The epidemic which struck England in 1348–1349 killed perhaps half of the population in around 12 months. The new era of abundant land and scarce labour that it ushered in – the ‘age of the Black Death’ of this book's title – lasted for the next 200 years or so. As Mark Bailey argues in the volume's introduction, it is difficult to avoid seeing the Black Death as a major historical turning point. Yet this still leaves a good deal of room for debate about its exact economic effects. In recent decades, few scholars have done more to shape the debate on plague and its repercussions than John Hatcher. This new book, published in Hatcher's honour and containing essays by his colleagues and students, represents a major landmark in the study of these issues. In it, new light is shed on well-known features of this period, such as the failure of population to recover, the generally low level of crop yields, and the leasing out of manorial demesne farms. Meanwhile, other contributions open up novel or neglected areas, such as the history of late medieval fairs and the victualling trades, each of which is presented so as to reveal something distinctive about the post-Black Death era.
The volume consists of three parts: ‘The Medieval Demographic System’; ‘Landlords and Peasants’; and ‘Trade and Industry’. Two of the three chapters in Part I – by Ole Benedictow and Richard Smith – provide synoptic accounts of research in the demographic history of the period, though the chapters differ considerably in emphasis and approach. Benedictow defends the notion of a distinctive medieval ‘high pressure’ demographic regime of high mortality and fertility. Smith provides an expert analysis of the state of knowledge concerning adult mortality between 1349 and 1540. His chapter also includes important upward revisions to Josiah Russell's 1948 estimates of the life expectancy of tenants-in-chief of the Crown based on the inquisitions post mortem. In the final chapter in this section, Maryanne Kowaleski makes innovative use of a range of primary sources to argue for significant continuity from the medieval to early modern period in the demographic structure of England's maritime communities.
Part II opens with a major study by Bruce Campbell that presents new data on crop yields and seeks to explain the puzzle of the low yields achieved overall in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Martin Stephenson looks at seigniorial attitudes to investment and risk, and argues that medieval landlords made higher levels of capital investment in their estates than is traditionally thought. In a case study of the fenland economy in the years 1346 to 1353, David Stone demonstrates the striking insights into the course of the epidemic and its disruptive short-term effects that can be gained through a close reading of manorial account rolls. Staying in the Cambridgeshire fens, Erin McGibbon Smith's exploration of the different types of business recorded in the court rolls of the prior of Ely's manor of Sutton-in-the-Isle offers important reflections on the potential and dangers of this major source category. In a discussion of the manors of the Arundell estate in Cornwall, Phillipp Schofield investigates the complex relationships between movements of rent and local economic opportunities, and makes several broader observations about the limitations of the manorial records for the study of the later fifteenth century. Finally, John Munro revisits questions about the timing and nature of landlords' abandonment of direct demesne management, providing in the process a wide-ranging discussion of the period's major economic trends and variables that draws heavily on reworked data on prices and wages.
Three chapters make up ‘Part III: Trade and Industry’. James Davis and John Lee both consider the implications of the restructuring of market networks and consumer demand that occurred in the age of the Black Death. Davis explores the activities of the brewers, bakers and other lesser retailers of Clare (Suffolk), while Lee pulls together the scattered information on fairs, cautiously arguing that fairs remained important in the later medieval period because they suited its changing patterns of trade. Richard Britnell focuses on coal mining on the Bishop of Durham's estate, stressing both the extent of the fifteenth-century slump in the coal trade, and the social diversity of the entrepreneurs who leased and managed the bishop's mines.
As Hatcher himself has argued in an influential study, the age of the Black Death cannot be viewed as an undifferentiated whole. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he suggests, must be seen as a ‘succession of sub-periods each with its own distinctive characteristics’.1 The chapters in this collection provide abundant further support for that view. Perhaps the major contribution of the book is to provide an even more nuanced periodisation of the economic history of the century and a half after 1349 than was previously available. Another strength of the book is its recognition that the demographic collapse brought about by the Black Death and later plague outbreaks was not the sole determinant of economic trends in this period. This feature is most obvious in Campbell's chapter, which draws attention to the correlation between poor yields and difficult environmental conditions, and in Munro's, which argues for an emphasis on monetary and fiscal policy. But this plurality of explanation is evident elsewhere in the book, such as in Davis's suggestion that the production and marketing strategies of Clare's brewers and bakers are unlikely to have operated independently of seigniorial regulation of their activities.
This is not a cheap book. But in the opinion of this reviewer, the decision to allow contributors to develop their arguments at length and to include abundant supporting data and illustrations is well justified. The result is a volume which is itself excellent evidence in support of Bailey's more general observation (p. xxxv) that ‘there is much in the study of the economic and social history of late medieval England about which to be optimistic’.
