23. Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, chap. 1; F. Curschmann, “Hungersnöte in Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Wirtschaftsgeschichte des 8. bis 13. Jahrhunderts,” Leipziger Studien aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte 6 (1900) 1.
24. Marc Bloch, “Le probleme de l’or au Moyen Age,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 5 (1933) 1–34; a translation appears in Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch (tr. J. E. Anderson; Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), 186–229. Also important is a companion piece by Bloch, translated by Anderson as “Natural Economy or Money Economy: A Pseudo-Dilemma,” ibid., 230–41.
25. Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money 1450–1920 (Barcelona, 1969; English tr. London, 1976), 19.
26. C. C. Patterson, “Silver Stocks and Losses in Ancient and Medieval Times,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 25 (1972) 205–35; the estimate of three hundred tons is from D. M. Metcalf, “English Monetary History in the Time of Offa: A Reply,” Numismatic Circular 71 (1963) 1651.
27. J. R. Strayer, “The Crusades of Louis IX,” in K. M. Setton, ed., A History of the Crusades (Philadelphia, 1962), II, chap. 14.
28. Robert S. Lopez writes, “Silver had been mined in various European regions throughout the early Middle Ages; the opening of the Goslar mines had been one of the earliest signs of the long trend of growth in the tenth century; Freiburg, probably the richest source, had been developed in the twelfth century. The thirteenth was marked by intensive exploitation of old mines but not blessed by important new discoveries; and there were symptoms of increasing difficulties in securing the larger amounts demanded by the growing hunger for silver. In Italy, the inferior mines of Tuscany and Sardinia were tapped, and water-driven hammers were introduced to exploit the poorer ores of Trentino; in Germany, Goslar passed its peak and Freiburg was nearing exhaustion.” Robert S. Lopez, “Back to Gold, 1252,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 9 (1956) 219–40, 233.
29. Patterson, “Silver Stocks and Losses,” 230.
30. Mate, “High Prices in the Early Fourteenth Century,” 2.
31. Two excellent and very thoughtful essays on this subject are N. J. Mayhew, “Money and Prices in England from Henry II to Edward III,” Agricultural History Review 35 (1987) 121–32; and A. R. Bridbury, “Thirteenth-Century Prices and the Money Supply,” ibid., 33 (1985) 1–21. Bridbury and Mayhew believe that the expansion of the money supply began earlier, circa 1280, and that a “sudden late-twelfth century surge has every appearance of monetary inflation.” (Mayhew, 129).
I read the price-series of Thorold Rogers and David Farmer differently (as did Rogers and Farmer themselves), as a gradual rise in prices, except for a very violent price-surge during a period from 1201 to 1205, which was time of extreme bad weather. W. L. Warren writes of that time, “the rivers froze after Christmas and the Thames could be crossed on foot. The ground was so hard that no ploughshare could bite into it until March. The winter sowings were almost ruined by the ferocity of the cold; vegetables and herbage shriveled up. When spring finally came . . . corn was selling at famine prices. Oats fetched ten times the normal price, and men were paying half a mark for a few pence worth of peas or beans. A sorry land was England in 1204–05.” W. L. Warren, King John (London, 1961), 105.
32. On florins and ducats, a good survey appears in Frederic Lane, Venice, a Maritime Republic (Baltimore, 1973), which summarizes many years of study on this subject; see also idem, “Le vecchie monete di conto veneziane ed il ritorno all’ore,” Atto dell Instituto Veneto di Scienze Letre ed Arti; Classe di Scienzi Morali, Letter, ed Arti 117 (1958–59) 49–78; A. M. Watson, “Back to Gold and Silver,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 20 (1967) 1–34.
33. Lopez describes a “boom of contracts of exchange and bank transfers between 1248 and 1255.” “Back to Gold,” 232.
34. Carlo M. Cipolla, “Currency Depreciation in Medieval Europe,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 15 (1963) 417.
35. On the fall of real wages, see Postan, “Some Economic Evidence of Declining Population,” 221–46; Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates,” 296–314; and Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, 40–41.
36. Georges d’Avenel, Histoire économique de la proprieté, des salarires des denrées et de tous les prix en general depuis l’an 1200 jusqu’en l’an 1800 (7 vols., Paris, 1894–1926), III, 317.
37. The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, ed. H. E. Butler (London, 1949), 59.
38. Carus-Wilson, “Industrial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century,” 54.
39. Carlo M. Cipolla, Money, Prices, and Civilization in the Mediterranean World: Fifth to Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1956), 63–65; Sidney Homer, A History of Interest Rates (New Brunswick, 1963) 94–99.
40. Cipolla, Money, Prices, and Civilization, chap. 3.
41. “It is generally agreed that the thirteenth century witnessed an economic crisis that led to the impoverishment of the population.” Alfred N. May, “An Index of Thirteenth-Century Peasant Impoverishment? Manor Court Fines,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 26 (1973) 397; Titow, English Rural Society, 64–96.
42. Rohault de Fleury, Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion de N.-S.J.-C. (Paris, 1870), 213, 357.
43. J. Z. Titow, Winchester Yields (Cambridge, 1972); Mate, “High Prices in Early Fourteenth-Century England,” 8.
44. A running tabulation of disettes appears in M. E. Levasseur, Les prix aperçu de l’histoire économique de la valeur et du revenu de la terre, en France du commencement du XIIe siècle à la fin du XVIHe, avec un appendice sur le prix du froment et sur les disettes depuis l’an 1200 jusqu’a l’an 1891 (Paris, 1893), appendix.
45. D’Avenel, Histoire . . . de tous les prix, III, 183.
46. D. L. Farmer, “Some Livestock Price Movements in Thirteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review, 2d ser. 22 (1969) 1–16. Postan, in an appended note to Medieval Economy and Society, 280–81, expresses strong skepticism about the thesis that recoinages made a difference in price levels. He writes: “The upsurge of prices which Mr. Farmer noted in the years following some of the recoinages does not occur in the years following other recoinages. Between 1150 and 1300, recoinages occurred at least six times, from 1156–9, 1181, 1205, 1247, 1279 and 1299, yet some of these do not appear to have had any effect on prices, especially 1181, 1205 and 1299.” Postan appears to have been mistaken about the recoinages of 1205 and 1299, but he may have been correct about 1181. On balance, the weight of Farmer’s evidence is greater than Postan’s skepticism. See also D. L. Farmer, “Some Grain Price Movements in Thirteenth-Century England, Economic History Review 2d ser. 10 (1957–58) 207.
47. Mate, “High Prices in Early Fourteenth-Century England,” 5.
48. Ibid.
49. Michael Prestwich, “Early Fourteenth-Century Exchange Rates,” Economic History Review 32 (1979) 470–82.
50. Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank (Cambridge, 1963; New York, 1966), 2.
51. Mario Chiaudano, “I Rothschild del Dugento: La Gran Tavola di Orlando Buonsignori,” Bullettino Sienese di Storia Patria 42 (1935), 103–42; William M. Bowsky, The Finance of the Commune of Siena, 1287–1355 (Oxford, 1970); idem, A Medieval Italian Commune: Siena Under the Nine, 1287–1355 (Berkeley, 1981).
The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century
1. A quantitative study appears in Hugues Neveux, “Bonnes et mauvaises récoltes du XIVe au XIXe siècle: Jalons pour une enquète systématique,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 53 (1975) 177–92. There were many local exceptions. Tuscany appears to have escaped the ravages of this great famine but was hit severely a few years later.
2. Ian Kershaw, “The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 1315–1322,” Past & Present 59 (1973) 3–50; Elisabeth Carpentier, “Famines et epidemies dans l’histoire du XIVe siècle,” Annales 17 (1962) 1062–92; David Herlihy, “Population, Plague, and Social Change in Rural Pistoia, 1201–143
0,” Economic History Review, 2d ser. 18 (1965) 225–44; H. S. Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315–1317,” Speculum 15 (1930) 343; H. V. Weveke, “La famine de l’an 1316 en Flandre et dans les regions voisines,” Revue du Nord 41 (1950) 5.
For a quantitative study of the diet of harvest workers by decade, 1250–1430, see Christopher Dyer, “Changes in Diet in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Harvest Workers,” Agricultural History Review 36 (1988) 21–37.
3. Lucas, “Great European Famine of 1315–1317,” 61.
4. Ibid., 58.
5. Ibid., 57–58.
6. Ibid., 66.
7. A. R. Bridbury, “Before the Black Death,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 30 (1977) 393–410.
8. J. R. Maddicott, “The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294–1341,” Past & Present supplement 1 (1975), rpt. in T. H. Aston, ed., Landlords, Peasants and Politics in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1987), 285–359; E. Miller, “War, Taxation, and the English Economy of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,” in J. M. Winter, ed., War and Economic Development (Cambridge, 1975); J. O. Prestwich, “War and Finance in the Anglo-Norman State,” Royal Historical Society Transactions 5th ser. 4 (1954) 19–44; K. B. McFarlane, “War, the Economy, and Social Change,” Past & Present 22 (1962) 3–35.
9. This is the conclusion of Guy Bois, no friend of Malthusian models. He writes, “The chronology of the fall in the revenues of the landed seignury shows a remarkable correspondence with the movement of population.” This was specially the case with petty nobles; great seigneurs did much better. Bois observes: “On the one hand, the privileged position of the recipients of dues from seigneurial monopolies and tithes is obvious. Their revenues offered particular resistance to the erosion that threatened from all sides. They even derived benefit from the price rises of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. On the other hand stood the mass of small landlords drawing the best part of their incomes from the rent from their peasant tenures.” See The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern Normandy c. 1300–1500 (1976; Cambridge, 1984), 221, 236–37.
10. Edouard Perroy, “Les crises du XIVe siècle,” Annales 4 (1949) 167–182; R. H. Hilton, “Y eut-il une crise générate de feodalité?” Annales 6 (1951) 23–30; Robert Boutrouche, La crise d’une societé (Paris, 1947). A popular account appears in Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York, 1978), a lively narrative of military and political events centered on a knight of France, Euguerrand de Coucy VII.
11. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York, 1969) 35.
12. Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (New York, 1978), 24–25.
13. Guy Bois believes that these “price scissors” were “an original form of price movements peculiar to the feudal economy.” This interpretation is central to his Marxist analysis of the “crisis of feudalism.” But similar scissor-like movements also appeared after the climax of other great waves and are not unique to any one of them. Further, these wave-movements in crises cannot be made to correlate with Marxist stages of production unless that taxonomy is changed in fundamental ways. There is an interpretative opportunity here, for a post-Marxist historian. See Bois, Crise du feodalisme, 92.
The Equilibrium of the Renaissance
1. For contextual essays, see R. S. Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, “The Economic Depression of the Renaissance,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 14 (1962) 408–26; Leopold Genicot, “Crisis: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times,” Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 1, 678–94.
2. This account is drawn from David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–1430 (New Haven, 1967); and idem, “Population, Plague, and Social Change in Rural Pistoia,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 18 (1965) 225–44.
3. Tuchman, Distant Mirror, 166.
4. C. A. Christensen, “Aendringerne i landsbyens oslashkonimiske og sociale strukur i det 14 og 15 århundrede,” Historisk Tidsskrifft 12 (1964) 346.
This is what German scholars call the Wüstungsproblem, the “problem of the deserted villages,” a major historiographical issue in many European nations. Part of the problem is about how many villages were deserted by their inhabitants, and precisely when the desertion took place. See Maurice Beresford and John B. Hurst, Deserted Medieval Villages (London, 1971); A. Holmsen, “Desertion of Farms around Oslo in the late Middle Ages,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 10 (1962) 165; Wilhelm Abel, Die Wüstungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters (2d ed., 1955); J. F. Pesez and E. Le Roy Ladurie, “Les villages desertes en France: Vue d’ensembles,” Annales 20 (1965) 257.
5. A leading authority on this subject is John Day, “The Great Bullion Famine of the Fifteenth Century,” Past & Present 29 (1978) 3–54; reprinted with many other essays in idem, The Medieval Market Economy (Oxford, 1987).
6. The price of wheat (in grains of silver) changed as follows in England, according to evidence drawn from the estates of the Bishops of Winchester:
7. N. J. Mayhew, “Numismatic Evidence and Falling Prices in the Fourteenth Century,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 27 (1974) 1–15; H. A. Miskimin, “Monetary Movements and Market Structure—Forces for Contraction in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 2d ser. 24 (1964) 470–490; J. Schreiner, Pest og prisfall i Senmiddelalderen (Oslo, 1948); H. van Werveke, “Essor et déclin de la Flandre,” in Studi in onore di Gino Luzzato (Milan, 1950).
8. Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia; Beveridge, “Wages in the Winchester Manors”; idem, “Westminister Wages in the Manorial Era”; D. Woodward, “Wage Rates and Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England,” Past & Present 91 (1981) 28–46.
Important new evidence of qualitative change in the labor market after the Black Death appears in Dyer, Standards of Living, 222–33, and Simon A. C. Penn and Christopher Dyer, “Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the Labour Laws,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 43 (1990) 356–76.
9. Samuel Cohn, The Laboring Classes of Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980); Richard C. Trexler, The Spiritual Power: Republican Florence under the Interdict (Brill, 1974).
10. E. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896).
11. Postan, Medieval Economy and Society, 173; H. L. Gray, “The Commutation in Villein Services in England before the Black Death,” English Historical Review 29 (1914) 625–56; R. H. Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage in England,” Past & Present 31 (1965) 3–19; T. W. Page, The End of Villeinage in England (New York, 1900).
12. Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia, 146–47.
13. For many years, the Renaissance was thought to be the product of high prosperity. That idea was challenged by R. S. Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, who argued that the Renaissance was actually a time of economic depression. The Lopez-Miskimin model fits the period from 1348 to 1405 in Italy, and also the early fifteenth century in northern Europe. But the Italian quattrocento is better understood as an era of economic equilibrium with comparatively stable prices, falling rent and interest, and rising wages. That equilibrium became an important underpinning of the Renaissance; see Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, “Economic Depression of the Renaissance”; Carlo M. Cipolla, “Economic Depression of the Renaissance?” with rejoinders by Lopez and Miskimin, Economic History Review 2d ser. 16 (1964) 519–529; C. Barbagallo, “La crisi economico-sociale dell’Italia della Renascenza,” Nouva Rivista Storica 34 (1950) and 35 (1951). For fiscal movements, see Josef Rosen, “Prices and Public Finance in Basel, 1360–1535,” Economic History Review, 2d ser. 25 (1972) 1–17.
14. Bois, Crise du feodalisme, 284–308.
15. M. M. Postan, “The Fifteenth Century,” Economic History Review 9 (1938–39) 160–67; Perroy, “Les Crises du XIVe siècle”.
16. One study shows that wages in Rouen rose for hand workers from 20 pence in 1399–1407 to 27 pence in 1469–78; wages of masons rose from two sh
illings sixpence to four shillings or four shillings sixpence in the same period. At the same time, the price of grain in hours of labor fell 40 to 50 percent. See Guy Bois, “La prix du froment à Rouen au XVe siècle,” Annales 23 (1968) 1262–82; for England, see J. Hatcher, Population and the English Economy (London, 1977).
17. The Mediterranean moment was made possible by favorable climatological conditions, which have changed profoundly in this region. The territories of Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, which today are baked dry by the summer sun, were in the fifteenth century more moist, because of changing atmospheric circulation systems. Small changes in precipitation had a large impact upon the carrying capacity of the environment. See J. Vicens Vives, Manual de historia economica de España (Barcelona, 1959).
18. The estimate of 870,000 deaths was made by Theodoros Spandugino, and is accepted by Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (Princeton, 1978), 431; a lively survey is Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries; The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (New York, 1977).
19. This process may be said to have begun in 1405, with the acquisition of Padua, Bessano, Vicenza, and Verona; it reached its limit with the annexation of Rovigo in 1484; thereafter, the boundaries of Venice changed little until the conquest of the republic by Napoleon in 1797.
20. Lane, Venice, 289.
21. De Roover, Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank; Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1980), 29–66; idem, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1968).
22. Goldthwaite, Building of Renaissance Florence, 328–29; idem, “I prèzzi del grano a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo,” Quaderni Storici 28 (1975) 5–36.
23. Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oscar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago, 1948), 225.
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