SOME ECONOMIC EVIDENCE OF DECLINING POPULATION IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

Abstract

N recent years a number of economic historians, writing about England I in the later middle ages, have tried to project their studies against a background of a relatively low or falling population. The projection has an obvious convenience. The alternating phases in the history of population-its rise in the earlier centuries, and its fall in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries-fit well with what is becoming the accepted chronology of medieval development, and may indeed supply the most plausible explanation of the economic ebb and flow. Yet, in spite of its convenience, the projection is still very much of an hypothesis and is still apt to be questioned.2 Most historians may be prepared to accept as proven the high mortality of the Black Death and perhaps also the high mortality of the two or three lesser plagues which occurred within a generation of I 348. But they continue to differ about the exact rates of mortality during the plague and still more about the length of time medieval population took to recover. In general they are inclined to treat the period of pestilences as a temporary interlude in the continuous progression of English history. Thorold Rogers, who knew his medieval facts (none of his contemporaries and very few of his successors knew them equally well), went furthest in trying to accommodate