A fresh overview of the fifteenth-century English economy needs no justification, as the debate about its character has persisted for well over a century, and has still not been resolved. I will begin with a brief reminder of some of the arguments of those who see the century as a period mainly of decline, and then I will explore some alternative approaches. There is much common ground between the various schools of thought, and it is worth saying at the outset that everyone agrees that the whole period between c.1380 and c.1520 saw low population levels, in the region of 2.2 and 2.5 million. In most parts of the country land values were low, demand for cereals slackened, and many towns show little or no growth.

Some Perspectives on the Fifteenth-Century Economy

A dismal picture of the fifteenth-century economy was outlined in a famous article by M.M. Postan, published in 1939. The recession of the 1930s must have encouraged him to see the past in terms of a cyclical pattern of booms and slumps. He did not favour the ‘age of transition’ approach, in which the later Middle Ages was seen as the ‘dawn of a new era’. He recalled the writings of past protagonists, such as Denton who depicted the fifteenth century as a depressed period, and Kingsford and Thorold Rogers, who arrived at opposite conclusions. His own argument was succinct, simple and consistent: in the fifteenth century agricultural production shrank, some land once used as arable lay vacant, rents were lower and grain prices fell. The market diminished to such an extent that more people practised self-sufficiency, towns complained of their poverty, trade with France and in the Baltic declined, and exports of cloth fell off in the middle of the century. This was not an age of merchant enterprise, though villagers and labourers derived some benefits. He hinted that the reduction in the aristocracy’s landed incomes encouraged political conflict. He even suggested that the slender columns of perpendicular architecture, using so much less stone than solid Norman churches, reflected reduced funds for building. For the next seventy years researchers tackled various aspects of Postan’s characterisation of the fifteenth century, and found much local variation; some detected signs of a healthier urban and trading economy than he suggested, but Postan’s relentless pursuit of an agenda of depression was still a powerful influence.

In 2010 Richard Britnell returned to Postan’s article, and found that many of its arguments, although they had not been based on sustained forays into the archives, had been confirmed by subsequent systematic research. The evidence of tithes showed that arable acreage and grain production had fallen for all rural producers, peasants as well as lords. Rents were subject to a general decline. The numbers of mills were falling. In the long fifteenth century (1377–1525) the percentage of the population that lived in towns tended to move downwards. The increase in woollen cloth exports, which was especially marked in the last quarter of the century, was not part of a general surge in overseas commerce, as the trade in raw wool was in decline, and the combined value of wool and cloth sold overseas showed no consistent upward trend.