Economy, Trade, and Society in the Late Middle Ages
Three numbers fix the late medieval economy in time. In 1300 the population of Europe was approaching seventy million, the high-water mark of the medieval expansion; in 1348, after the first wave of the Black Death, it had fallen by perhaps a third; and it would not return to its 1300 level until somewhere around 1500. Two hundred years of demographic and economic history turn on those numbers, and on the institutional adjustments that the people of the period made in response to them.
The economy that emerged from this long crisis was recognisably different from the economy of 1300. Wages were higher in real terms. Serfdom was fading in western Europe. Towns were larger, more numerous, and more politically assertive. Italian merchant banks and the great fairs of Champagne were giving way to new instruments of credit and new centres of exchange. The Hanseatic League in the Baltic and the Florentine and Genoese galleys in the Mediterranean had built a trade network that, by 1400, reached from Bergen to Beirut and from Bruges to Novgorod.
This guide is organised in four sections:
- Trade, banking, and the merchant class — the Champagne fairs, the Hanse, and the Italian banking houses from the Bardi to the Medici.
- Agriculture, famine, and rural change — the Great Famine of 1315–1317, the three-field system, and the wool trade that dominated the English economy.
- Towns, cities, and urban life — guilds, the daily life of the medieval city, and the growth of London and Paris.
- Peasants, manors, and the village economy — the manor, the village community, and the long decline of serfdom.
A system in two crises
The late medieval economy was the economy that lived through, and partly caused, the end of the medieval expansion. From roughly 1300 to 1350 a series of overlapping shocks — the Great Famine of 1315–1317, the murrains of cattle and sheep in the 1310s and 1320s, the return of plague, the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337 — cut the population and exposed the structural weaknesses of the Malthusian economy that preceded it. The Black Death of 1347–1351 and its recurrences kept the population low for a century. Then, from roughly 1450 to 1500, a partial demographic recovery coincided with the rise of new fiscal states, the spread of the printing press, and the first tentative moves towards Atlantic exploration.
Most of the institutional changes covered in the four sections — the decline of serfdom, the rise of wage labour, the tightening of the guilds, the appearance of new forms of credit — are best read as responses to that long crisis. They were not the inevitable result of “progress.” They were the practical answers that the people of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries found to a problem that nobody had solved since the eleventh century: how to organise production, distribution, and government when labour was suddenly and persistently scarce.
A note on periodisation
This guide stops at 1500 by convention rather than by any sharp break. The Antwerp Bourse is from 1531, the Bank of Amsterdam from 1609, the first English joint-stock companies from 1600 and after, and the first proper central bank (the Swedish Riksbank) from 1668. Each of these is sometimes described as a “medieval” invention; all of them are early modern. The late medieval economy did not produce them. It did produce the bill of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, large-scale merchant banking, the commenda contract, the Hanseatic kontor, the Wool Hall of the Calais staple, and the great trading companies of Venice and Genoa — the technical preconditions of those later institutions, but not the institutions themselves.
What this guide does not do
The economy treated here is the economy that left written records. The result is heavy on Florentine ledgers, English manorial court rolls, and the statutes of Flemish wool towns, light on the household economy of the peasant, the informal economy of the suburb, and the labour of women and children. The articles in the four sections try to flag this bias where it matters.