THE MARGIN AND THE MEDIEVAL ECONOMY

The causes and the extent of economic change in medieval England remain matters of controversy. In the quest to understand the dynamics of the economy, historians have considered the relative influence of such factors as technological innovation, class structures and relations, demographic trends, and contemporary economic attitudes. Nevertheless, while subject to sustained assault in recent years, the current weight of historical scholarship still suggests that the changing balance between land and labour was the most important influence behind economic change. The basic principles of this ‘population-resources’ model were first outlined in a series of seminal articles by the late Michael Postan, and have influenced the work of many later scholars. In recent years, more sophisticated analysis of manorial records has yielded detailed evidence about medieval agriculture and demography which has demanded some refinement of the model. Yet one central constituent that has been accepted almost without question is its concept of ‘the margin’.

The model postulates that population increase in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries resulted in both the expansion of cultivation and the general growth of the economy. However, by around 1300 the population had outstripped the ability of agriculture to maintain it and there followed at least a century of demographic and economic decline. The two centuries after Domesday are regarded as a period of progressive land shortage, when the pressure of rising population forced society to colonise lands which in more propitious times would have been regarded as unfavourable for cultivation.