A Mystery within an Enigma. The Economy 1355 to 1375

Abstract

The economic response to plague outbreaks in 1348–9 and 1361 has long puzzled historians. Despite the collapse in population, landholding size remained small and prices of foodstuffs remained high, causing the real wages of the mass of the populace to fall below their pre-plague level. The traditional explanation for this paradox is that a combination of seigniorial repression, the spare capacity in the pre-plague economy, monetary inflation, and a succession of poor harvests created an ‘Indian Summer’ for landlords, where rents, prices, and profits remained unexpectedly buoyant. But this oversimplifies the complexities of the period, and a careful reconstruction of what actually happened helps to explain its paradoxical elements. This chapter surveys the wide range of responses in different sectors of the economy, principally increases in mean household incomes and shifting patterns of consumption. Supply-side responses were remarkably rapid in some sectors (textiles, brewing), but sluggish in others. Responses were disrupted by a succession of extreme events—recurrent plague outbreaks, climate change, and repeated livestock epidemics—that generated uncertainty and risk for producers. Historians have tended to generalize too broadly about the third quarter of the fourteenth century, which is a pivotal period of change deserving much closer and more careful scrutiny.