Transformation of Medieval England 1370-1529, The

J.A.F. Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582489769
• eBook ISBN: 9781317872597
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

A detailed survey which examines the major developments in English society during this period of social crises, population decline, agarian unrest, the introduction to enclosures - and political tensions particularly over succession.

Part One

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Environment and economy

Framework of Events – Economic and Social

In the case of major epidemics, it is often impossible to specify their nature in detail, as contemporary records are often imprecise. The term ‘plague’ may denote an epidemic of bubonic or pneumonic plague, but it may also be used more generally to describe any pestilence. Also it is not clear what was the nature of the disease known as the ‘sweating sickness’. In the table below the less precise term ‘epidemic’ is normally employed, rather than anything more precise, because the economic consequences of such outbreaks resulted from the fact that they occurred, not from their particular nature. It is impossible to state how widespread such epidemics were; many of those in the fifteenth century seem to have been particularly severe in London; on a number of occasions our knowledge of an outbreak depends on the fact that the meeting of Parliament was adjourned to a location in the provinces to avoid danger to those attending it.

Entries in italics refer to political events and have been included to provide a cross-reference to the Framework of events – Political.

1348–49	Initial attack of the Black Death.
1361–62	Epidemic.
1369	Epidemic. Renewal of Anglo-French War.
1373	Bristol granted legal status as a county.
1375	Epidemic.
1377	Succession of Richard II.
1381	Great Revolt. Main centres of disorder in Kent, Essex, East Anglia, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, London. Isolated outbreaks in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Warwickshire, Yorkshire.
1385–88	Tension between England and the Hanse towns.
1387–88	Revolt of the Lords Appellant against Richard II.
1389	Truce with France.
1390	Epidemic.
1392–97	London lost municipal autonomy.
1396	York granted legal status as a county. Twenty-eight-year truce with France.
1399	Succession of Henry IV.
1400	Newcastle granted legal status as a county.
1404	Norwich granted legal status as a county.
1405–8	Tension between England and the Hanse towns.
1405	Epidemic.
1409	Lincoln granted legal status as a county.
1413	Epidemic. Succession of Henry V.
1415	Renewal of war in France.
1422	Succession of Henry VI.
1431	Rising at Abingdon, Berkshire. Supposedly Lollard, but little evidence of heresy. Trouble also in Wiltshire, Coventry and London.
1431–37	Tension between England and the Hanse towns.
1433	Epidemic.
1434	Epidemic.
1435	Congress of Arras; Burgundian change of sides in war.
1437	Epidemic.
1438–39	Food shortages after bad harvest.
1439	Epidemic. Peace settlement and trade agreement with Burgundy.
1440	Hull granted perpetual succession as a legal personality.
1444	Epidemic.
1446	Robert Sturmy of Bristol sent ship, the cog Anne, into the Mediterranean.
1448–50	Epidemics.
1449–56	Tension between England and the Hanse towns.
1450	Loss of Normandy. Cade’s rising in Kent. Disorders in Wiltshire at the same time. Trouble persisted in Kent for two more years on a less widespread scale.
1452	Epidemic.
1453	Final expulsion of the English from France.
1454	Epidemic.
1457	Robert Sturmy sent ship, Katherine, into the Mediterranean.
1461	Succession of Edward IV.
1464	Epidemic. Reduction in bullion value of coinage.
1468–75	Tension between England and the Hanse towns.
1470–1	Readeption of Henry VI.
1471	Epidemic. During Lancastrian attack on London, Essex men with economic grievances joined Fauconberg’s Kentishmen.
1475	Trade treaty with Hanse towns.
1479	Epidemic.
1480s	Search for ‘island of Brasil’ by ships from Bristol.
1483	Succession of Edward V. Usurpation of Richard III.
1485	Epidemic. Succession of Henry VII.
1486	Trade treaties with Brittany and France.
1489	Anti-tax revolt in Yorkshire. Murder of the earl of Northumberland.
1493	Epidemic.
1496	Trade treaty with Low Countries (Intercursus Magnus).
1497	John Cabot, voyaging out of Bristol, reached Newfoundland. Trade treaty with France. Cornish revolt and march on London.
1499–1500	Epidemic.
1505	Epidemic.
1509	Succession of Henry VIII.
1521	Epidemic.
1525	Resistance to ‘Amicable Grant’, particularly in East Anglia.
1526	Debasement of coinage.
1529	Meeting of the Reformation Parliament.
1536	The Pilgrimage of Grace. Mainly religious and political in character, but some social grievances also voiced.

Chapter 1

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The population of England

The economic development of England between the mid fourteenth and the early sixteenth century was determined by changes in the country’s population more than by any other single factor. This is undoubted, but unfortunately for historians these changes cannot be measured precisely. Three problems, in particular, confront us, the extent of the fall in England’s population caused by the Black Death and by subsequent epidemics, the chronology of decline and recovery, and the possible redistribution of population throughout the country. The third question is so closely related to changes in the forms of rural settlement and to the growth and decline of towns that it is best considered in these contexts; the present chapter will concentrate on the scale of mortality and the fluctuations in the total population of England in the century and a half before 1529.

The historian’s main difficulty in examining these problems is that medieval man was not statistically minded, and that consequently precise data are not available to us in our search for answers to problems. It is easier to judge the impression which the Black Death made on men’s minds, for this is reflected in the chroniclers’ writings, than to measure the scale of its ravages. The St Albans writer Thomas Walsingham declared that scarcely two men survived out of twenty in certain religious houses, and that many men considered that barely a tenth of the whole population remained alive (32, i, 273). Other chroniclers, such as Henry Knighton at Leicester, describe the extent of the plague locally, suggesting that there were 700 deaths in one parish and 380 in another, and some even appear to have doubted if man’s life on earth was going to continue (53, p.169). Some figures of deaths in monastic houses may be accurate, but as the plague did not strike evenly throughout the country it would be foolish to deduce any estimate of national mortality from them. The same problem of interpretation arises from any use of manorial records, probably the best available documentary source; these can tell us no more than the number of holdings which fell vacant on particular estates and throw no light on mortality among landless persons.

The Black Death, which reached England in 1348, remained virulent in the following year, and recurred frequently in succeeding centuries, probably originated in central Asia and spread to the Black Sea area along the trans-Asian trade routes. From there it travelled rapidly to the Middle East, Italy and western Europe. The plague took two forms, bubonic, transmitted by a bacterium carried by the rat flea, and pneumonic, spread directly by droplet infection in a manner similar to the common, cold. It is almost certain that both forms of the disease were present in late-fourteenth-century England, and it may well have been the pneumonic form, the more lethal of the two, which was responsible for the scale of the mortality in 1348–49 (53, pp.172–3). There has been some controversy in recent years over the effect which the plague had on the population, and the bacteriologist J. F. D. Shrewsbury has tried to argue that bubonic plague could not, by its nature, have destroyed as high a proportion of the population as historians have claimed (102). He does not, however, allow for the possible effects of the pneumonic form of the disease, and suggests that another epidemic, possibly of typhus, may have been responsible. As far as the effects of population change on the economy are concerned, however, the particular disease is of secondary importance.

The greatest problem for the historian of late medieval population in England is that he has no reliable figure for the number of inhabitants at the time when the plague struck the country first. Indeed, since the Domesday Survey of 1086 there had been no government measure which had produced a record of this. A generation after the first onset of the disease, the poll-tax levy of 1377 did provide such figures, but it is clearly impossible to use this to estimate the level of population before 1348 or indeed the scale of mortality in the first, or any of the intervening later, epidemics. Furthermore, although the first poll-tax was sufficiently successful as a fiscal measure for it to be repeated in 1379 and 1381, the hostility shown to it in the Great Revolt of the latter year led to its abandonment as a form of taxation; not until the sixteenth century do further governmental records become available which can be employed to estimate the size of the national population with even a modicum of confidence. These include the returns of a military survey in 1522, the subsidy rolls of 1524–25 and the chantry certificates of 1545, which report the number of communicants in each parish. In other words, in the period covered by this book, the only direct evidence on population figures comes near its start and very close to, or even after, its end. There is literally nothing of an official nature which can serve as a guide to possible fluctuations in the intervening years.

Not only is the evidence scarce, but it is often undependable. The poll-tax was payable by all over the age of fourteen, apart from genuine beggars, including the mendicant friars, who were exempted from it, and from the inhabitants of Durham and Cheshire. The historian must therefore try to estimate the population of these two shires, the proportion of the population under fourteen and, hardest of all, the extent to which the tax was successfully evaded. Certainly evasion was rife in 1381, as can be seen from the marked discrepancies between the numbers paying the tax in that year and the figures for 1377 [A.4], and there is no reason to believe that the payments in the earlier year, although more complete, provide anything close to a total record of the population. Tax evasion is a similar problem in interpreting the sixteenth-century subsidy rolls, while any deductions based on the military survey, a crude census of males over the age of sixteen, must allow not only for children but also for the balance between men and women in the population as a whole. The chantry certificates of 1545, even if one accepts their record of communicants in the parishes as accurate, do not cover the whole country, and again there is uncertainty as to the proportion of the population below communicant age.

All estimates of population size must therefore allow for a large measure of conjecture, a fact stressed by all reputable modern historians who have worked on this intractable subject. The starting-point for all later studies must be J. C. Russell’s survey of British medieval population, published in 1948 (99), but more recent work has been effectively synthesized in the extended paper by J. Hatcher, dating from 1977, which also provides an excellent bibliography (75). Russell estimated the population of England at just over 2¼ million in 1377, and suggested that it rose by nearly a million between then and 1545. Hatcher, by contrast, prefers a 1377 figure in the 2¾−3 million range, and thinks it unlikely that this was exceeded until the second quarter of the sixteenth century. If there was an increase by 1545, much of it may have come in the years after 1530, and become important economically only after the period covered by this book (75, p.69). What is even harder for historians to estimate is the extent of the fall in population before 1377 from its peak in the earlier years of the century, whether or not this point was reached around 1300, the most generally accepted date, or on the eve of the cataclysm caused by the Black Death.

In any attempt to estimate the effects which population changes could have on the economy as a whole, the crucial matter is, however, not the absolute numbers of Englishmen at any particular date but the broader demographic trend. Did the population remain more or less static after the dramatic decline in the second half of the fourteenth century, or did it make a rapid recovery from the first wave of epidemics? Here the problem is less difficult than the estimation of absolute figures, because further kinds of evidence can be employed in the search for an answer. In certain social groups it is possible to examine replacement rates, namely the number of children in a family who survived to adulthood. Two such groups, which are sufficiently well documented for such a study, are tenants-in-chief and the London alderman class. Work on the former group has shown that in the century between 1341 and 1440, and more markedly in the last three-quarters of this period, the replacement rate for males was clearly below one, but rose sharply by the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (75, p.27). In the latter group the picture was very similar, a replacement rate of one in the generation following the Black Death, below one in the sixty years before 1437, and rising above it between then and the end of the century (104, p.204). Although both these samples suggest that there was a decline until well into the fifteenth century, followed by a recovery, there are two further points which need to be taken into consideration. Firstly, figures based upon the evidence of wills, which are the main source used in the examination of the London alderman class, may exaggerate the survival rate, because in times of plague whole families might be eliminated before any will could be drawn up, or between its drafting and the death of the testator. If this were the case, the drop in population in the first half of the period could have been deeper and the subsequent recovery slower than existing replacement figures suggest. Secondly, the fortunes of tenants-in-chief or of London aldermen and their families are not necessarily the best guide to trends in the country as a whole. One may presume that the standard of living of both these groups was above the national average, and that this could have given them better resistance to disease than their poorer neighbours. In the case of the Londoners, however, they may have been more vulnerable to plague than were country dwellers, unless they themselves had, as they might, country properties to which they could flee in time of pestilence. It seems clear that epidemics of the bubonic type became increasingly limited to the towns, which provided a better habitat for the plague-carrying black rat.

Attempts to examine survival and replacement rates in rural society and in towns other than London have made it clear that conclusions can at best be tentative. There are hints that in the country there was a higher survival rate from about the 1470s, but in Bristol and Worcester it appears that there was no marked population increase until about 1510 (59; 75, pp.28–9). If this is correct, and it is impossible to be certain how far the places for which adequate data survive are typical, it may indicate that rural areas saw an earlier recovery of population than the towns and certainly suggests that there were marked variations between different regions of the country.

Indirect evidence may also help the historian to examine population variations, because it is reasonable to infer that these caused economic changes, some of which can be measured over wider and more representative areas. The main problem associated with this approach is the difficulty of judging how far a rise or fall in the number of inhabitants was the vital factor in bringing about those changes of which we can be certain, notably those in wage and price levels. An alternative explanation for price rises, for example, has been to relate them to the amount of money in circulation or the bullion value of the coinage. This may have some validity ; after the devaluation of the coinage in 1465, when its silver content was cut by 20 per cent, there was a price rise of 7 per cent. The total supply of money in circulation cannot, however, be measured, because although the value of coins struck is known for individual years, there is no satisfactory way of estimating how long they remained in circulation. The increase in wages, however, seems to have persisted even in periods when there was a dearth of money, and Hatcher is prepared to accept the general line of the arguments put forward in Postan’s pioneering article of 1950 that population decline was the greatest single factor in bringing about these economic changes (75, pp.47–54).

The first indirect evidence for a falling population is the movement of wage-rates. Between 1300 and 1479 payments to agricultural workers on the estates of the bishops of Winchester rose sharply, both in cash terms and in real value, measured by the price of wheat. Furthermore, the wages of artisans, although they moved at a different rate, followed the same general pattern of i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Editor’s foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue. England in 1370
• Part One, Environment and Economy
• Part Two, The Nation of England
• Part Three, The Course of Politics
• Part Four, The Structure of Government
• Part Five, The Church and Education
• Epilogue. England in 1529
• Compendium of Information
• Bibliography
• Index