The number of England's inhabitants recovered only slowly from the demographic disasters of the fourteenth century. The best current estimates suggest that, having stood at between 4.5 and 6.0 million in 1348, the population of the kingdom was only somewhere between 2.25 and 2.75 million in the 1520s. If output per head had remained unchanged throughout the period from 1348 to 1525 this would mean that national income in the latter year was approximately one half what it had been in the former. But during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a larger part of the population than before was able to find regular employment, and more resources were available per head of the population. Wage levels rose, and families were able to buy more food and manufactured goods as a reward for their labours. The later fifteenth century was a golden age in the history of standards of living. Even in the 1520s, though real wages had fallen a long way from their fifteenth-century peak, skilled craftsmen could earn 25 per cent more than equivalent wage earners at the opening of the fourteenth century. The implications of these changes for the level and composition of national income are imperfectly understood. There are as yet no aggregate estimates either of incomes or of output sufficiently dependable to assess the combined effect of lower population and higher output per man. Interpretations of the economic history of these centuries vary considerably according to the emphasis which different historians place upon the main economic variables.