvard sociologist G. C. Homans wrote a brilliantly innovative account of thirteenth-century English rural society, based very largely on the records of manorial courts in which he

portrayed marriage among the customary tenantry as unavailable to adult males until they had gained access to property.!!” His argument was conducted very largely in the context of what he saw as the limiting

effects of impartible inheritance on the marital oportunities of male siblings of the designated heir.’’° While largely concerned with the family arrangements creating what he saw as a stem-family norm in champion England, Homans clearly presents a portrait of marriage for

rural males which is far from universal and noticeably restricted, as they wait to inherit or meet their side of a maintenance contract that supports the requirements of their elderly parents who have passed on the management of the land to them in retirement. Homans, in his 110 Smith, ‘Women’s property rights’, pp. 171-2; Poos and Smith, ‘ “Legal windows onto historical populations” ’, pp. 146-8. 111 J.P. Williams, ‘Marriage among the customary tenants of the bishops of Winchester, 1297-1366’, unpublished fellowship thesis, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 12-14; R. M. Smith, ‘Seigneurial reaction to, and the scale of, villein migration in

England 1250-1450’, in idem and Z. Razi, eds., The Manor Court and Medieval English Society, Oxford, forthcoming. Hallam in investigating merchet payments in the Myntling Register of Spalding Priory, containing among other evidence records of merchets that had been abstracted from the court rolls of the five priory manors of Pinchbeck, Spalding, Weston, Moulton and Sutton in Lincolnshire, feels confident that they constitute a meaningful record of marriage frequencies. He divides the 1,637 merchets recorded in these manors into half-century periods and when discovering that there were 484 in 1252-1300, 676 in 1301-50, 281 in 1351-1400, 96 in 1401-50 and 100 in 1451-78, concludes that ‘the numbers reflect the population movements of the period, the fluctuating popularity of matrimony and the decline, after 1400, both of the prior’s stock of villeins and his grasp of those that remained’. However, he does not feel it necessary to explain why a very high proportion of the increased number of merchets between 1302-50 should be the result of their growth in just one of the five manors. For in Moulton only 73 merchets recorded between 1252 and 1300 rose to become 193 between 1301 and 1350. See, H. E. Hallam, ‘Age at ’ marriage and age at death in the Lincolnshire Fenland 1252~—1478’, Population Studies, XXXIX, 1985, p. 58. ‘2 G. C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1941. 13 Homans, English Villagers, pp. 121-59.

64

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS work, is concerned to demonstrate how in champion England marriage entailed a considerable degree of economic independence and was a condition obtainable only through entry into one of a fixed number of niches.'* Openings to land were created, therefore, through deaths or retirements; the more openings or the earlier the retirements the more marriage there was. Indeed, the evidence discussed above on marriage frequencies in Halesowen and Redgrave in the wake of mortality in the early fourteenth century is perfectly compatible with this view. Such

‘social rules’ might be supposed to have functioned so as to limit runaway demographic growth and to establish demographic equilibria that did not lead to diminution in the ratio of land to people. The views of Homans have not gone unchallenged. In fact, Razi and E. Britton, in their work on Halesowen and Broughton respectively,

have established that non-inheriting sons in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries did acquire property by means other than waiting for their fathers to die or to retire. At Broughton Britton discovered that 23 per cent of resident families between 1288 and 1340

had more than one son who managed to acquire property.t Razi, having reconstituted 788 families resident in Halesowen between 1270 and 1348, discovered that of the 590 who had at least one son observable in the court records, 290 left evidence of two or more sons, and in 140 of

those cases two or more siblings are observed holding land simultaneously. The success diplayed by the ‘surplus’ sons in gaining access to land led Razi to claim that ‘Halesowen villagers were prepared to

face economic hardship and destitution rather than to remain bachelors .. .’.1!° Unfortunately, it has not always been fully appreciated that it was

not the death of an individual’s father nor his retirement that really mattered in permitting this pattern of niche occupancy, but any death or retirement. For many men would die or retire without direct offspring. In fact, in stationary populations 40 per cent of men would be without sons and only approximately 28 per cent would have had two

or more sons.'*’ If holdings were partible among heiresses, as was "4 R. S. Schofield, ‘The relationship between demographic structure and environment in pre-industrial western Europe’, in W. Conze, ed., Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, Stuttgart, 1976, pp. 147-60. "S Razi, Life, Death and Marriage, pp. 50-7; E. Britton, ‘The peasant family in fourteenth-century England’, Peasant Studies, V, 1976, p. 4 © Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p.57 ‘17 Smith, ‘Some issues concerning families and their property’, pp. 44-5.

65

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH frequently the practice, then we can show that in a population of 1,000

families there would in theory have been 544 vacancies for the 426 ‘surplus sons’ in the 28 per cent of all families producing them. The prospects of ‘surplus sons’ of course deteriorated markedly when the population was growing. For example, witha growth rate of 0.8 per cent per annum fewer than half the ‘surplus sons’ would theoretically have

had access to a slot.'!® Nonetheless, there are opportunities that can presumably be offered to surplus sons in a system of impartibility, either through inheritance within a wider kin group, marriage to an

heiress, or indeed through leasing and purchasing land from men lacking heirs. There is no reason to be surprised by Britton’s findings

concerning the success he demonstrates younger sons displayed in acquiring land given the demographic decline that he documents at Broughton.'!? Such findings are not incompatible with impartibility nor are they at odds with Homans’ rule that marriage without land was socially unacceptable. It is not therefore necessarily obvious that social practices would be fundamentally different in communities practising impartible and partible inheritance, especially if population growth was minimal. In other words, surplus sons might move to holdings of other men just as co-heirs might rationalise their inheritances in such a way

as to ensure that physical partition was avoided through sale by one sibling to another and subsequent entry of the ‘seller’ into the land

market. Land markets certainly could help to service these redistributions. Such considerations readily indicate that the distinction Homans wished to make between social arrangements and social forms likely to have distinguished the areas of England practising on the one hand impartible and on the other partible inheritance, has been overdrawn and that there were substantial divergences of theory from practice.!2° While the potential for fragmentation of holdings was obviously

considerable in areas of partible inheritance during periods of population growth, there were no obvious connections between inheritance practices and demographic growth rates. For example, customary

tenants on both of the Suffolk manors of Redgrave and Rickinghall

practised partible inheritance but in fewer than 30 per cent of all inheritances did groups involving two or more male siblings inherit 118 Smith, ‘Some issues concerning families and their property’, p. 48 119 Britton, The Community of the Vill, pp. 132-43. 120 Smith, ‘Some issues concerning families’, pp. 46-52.

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DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

between 1260 and 1320.'¢! Furthermore, while it was very common for such sibling groups to enter an arrangement whereby one or more sold out his or their share in the joint inheritance to a single ‘heir’, it was far from evident that these communities experienced especially high levels of nuptiality, at least among males. Between 1260 and 1319 at Redgrave in 58 out of 178 inheritances when there was no direct heir to inherit, a brother or brothers inherited, suggesting that in many cases marriage may have been forgone by the deceased./“* In the period between 1260 and 1320 demographic trends on both of these Suffolk manors were similar to those found on the central Essex manors of Great Waltham and High Easter where single-heir inheritance was the custom. Indeed, it is far from clear that partibility was consistently associated with high

population densities. Great Waltham in Essex which practised impartibility had a population density in 1300 greater than that of the

manor of Moulton in the Lincolnshire Fens where Hallam has suggested multigeniture fostered particularly heavy concentrations of people.!* It would seem, therefore, that it is difficult to observe any consistently encountered tendency for areas of partible inheritance to be associated with particularly high levels of male nuptiality in the early fourteenth century. What is more, the evidence presented by Razi and Britton does not necessarily indicate that the manors of Halesowen and Broughton, with impartible inheritance of the land of which a man died seised, displayed patterns in which men entered into marriage without regard to the economic consequences of such an action. The potential access of ‘surplus’ sons to the land of heirless men was considerable, given the effects of the ‘demographic lottery’. Whatever may have been the extent of the openings available to

men allowing them to by-pass the theoretical restrictions of unigeniture or, indeed, to adapt themselves to the inconveniences of multigeniture, we are left with no clear sense of what these practices implied for the level of, or trends in, female marriage chances. Of interest here is some evidence relating to marital incidence from the late thirteenth century, especially valuable because such estimates cannot be made again until we have access to the Poll Tax listings of

| 67

1377-81. The evidence from the listings of the prior of Spalding’s serfs 121 Smith, ‘Some issues concerning families’, p. 49. 122 Smith, ‘Families and their land’, p. 194 123 1. E. Hallam, ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, EcHR, X, pp. 350-1.

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH at Weston, where impartibility was the custom, and Moulton, practising partibility, suggest that considerable marital restraint was exercised by

both sexes in the 1260s. These are difficult sources to interpret and

cannot, contrary to Hallam’s view, be treated as if they were censuses.'““ In fact, they are genealogies and it is impossible to estab-

lish with any precision who is alive or who is dead.’ They can, however, be employed in such a way as to establish maximum and minimum estimates of marriage proportions. For those over five years of age (assumed to be those not listed as parvuli), a maximum estimate indicated that 48 per cent and 50 per cent of the women in Weston and

Moulton respectively were married while a minimum estimate suggested that 36 and 23 per cent respectively were married. For men the maximum estimates for Weston and Moulton were 50 and 48 per

cent respectively and minimum values were 32 and 29 per cent respectively. There are good reasons for assuming that the marriage proportions for males and females fell approximately mid-way between

the two extremes, at around 40 per cent for males in Weston and Moulton and 42 per cent for females in Moulton and 37 for females in Weston. These values would have been very close to comparable estimates of the proportions married of those over the age of five in English

seventeenth-century populations when mean ages at first marriage were about twenty-six for females and twenty-nine for males./”° It

should, furthermore, be noted that these listings omit to include information on those local inhabitants who were not serf land holders (i.e. unattached labourers and servants) and who, we may suppose, were the least likely to be married.'*’ But to test the working of the preventive check over the medium

term we would need to establish whether there was any significant

change in marital practice relating to the age, incidence, and remarriage of females. Conditions of many manors in the later thir-

teenth and early fourteenth centuries were such that entry into marriage was not without considerable obstacles. Evidence has been collected indicating the extent of widow remarriage in communities 124 Hallam, ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, p. 340. “9 R. M. Smith, ‘Hypothéses sur la nuptialite aux XII[Ie—-XIVe siécles’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, XXXVIII, 1983, pp. 120-1. 126 Smith, ‘Hypothéses sur la nuplialite’, pp. 121-4. 127 L. R. Poos, ‘Reconstructing a demographic region in late-medieval England: the case of Essex after the Black Death’, in R. M. Smith, ed., Regional and Spatial Demographic Patterns in the Past, Oxford forthcoming.

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DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

whose widows retained substantial shares in part or the whole of their dead husband’s holding. Over twenty-five years ago Titow drew attention to the effect of the pressure of demand for land on patterns of widow

remarriage in rural communities.’“° On the bishop of Winchester’s manor of Taunton between 1260 and 1315 almost a third of recorded villein marriages involved a widow remarrying. Here the holding of the

dead husband passed to the widow, as was the case on the abbot of Crowland’s Cambridgeshire manor of Cottenham where, in theory, she was subject to the disability of forfeiting her holding if she proceeded to re-marry.’”"

Nevertheless, in the early years of the fourteenth century remarriage with land seems to have been overwhelmingly the dominant form of property transfer among the Cottenham villeinage. In the first two decades of the fourteenth century 51 per cent of recorded marriages related to the remarriage of widows with land. The 1320s in Cottenham

saw the pattern changing, slowly at first but by 1348 the change had been sufficiently great that only 25 per cent of recorded marriages from 1320 to the Black Death were of this sort; this pattern of decline also characterised the period after 1350. So great was this demand in the early decades of the century that grooms were obliged to pay what by local standards were enormous fines for permission to marry and to enter the widow’s land. In 1310 John, son of Reginald Attepond, paid five marks (£3 6s 8d) for Agnes, widow of John son of Nicholas, with her land. At the same court Henry Waveneys paid a mere two shillings for

licence to place his daughter Custancia in marriage.'°’ In part, the discrepancy in fines indicates the difference in demand for the two women in the local marriage market. This view is sustained by the apparent correlation that exists between the changing frequency of widow remarriage and the level of fines. In the first decade of the fourteenth century business was brisk and fines high, with landed widows fetching £2 10s 0d to £4 0s 0d. By the 1330s and 1340s fines had 128 J. Z. Titow, ‘Some differences between manors and their effects on the conditions of the peasantry in the thirteenth century’, Agricultural History Review, X, 1962, pp.

129 RM. Smith, ‘Some thoughts on hereditary and proprietary rights in land under customary law in thirteenth and early fourteenth-century England,’ Law and History

Review, I, 1983, pp. 123; J. Ravensdale, ‘Population changes and the transfer of customary land on a Cambridgeshire manor in the fourteenth century’, in Smith, Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, pp. 218-20. 13° Smith, ‘Some thoughts on hereditary and proprietary rights,’ pp. 124-5.

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BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

fallen to £2 suggestive of the shrinking demand that most evidently preceded the Black Death. That entry into marriage seems to have become easier over the course of the period from 1320 to 1348, with possible declining pressure of population on resources, is indicated by the way in which widow remarriage as a proportion of all marriages appears to have declined at

Cottenham.'*! We know, too, that in the early fourteenth century lightly populated areas with less demand for land, such as on the manor

of Thornbury in the unhealthy marshes of Severnside, experienced lower levels of widow remarriage.'** The issue of changes in the frequency of widow remarriage prior to 1348 was not pursued in this valuable study of Thornbury.

Geographical variations and chronological fluctuations in the incidence of widow remarriage are to be expected in a society in which entry into marriage was conditional upon economic independence on the part of the newly married and in which married sons and daughters

were not absorbed indiscriminantly within their natal hearth.'’° A glance towards the sixteenth century is instructive in this matter. It is

worthy of comment that in the early fourteenth century, demosraphically quite similar conditions to those of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century existed when population levels were relatively high. In the late sixteenth century the baptism-marriage ratios were incompatible with the levels of the gross-reproduction rate and the known levels of age specific marital fertility, suggesting that a high proportion of all marriages were remarriages. Both periods have in

131 Ravensdale, ‘Population changes and the transfer of customary land’, pp. 213-25. 132 Pp. Franklin, ‘Peasant widows’ ‘liberation’ and remarriage before the Black Death’, EcHR, XXXIX, 1986, pp. 186-204. 133 This discussion has not entered into the treacherous terrain concerning the impact of seigneurial influence upon the marriage behaviour of customary tenants. There are many well-documented instances of lords either directing tenants to marry or finding

husbands for widows to ensure the performance of labour services in the period 1300-48. E. Clark has documented in considerable detail on two Norfolk manors instances of lords ordering tenants of both sexes to marry. However, the effect of such action is ambiguous insofar as the overwhelming majority of instances indicate that the individuals so charged paid fines instead of abiding by the choice of their landlord or his representatives in the manorial court. Whether such pressures served in a more

general sense to undermine the operation of the ‘preventive check’ remains an entirely open, but highly important, question. See. E. Clark, ‘The decision to marry in thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Norfolk,’ Mediaeval Studies, XLIX, 1987, pp. 496-516.

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DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS common severe ‘land hunger’ and falling living standards.!*4

It should, furthermore, be noted that widow remarriage on the scale exhibited by certain communities in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is far less frequently encountered in contexts where a high premium is placed on marriage as a reproductive vehicle. In certain southern European, Middle-Eastern, and South Asian contexts a reluctance to engage in, or indeed a prohibition upon, widow

remarriage is closely connected with a set of social rules. That set comprises a great stress on bridal virginity, avery early marriage age for girls, and great dishonour attaching to girls and their families if those

rules are breached.’ In such settings males remarry much more frequently than females and in so doing tend to select their brides from

the pool of younger women, thereby depressing the overall age of women at first marriage and serving to exaggerate the average age gap between husband and wife. Indeed, these are features highly characteristic of marriage regimes outside of north-west Europe. Historical demographers working on English society after 1538 have shown the centrality of the pattern of late female marriage and the

muted fertility levels associated with it, to an understanding of how demographic growth rates could be effectively deterred. J. Hajnal originated the phrase ‘European marriage pattern’ to describe a regime in which mean marriage ages for both sexes were relatively late and substantial numbers of men and women never married at all.°° This pattern created comparatively low upper levels of fertility and, unless srowth rates were to diverge greatly from 0 per cent per annum, these fertility rates had to co-exist with moderate levels of mortality. Obviously, if estimates of life expectation at birth and higher ages that have been made by Postan, Titow, and Razi are accepted as charac-

teristic of the half-century before the Black Death, contemporary populations, in order to enjoy intrinsic growth rates of 0.5 to 1 per cent per annum, would have been obliged to have fertility levels a great deal 134 R. M. Smith, ‘Some reflections on the evidence for the origin of the “European Marriage Pattern” in England’, in C. Harris, ed., The Sociology of the Family: New Directions, Keele, 1979, p. 95.

135 J, Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem and the Politics of Sex: Essays on the Anthropology of the Mediterranean, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 79-83; A. Macfarlane, ‘Modes of reproduction’ in G. Hawthorn, ed., Population and Development: High and Low Fertility in Poorer Countries, London, 1978, pp. 112-13.

. 136 J. Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns in perspective’ in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, ed., Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, London, 1965, pp. 101-46.

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BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

higher than those found in Elizabethan England (i.e. gross reproduction rates of three to four rather than two to three). Razi does indeed argue that the Halesowen peasants of the early fourteenth century did practise a ‘non-European’ pattern of marriage and employs three major lines of argument to support this position empirically.’°’ One set of evidence we have already considered in the context of Razi’s denial of

Homans’ view that impartible inheritance severely hindered the marriage prospects of non-inheriting siblings. Nevertheless, in so far as

it relates primarily to the question of male marriage chances, and therefore bears little on the issue of female marriage age and incidence (which is critical to any discussion of the European marriage pattern

and the operation of the preventive check as it relates to fertility) it would seem that the argument cannot be made in quite the way Razi had intended. On analysing merchets, payments recorded in the manor court rolls to secure permission for villein women to marry, Razi attempts an estimate of generational length and, by association, marriage age. The marriage ages he computes are relatively early for both sexes although the smallness of the sample precludes any discussion of trends prior to 1348. The procedure rests upon the assumption that men only appear in

the manor court if they are landholders and that as landholders they therefore must have attained the legal age of majority. Another procedure using three generations of individual families relies on the identification of first-born daughters. There has been considerable debate about whether these procedures lead to circular reasoning or whether the ages that have been calculated are soundly based.'°® This debate is far from over, but clearly, as Razi justifiably remarks in a spirited response to those sceptical commentators on his methods, ‘the

true nature of the marriage pattern in medieval England will not be decided on methodological battle-fields but on good evidence which can only be found in hard empirical work on court rolls and other medieval

records’.'°? Whether the fullest series of manorial court proceedings 137 Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 45-71. 138 Poos and Smith, ‘ “Legal windows onto historical populations” ’, pp. 144-8; Z. Razi, ‘The use of manorial court rolls in demographic analysis: a reconsideration’, Law and History Review, Ill, 1985, pp. 198-9; L. R. Poos and R. M. Smith, ‘Shades still on the windows: a reply to Zvi Razi’, Law and History Review, Ill, 1985, pp. 424-7; Z. Razi, ‘The demographic transparency of manorial court rolls’, Law and History Review, V, 1987, pp. 530-4. 139 Razi, ‘Demographic transparency’, p. 534.

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DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

will allow these disputes to be resolved is far from clear. Whatever the

age at marriage may have been at any moment in time, we still lack studies that have demonstrated that female marriage was either static or shifted in age or incidence in the half-century before 1348.'*° Lack of

information on the proportions of the female population evermarrying, given the incomplete nature of the marriage record in

this debate. }

manorial court rolls, is an exasperating obstacle for all participants in

To treat demographic growth as exclusively determined by the relative working of the ‘positive’ and ‘preventive’ checks is to undervalue the importance of migration. Although earlier in this discussion emigration was assessed to have been of minimal significance as a regulator of national population trends in the early fourteenth century, migration could clearly have served at a more localised geographical scale to determine growth rates. Migration has certainly been given

° * ° * 141

such a role in many discussions of rural society after 1350.°*" Nonethe-

less, it has become rare to encounter medieval economic and social historians who deny the inherent mobility of the population in the early fourteenth century. But was this movement systematically structured so as to relieve pressure on resources in ‘overpopulated’ localities and to

enable growth in areas with an excess of land and capital relative to labour? Indeed, were the communities in which population decline

appears to be detectable in the early fourteenth century losing inhabitants through emigration to areas that were demographically more buoyant and hence absorbing labour?

The most sophisticated investigation to-date of population turnover in the early fourteenth century involves the comparison of individuals appearing on the tithing lists drawn up over closely spaced points in time for a group of Essex manors that have also left records of 140 Hallam has attempted to provide some data on this matter from the merchets and pedigrees of villeins in the Myntling Register of Spalding Priory. There is no space to discuss this study which argues for the existence of a European marriage pattern in this region of Lincolnshire before the Black Death. However, Hallam believes that male and female marriage ages rose over the course of the fourteenth century, but his

case depends upon some controversial assumptions and computations that are statistically problematic. See, Hallam, ‘Age at first marriage and age at death’, pp. 63-8. 141 The ‘classic’ work is J. A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Medieval English Village, Toronto, 1964, pp. 129-82. R. H. Hilton considers that ‘one of the most significant features of the post-Black Death situation was the great mobility of the rural population’: see R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England, 2nd edn., Basingstoke and London, 1983, p. 33.

13

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH the numbers of males over the age of twelve years in tithing.’** Not-

withstanding the fact that the communities were actively losing population, they showed an annual excess of ‘entrants’ over ‘exits’, suggesting that migration was not the sole or principal determinant of the demographic decline they were experiencing.'*° On the other hand, Britton, in his account of demographic decline in the Huntingdonshire village of Broughton, concludes that the pace of emigration intensified between 1280 and 1340. Furthermore, he interprets the decline in the number of cases concerning persons illegally received into the households of residents as indicative of a fall in immigration.'“* Razi, how-

ever, whilst acknowledging that Halesowen did not possess a closed

population, does not believe that the evidence supports a case for migration having any significant impact on demographic trends.'*° While it remains difficult to detect any systematic pattern of rural

settlements in the early fourteenth century that were distinguished either by a predominance of emigrants or immmigrants, there is considerable evidence to suggest that populations were in a state of flux and that local opportunities frequently did not match the needs of local

labour. For instance, the evidence from the manor of Weston in the densely-settled silt fenland of south Lincolnshire indicates that of sixty-eight sons of serfs listed on a genealogical record of the prior of Spalding’s tenants, twenty-six (38 per cent) had emigrated. Impartible inheritance was practised in Weston. By contrast, on the nearby manor of Moulton, partibility was the custom and only 23 per cent of the adult sons had migrated. These differences in assumed propensity to migrate inclined Hallam to regard primogeniture as limiting local opportunities

for younger sons./“° ‘Surplus’ younger sons may have been a more

general social problem in the early fourteenth century and their increasing inability to gain a foothold in their natal communities as

married householders may be reflected in the large numbers of anlipimen occasionally recorded as paying chevage and absent from certain manors in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. At 42 L. R. Poos, ‘Population turnover in medieval Essex: the evidence of some early fourteenth-century tithing lists’, in L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith, and K. Wrightson, eds., The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, Oxford, 1986, pp. 1-22. 143 Poos, ‘Population turnover’, p. 11 44 Britton, The Community of the Vill, pp. 143-51. 145 Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 30-2. 146 Hallam, ‘Some thirteenth century censuses’, pp. 355-9.

74

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS Forncett in south Norfolk each year approximately 100 such individuals

were recorded as away from the manor, while the number of bond tenants was only about 135 and they are shown to have held very small

properties.‘*’ Similar patterns appear to be detectable on the larger Somerset manors of the abbot of Glastonbury.!*° The apparent difficulties that young adults experienced in gaining a ‘settlement’ that the above evidence reveals was further reflected ina

drift of propertyless persons towards the towns. For instance, the apparent growth in Norwich’s early fourteenth-century population seems to have been founded upon immigration, disproportionately of the poor, leading to an expansion of the city’s inhabitants with neither capital nor security of income.!*? The consequences of these developments have been effectively demonstrated by research which suggests that a shrinking proportion of Norwich’s population were owners of real property. The estimated growth of Norwich’s population from c. 16,000 to c.25,000 between 1310 and 1333 should be seen against the backsround of a subsidy assessment of 1332 listing only 418 persons. Such evidence suggests that immigration was having the clear effect both of

increasing the number of urban poor and decreasing the social cohesion of the city.!°° At much lower levels in the urban hierarchy R. H. Hilton has noted the drift into small seigneurial boroughs of

‘disreputable’ elements reflected in the significant numbers of ‘strangers’ and ‘illdoers’ presented in the court rolls. He notes, too, a srowth in the number of presentments of women who were identified as illegal immigrants or entrants, which may not reflect their share of the

urban population so much as their difficulties in gaining economic security in an over-supplied labour market.'°! To-date the theme of rural to urban migration has received relatively little attention in the period 1270 to 1348. There are, however, some signs that, like the late sixteenth century, there may have been a recognisable growth in the movement of paupers to towns with crude ‘subsistence’ or ‘push’ factors forming a vital part of the migration matrix. What has been recently said of the later period can also be suggested for the early fourteenth 147 FG. Davenport, The Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor 1086-1565, Cambridge, 1906, pp. 45-7. 148 Postan, ‘Medieval agrarian society in its prime’, p. 624. 149 Rutledge, ‘Immigration and population growth’, pp. 27-8.

150 R_H. Hilton, ‘Small town society in England before the Black Death’, Past and Present, CV, 1984, p. 64-5. 151 Hilton, ‘Small town society’, p. 66-7.

15

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH century; the migration of the poor to urban centres indicates that ‘push factors were not matched to the precise needs of the economy’.

Conclusion

, In many respects this review of certain attributes of the demographic evidence for the first half of the fourteenth century, focusing both upon

population trends and the possible operation of Malthusian checks, makes for depressing reading. Our knowledge of demographic processes, if not trends, is still especially thin and uncertain. The margins of error around our ‘results’ are still very great. There is, however, much more that could be done to reduce these margins. There are a large number of court roll series capable of providing the evidence for

the investigation of the short-run responsiveness of mortality (and possibly nuptiality) to variations in harvest quality. Indeed, the considerable growth of our knowledge of regional farming systems and yield variability on manorial demesnes might provide the statistical backcloth against which a study of short-term variations could be profitably set. A comprehensive and systematically organised study of demographic and social consequences of dearth in the period 1310-22

is needed, and probably requires work undertaken by a coordinated team of researchers to produce really valuable results. More, too, could

be done with heirship patterns to ascertain whether contrasts in apparent demographic growth patterns as great as those discovered to-date between manors such as Halesowen and especially Coltishall on

the one hand, and Great Waltham, High Easter, Rickinghall, and Redgrave on the other, are characteristic of other communities. Indeed, for the purpose of providing national demographic totals we desperately need to know which of these two ‘groups’ of experiences or, for that

matter, any other population dynamic was characteristic of the majority of rural places. But these and most of the practical possibilities

of research utilising court rolls are, in intellectual terms, mere mole-

hills to be scaled when compared with those mountainous peaks surveyed in the first part of this paper. At present, within the context of the period 1300-48, the prospect of an answer to the question which

Lee has called the ‘most basic in economic-demographic history’ 152 P. Clark and D, Souden, ‘Introduction’ in idem, eds., Migration and Society in Early modern England, London, 1987, p. 32.

76

DEMOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS

remains bleak.'°° That is, did long-run trends and swings in population

and living standards primarily reflect variations in the demand for labour or did they instead largely reflect disturbance in the relative natural powers of increase independent of economic progress?

153 Lee, ‘Population homeostasis’ p. 76.

77

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