This book is concerned with standards of living and patterns of consumption in England between the thirteenth and the early sixteenth century. It is the first work to treat the period wholly in this way, but the approach has many antecedents in historical writing going back for more than a century, and owes much to a growing tide of research in the last twenty years.

Perhaps the first modern interest in the subject can be seen among nineteenth-century antiquarians in search of curiosities and specifically of material to illustrate the social background to medieval literature. They produced works of lasting value in editions of aristocratic household accounts, which have not been used by historians until recently. The first scholar to employ modern methods of analysis to the history of living standards was J. E. Thorold Rogers, a professor of economics in the universities of London and Oxford who, with remarkable energy and persistence, collected a mass of information on prices and wages from 1259 to 1793, published in seven fat volumes between 1866 and 1902. His interpretation of these figures, Six centuries of work and wages, first appeared in 1884 and went through many reprintings and editions. Thorold Rogers was a radical social reformer, for a time serving as a Liberal MP, for whom historical research was linked directly with a concern for the condition of the working class in his day. He argued that agricultural workers had suffered a continuous fall in their living standards since the middle ages.