The Black Death

How the Recession ended is the subject of The Closing of the Middle Ages’ England, 1471–1529 (Oxford, 1997) by Richard Britnell, who has written usefully also on the earlier period in Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge, 1986), in The Commercialisation of English Society 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993), and in The Black Death in English towns’, Urban History, 21 (1994), pp. 195–210. And there are summaries of the views of Campbell and Dyer, the two most prolific authors on this period, in Bruce Campbell’s ‘A fair field once full of folk: agrarian change in an ere of population decline, 1348–1500’, Agricultural History Review, 41 (1993), pp.60–70, and Christopher Dyer’s Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages.Social change in Englandc.1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989). Valuable regional studies, each of much wider application, include Mark Bailey’s A Marginal Economy? East Anglian Breckland in the later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989); P. J. P. Goldberg’s ‘Mortality and economic change in the diocese of York, 1390–1514’, Northern History, 14 (1988), pp. 38–55, and his Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy. Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992); Mavis Mate’s Agrarian economy after the Black Death: the manors of Canterbury Cathedral Priory, 1348–91’, Economic History Review, 37 (1984), pp. 341–54, and her Labour and labour services on the estates of Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the fourteenth century’, Southern History, 7 (1985), pp. 55–67; A. J. Pollard’s ‘The north-eastern economy and the agrarian crisis of 1438–1440’, Northern History, 25 (1989), pp. 88–105; L. R. Poos’s ‘The rural population of Essex in the later Middle Ages’, Economic History Review, 38 (1985), pp. 515–30, and his A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991); and the many West Midlands studies of Zvi Razi, beginning with Life, Marriage and Death in a medieval parish. Economy, society and demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), and including his two important papers. ‘Family, land and the village community in later medieval England’. Past&Present, 93 (1981), pp. 3–36. and ‘The myth of the immutable English family’, ibid., 140 (1993), pp. 3–44.

Razi, Poos and Goldberg are demographers as well as social historians. And the two specialisms are combined again in the work of John Hatcher and Barbara Harvey. John Hatcher’s survey of Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348–1530 (London, 1977) has been reprinted many times. He subsequently moved to an earlier period, but has since returned to the later Middle Ages with two important papers on ‘Mortality in the fifteenth century: some new evidence’, Economic History Review, 39 (1986), pp. 19–38, and ‘England in the aftermath of the Black Death’, Past & Present, 144 (1994), pp. 3–35. Hatcher’s research on the obituary lists of Christ Church (Canterbury) was what gave him the ‘new evidence’ for that article in 1986. And the heavy mortalities and characteristically short life-spans of Canterbury’s post-plague monks have been found to be matched exactly in the Westminster Abbey data, discussed by Barbara Harvey in her Ford Lectures of 1989, and published in Living and Dying in England 1100–1540.The monastic experience (Oxford, 1993).