1200–1350

Peasants have left no accounts: they were often illiterate, and such documents had no place in a domestic economy in which most of the produce was consumed within the household. The peasantry used goods, rather than making profits, so that a calculation of surplus in purely financial terms would have been foreign to their outlook. The evidence for the living standards of the peasants comes from documents compiled by lords or by the state, whose main interest lay in squeezing money and services from them. There are two approaches to research into peasant living standards. One is to attempt to build models of peasant income and expenditure. The other is to seek more direct evidence of peasant material conditions, such as housing, clothing and food. This chapter is devoted to the first method, and chapter 6 to the second.

Modelling the peasant economy can be attempted on a grand, theoretical scale. Lunden, for example, who is concerned with the medieval peasantry of Norway, argues that the variable factors were the peasants' diet, the number of people, the area of land in agricultural use, rents and taxes, climate and technology. He assumes that diet did not change (being close to the minimum necessary to sustain life), and that technology was static. Accordingly, if the number of people rose, or the taxes increased, or the climate deteriorated, the area of agricultural land would have grown. In the opposite circumstances the cultivated area shrank.