Social mobility, demographic change, and landed society in late medieval England

Abstract

This paper aims to document the impact of the plague-induced demographic crisis of the second half of the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries on the succession patterns of the English landed aristocracy and to show that while these changed succession patterns both increased the wealth of the established families that survived the plague and encouraged upward mobility into the landed class they were particularly important in promoting the latter. (EXCERPT)