The Black Death

Those changes had been the subject of a long-running debate in the journal Past & Present, which generated such interest that it was re-issued in book form as The Brenner Debate. Agrarian Class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe, eds. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985). The debate has since been continued in S. R. Epstein’s ‘Cities, regions, and the late medieval crisis: Sicily and Tuscany compared’, Past & Present, 130 (1991). pp. 3–50. And one of its concerns has always been to establish the chronology of the crisis. Guy Bois, author of The Crisis of Feudalism. Economy and society in Eastern Normandy c. 1300–1550 (Paris, 1976; Cambridge, 1984) and a contributor to the original debate, had taken the view that it was the Great Famine of 1315–17 which was the turning-point. And following Ian Kershaw’s examination of that crisis in ‘The Great Famine and agrarian crisis in England 1315–22’, Past & Presently, 59 (1973), pp. 3–50, a levelling-off of Europe’s population in (or before) those years had seemed established. Yet the setback, it now appears, was only temporary. In Before the Black Death, Studies in the ‘crisis’ of the early fourteenth century, ed. Bruce M. S. Campbell (Manchester, 1991), Barbara Harvey’s answer to the question ‘Was there actually a crisis?’ was unequivocal. The reverses of the half-century before the Black Death were not a turning-point, she concluded firmly, but ‘a mid-term crisis’. In reality, it was ‘the advent of plague, an exogenous factor, that transformed the economic life of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, and the changes which actually occurred after that event could not have predicted in the first half of the century’ (p. 24).

It had been Bruce Campbell’s fine study of the peasant land market in Coltishall (‘Population pressure, inheritance and the land market in a fourteenth-century peasant community’, in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, ed. R. M. Smith [Cambridge, 1984], pp. 87–134) that had caused David Herlihy to change his mind. Campbell was clear that the crisis in Norfolk’s Coltishall was the result ‘not of economic but of biological factors’. And much of the recent work on the socio-economic history of late-medieval England has served to reinforce that conclusion. For summaries of that work, see The Black Death in England, eds. Mark Ormrod and Phillip Lindley (Stamford, 1996), and my own King Death, The Black Death and its aftermath in late-medieval England (London, 1996). In the specialist literature, Campbell and Bailey, Bridbury and Britnell, Dyer and Goldberg, Harvey and Hatcher, Mate, Pollard, Poos and Razi are the names to watch. Of these, A. R. Bridbury has always taken the view that there was less crisis than opportunity in post-plague England, his position hardly changing from the publication of his iconoclastic Economic Growth, Englandin the later Middle Ages (London 1962) – cited in Ziegler’s bibliography – through ‘The Black Death’, Economic History Review, 26 (1973), pp.577–92, to the collected papers of Bridbury’s The English Economy from Bede to the Reformation (Woodbridge, 1992). Most historians, however, now see it differently. And there is growing agreement that it was the Black Death – more than famine, climatic deterioration, bullion shortages, or any other single cause – that first prepared the way for the ‘long’ fifteenth century of economic recession and social change.