THE ENGLISH ECONOMY FOLLOWING THE BLACK DEATH

* Judith R. Gelman

July 1979 (revised November 1982) 52pp. PDF

* Bureau of Economics, Federal Trade Commission. 

The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily represent those of the

Commission, individual Commissioners, or other staff members.

Research for this paper was done while the author was studying at

MIT. 

I. INTRODUCTION

This paper examines evidence from late-Medieval/early Renaissance England

 in order to determine whether the English economy suffered a secular decline after the first outbreak of plague, in 134 8-51. The major conclusion of this analysis is that the plague did not cause an economic depression in England .

Instead, economic data--such as food prices, wages, and trade figures-- indicate that the economic welfare of the surviving English population improved in the post-plague era. The severe and repeated population declines during the post-plague period appear to have been generated wholly exogenously . The economic improvement was not universal. While the peasants and artisans were better off in the post-plague era, the upper class suffered from the rise in wage rates and the fa ll in land rents .

The conclusions reached here contradict those of many other economic historians . The disagreement has two basic sources .

First, when the population level falls drastically, total and percapita economic activity may move in opposite directions . Many economic historians, most notably Miskimin and Lopez , have looked

at trade figures for this period in aggregates, ignoring changes in population (see 19, 20 , 21, 22). Such practices implicitly rely on Malthusian theories of endogenously generated changes in population . The problems with applying the Malthusian population theory to this time period are dis cussed below in greater detail.

For now , suffice it to say that population decline may be exogenous or may be affected by economic activity in other than the usually expected ways. Because the issue of aggregate versus per capita data has been mishandled by many writers, it is necessary to define economic depression precisely.