Few periods of English economic history have been so much misunderstood by writers of general histories as the fifteenth century. The fault is partly the researcher's, who until very recently fought shy of the economic history of the period. Yet much more is now known to specialists than has penetrated the consciousness of the general historians. In text-books and political surveys the economic history of the fifteenth century is still made up of a few conventions for which recent research offers no justification.

The conventional notions die so hard, simply because they appear to fit into general preconceptions about the period. Coming as it does at the very end of what is regarded as the Middle Ages and just before the Tudor era, the century is easy to interpret as one of ‘transition’: as a time during which the so-called medieval development was completed and the great Tudor achievement prepared. And people who view the whole of English economic history as a continuous ascent from the barbaric primitivity of the pre-conquest days to the glorious efflorescence of the renaissance, find an easy explanation of the fifteenth century in its position between the fourteenth and the sixteenth. It is easy to assume, as most textbooks in fact do assume, that everything which the sixteenth century possessed – industrial and commercial expansion, mercantile capital, middle classes, agricultural progress, enclosures – was to be found in the fifteenth century in a degree somewhat smaller than in the sixteenth though somewhat greater than in the fourteenth.