0306A

AT THE END of the 14th century the British Isles were a land transformed. At the beginning of the century the population everywhere had been high and rising. Towns and villages had been crowded. The countryside had been akin to Langland's 'plain full of people'. A hundred years later the position was very different. Population had fallen and continued to fall. Whole villages had vanished from the map. In the towns, rows of tenements stood empty.
   The turning point had come in 1348 when the Black Death struck Britain. No plague epidemic had hit the country for some 700 years; the last known outbreak had been back in the 660s. In the 1340s, however, a plague-carrying bacillus was brought to western Europe from Russia. The dreaded infection spread quickly. According to the chronicler of Lynn, it was introduced to England through Weymouth in June. By August it had reached the south-east, and by spring the following year it had spread to the far north. The symptoms of the disease were terrible. Large swellings or buboes grew in the groin, neck or armpit, giving off a foul smell, and within two or three days the victim was dead. In the absence of reliable statistics it is hard to say how many people died, but a figure of between 30 and 40 per cent of the population is probably about right. At the beginning of the century, England's population had been some 6-7 million. Eighty years later it had fallen to 3-4 million. Scotland's population is believed to have fallen by the same proportion.
   The Black Death, though the most dramatic, was not the only catastrophe to hit the British Isles in the 14th century. In the forty years before this plague there had been a series of natural disasters. For two successive summers, in 1315 and 1316, there had been heavy rain, destroying the harvest and leaving the people without food; so famine was widespread. In 1321 there was another harvest failure, and prices rose to almost the levels of 1316. The natural disasters were not confined to humans. Sheep were afflicted by liver rot and other diseases, and flocks were decimated. At the royal manor of Clipstone (Nottinghamshire) half the flock died. The fall in animal stocks had major consequences. Not only were milk and cheese supplies reduced; cereal production was disrupted because draught animals were lost.
   The Cambridge economic historian M.M. Postan, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, suggested that there was a �crisis of subsistence' in the early 14th century - in other words, that population growth was outstripping resources, and that a malnourished population had become �calamity sensitive'. The suggestion, however, may well underestimate the level of development of the medieval economy. The majority of peasant landholders had small surpluses to exchange for food, while the landless or very poor could support themselves by working for the better-off. It is noticeable that in some of the most densely populated areas, like East Anglia, there are remarkably few signs of impoverishment.
However serious the famines, then, the Black Death probably deserves its reputation as the main agent of change. Moreover, it was not the only visitation of plague. There were further major outbreaks in 1361, 1369, 1390, 1413, 1434, 1439 and 1464, and smaller outbreaks in between; in Scotland there were additional outbreaks in 1401-3, 1430-2 and 1455. In their accounts of the visitations of 1361 and 1390 the chroniclers noted that the disease particularly afflicted the young - presumably because they lacked the resistance to it of their elders. As a result of this high incidence among adolescents, there were fewer people of childbearing age, and by 1400 the population was failing to reproduce itself. It is not until the end of the 15th century that there is firm evidence of a recovery in numbers.
A major consequence of population decline was a retreat in the area under cultivation. The long period of expansion which had begun in the early Middle Ages and lasted till around 1300 came to an end. In some parts of the British Isles widespread abandonment of the land occurred. One of the worst affected areas was the English East Midlands. In parts of Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire whole villages were abandoned, leaving only a church in the fields to indicate the site of a former settlement. But the phenomenon of desertion needs to be seen in perspective. Scotland and Wales were less seriously affected. And even in England it was chiefly the smaller settlements that vanished from the map. Generally, villages shrank rather than disappeared altogether. Population fall was not the only factor that produced agrarian change in this period. Climatic change had a role to play too. From the early 14th century the weather appears to have got colder and wetter. The lower summer temperatures made arable cultivation more difficult in the higher and more northerly parts of Britain. On the slopes of the Lammermuirs in Scotland the growing of cereal crops was gradually phased out. In southeastern England rising sea levels led to the abandonment of cereal growing on the coastal estates of Battle Abbey in Sussex, and flooding was common. Serious inundations by the sea are recorded at Barnhorne (Sussex) in 1356-57, 1371 and repeatedly in the 1420s.
Concentration on these natural disasters can easily leave us with the impression that the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries were a grim, doom-ridden age. This idea is reinforced by the art of the period. The figure of death was represented more often. Depictions of the 'Three Living and the Three Dead' made their appearance in manuscripts and on church walls. Scenes of the 'Dance of Death' adorned the north cloister of Old St Paul's. In the 1440s cadaver tombs, showing the figure of the deceased in decay, were introduced into the British Isles from France. The living were given firm admonition against vainglory - their day, it was implied, would come.
   However, the pervasive impression of gloom needs modification. For those who survived the catastrophes, life was good - far better than it had been before. The days of poverty and overcrowding in the countryside were over. Land was abundant. Those without land were able to gain a tenement for the first time, while those already well-off were able to acquire more. Furthermore, the economic conditions of the time favoured the peasantry over the lords. Because labour was scarce, wages shot up. By the early 1380s skilled labourers who had once earned 5shillings or 6s a year were earning twice that amount. At the same time, the fall in population led to a drop in the price of food. A quarter of wheat, which in the 1320s had cost 8s or 9s, cost no more than half that fifty years later. Among the lower orders there was a general process of betterment. And, inevitably, in its wake came a rise in expectations. The unfree peasants, chafing under seignorial oppression, longed for freedom - freedom from villeinage and freedom to take advantage of the new economic opportunities. In England there was a major rebellion against the government and upper classes in 1381. As Froissart observed, this was not caused by poverty and hardship; rather it was a product of 'the case and riches that the people were of�. The rebels were thrusting, ambitious folk. The concessions made to them by Richard II at Smithfield were quickly revoked, but time and the changing economy worked in the peasants' favour. By the mid-fifteenth century villeinage had withered away. In Scotland, neyfdom, its northern equivalent, had died out a century before, killed by the dislocation of war. The rapid population decline paved the way for some major innovations in the structure of landholding and in the tillage of the soil. By the early 15th century most of the directly cultivated demesnes had been put out to lease. In Warwickshire the bishops of Worcester had leased all their demesnes by the early 1390s, and Coventry Priory had done so by 1411. In the south-east, the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, had leased virtually all of their demesnes by 1390, while Westminster Abbey and the archbishops of Canterbury leased theirs more gradually between 1380 and 1440. In Scotland and Wales the demesnes, which were anyway fewer and smaller, were also leased.

   With the introduction of leasing the landowners became, in effect, rentiers. Responsibility for tilling the soil now passed to the demesne lessees, who were men of varying background. A minority of lessees were substantial gentry figures - men of the rank of knight, esquire or gentleman. But the majority were lesser folk - peasants or yeomen.             More in Part B....