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The Population Trend in England between 1300 and 1348

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Barbara F. Harvey
Barbara F. Harvey
Affiliation:
Somerville College, Oxford
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Extract

It is now widely agreed that the economy of western Europe contracted in the later Middle Ages, but the causes of this depression and its time-limits are still disputed. Professor Postan argues that the depression was intimately connected with a decline in population beginning early in the fourteenth century and brought about by the operation of Malthusian checks and soil exhaustion. His argument may be briefly summarized. Population grew rapidly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the cultivated area was continuously extended. By 1300, however, both processes had gone too far. The plough had invaded marginal lands—in this context the term means poor lands—unsuited for permanent cultivation and subject to soil exhaustion. The precarious balance between population growth and the means of subsistence depended on the possibility of fresh colonization. When this was at an end, as it was, to all intents, by 1300, Europe was left with a population which it could not feed. Early in the fourteenth century, therefore—perhaps even in the 1290's—famine and disease brought about a long-continued rise in the death-rate, and this, later to be intensified by the plague, aggravated the decline in productivity. Thus the famine of the years 1315–17 was not merely a tragic episode of a kind likely to occur as long as the harvest of one year provided the bread of the next; it marked a turning-point in demographic history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 16 , December 1966 , pp. 23 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1966

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References

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page 42 note 1 See Economic History Review, 2nd ser., ii, p. 245.

page 42 note 2 W.A.M. 25421 ff., 26259, 16396, 25800, 27408, 7790, 27317. The taking of land into the demesne since the making of the last rental accounts for some other ‘vacancies’ at Birdbrook in the early fourteenth century.

page 42 note 3 I am indebted to Lady de Villiers for her criticism of a draft of this paper.