Introduction

This chapter explores the economy and society of Cambridge between the Hundred Rolls of 1279 and the midst of the great depression of the mid-15th century, c.1450. In doing so it connects the chronological coverage in this book to the literature on Cambridge from the period 1450 onwards and considers to what extent trends identified in the Hundred Rolls continued into the 14th century. The chapter focuses principally on the period after the Black Death of 1349 and considers its impact on Cambridge's property market and its wider economy. This outbreak of plague probably halved both the population of the country as a whole and the population of Cambridge. Traditional interpretations have often described this as a bleak period of decline for the town: ‘for Cambridge, as for most English towns, a period of retrogression and decay’. Even the growth of the colleges and university do not appear to have benefited the wider economy of the town: ‘For neither university town was the erection of growing centres of learning on the rubble of former streets an unmitigated blessing, let alone an immediate compensation for the loss of wealth-creating citizens.’ Indeed Cambridge's borough government made pleas for reductions to their tax quota and other payments to the Crown. On the other hand, some historians have seen the late 14th century more generally as a ‘golden age’ of new economic opportunities with rising living standards and the beginnings of a ‘consumer economy’. This chapter will reassess these views and suggest that a more nuanced picture is required, of both growth and decline in Cambridge.

The general consequences of the Black Death included reduced demand for urban property from a smaller population. The extent of this reduction varied between different towns, and within individual towns it varied over time and between different properties. In the property markets of some provincial towns and in London, for example, there appears to have been a phase of growth between about 1380 and 1420 in response to growing manufacturing, particularly within the cloth industry, and the rapid increase in the disposable income of wage earners. Even in these towns, though, the balance between the supply and demand for urban property appears to have been reached in c.1420, and thereafter there was a slow fall in urban land values.