Much has been written on the problem of population in the fourteenth century, on changing marriage patterns, on the severe and killing famines, particularly those of the second and fifth decades, and on the continent-wide epidemics, particularly of bubonic plague, which recurred frequently from the fifth decade onwards. The questions have been discussed at length of how soon population began to decline in different parts of Europe, and of how soon that decline made enough of an impact on the gross overpopulation of Europe to produce any significant changes in the economic and social structure. Much has also been written on the extraordinarily widespread war and disorder of the century. There were civil wars in France, Castille, Naples and Prussia, inter-city wars by land, and by sea, between the states of northern Italy, the ravages of routiers and condottieri in times of nominal peace, the ‘social’ revolts of peasantry in England and France, or of artisans in the cities of the southern Netherlands and northern Italy, the dissolution of strong central government and the imposition of crushing tax burdens. All this happened against a background of deteriorating climate and progressive soil-exhaustion.

It would have been well if even one factor could have remained stable in such a period, but in many parts of Europe the currency too was remarkably unstable, and marked by violent debasements and equally violent attempts to return to ‘strong’ money.