Britain in 1400

Nigel Saul tells how, in spite of famines and visitations of the plague, conditions were better than ever before for those living in 1400.

At the end of the fourteenth century the British Isles were a land transformed. At the beginning of the century the population everywhere had been high and rising. Towns and villages had been crowded. The countryside had been akin to Langland's 'plain full of people'. A hundred years later the position was very different. Population had fallen and continued to fall. Whole villages had vanished from the map. In the towns, rows of tenements stood empty.

The turning point had come in 1348 when the Black Death struck Britain. No plague epidemic had hit the country for some 700 years; the last known outbreak had been back in the 660s. In the 1340s, however, a plague-carrying bacillus was brought to western Europe from Russia. The dreaded infection spread quickly. According to the chronicler of Lynn, it was introduced to England through Weymouth in June. By August it had reached the south-east, and by spring the following year it had spread to the far north. The symptoms of the disease were terrible. Large swellings or buboes grew in the groin, neck or armpit, giving off a foul smell, and within two or three days the victim was dead. In the absence of reliable statistics it is hard to say how many people died, but a figure of between 30 and 40 per cent of the population is probably about right. At the beginning of the century, England's population had been some 6-7 million. Eighty years later it had fallen to 3-4 million. Scotland's population is believed to have fallen by the same proportion.

The Black Death, though the most dramatic, was not the only catastrophe to hit the British Isles in the fourteenth century. In the forty years before this plague there had been a series of natural disasters. For two successive summers, in 1315 and 1316, there had been heavy rain, destroying the harvest and leaving the people without food; so famine was widespread. In 1321 there was another harvest failure, and prices rose to almost the levels of 1316. The natural disasters were not confined to humans. Sheep were afflicted by liver rot and other diseases, and flocks were decimated. At the royal manor of Clipstone (Nottinghamshire) half the flock died. The fall in animal stocks had major consequences. Not only were milk and cheese supplies reduced; cereal production was disrupted because draught animals were lost.

The Cambridge economic historian M.M. Postan, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, suggested that there was a 'crisis of subsistence' in the early fourteenth century - in other words, that population growth was outstripping resources, and that a malnourished population had become 'calamity sensitive'. The suggestion, however, may well underestimate the level of development of the medieval economy. The majority of peasant landholders had small surpluses to exchange for food, while the landless or very poor could support themselves by working for the better-off. It is noticeable that in some of the most densely populated areas, like East Anglia, there are remarkably few signs of impoverishment.

However serious the famines, then, the Black Death probably deserves its reputation as the main agent of change. Moreover, it was not the only visitation of plague. There were further major outbreaks in 1361, 1369, 1390, 1413, 1434, 1439 and 1464, and smaller outbreaks in between; in Scotland there were additional outbreaks in 1401-3, 1430-2 and 1455. In their accounts of the visitations of 1361 and 1390 the chroniclers noted that the disease particularly afflicted the young - presumably because they lacked the resistance to it of their elders. As a result of this high incidence among adolescents, there were fewer people of child-bearing age, and by 1400 the population was failing to reproduce itself. It is not until the end of the fifteenth century that there is firm evidence of a recovery in numbers.

A major consequence of population decline was a retreat in the area under cultivation. The long period of expansion which had begun in the early Middle Ages and lasted till around 1300 came to an end. In some parts of the British Isles widespread abandonment of the land occurred. One of the worst affected areas was the English East Midlands. In parts of Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire whole villages were abandoned, leaving only a church in the fields to indicate the site of a former settlement. But the phenomenon of desertion needs to be seen in perspective. Scotland and Wales were less seriously affected. And even in England it was chiefly the smaller settlements that vanished from the map. Generally, villages shrank rather than disappeared altogether.

Population fall was not the only factor that produced agrarian change in this period. Climatic change had a role to play too. From the early fourteenth century the weather appears to have got colder and wetter. The lower summer temperatures made arable cultivation more difficult in the higher and more northerly parts of Britain. On the slopes of the Lammermuirs in Scotland the growing of cereal crops was gradually phased out. In south-eastern England rising sea levels led to the abandonment of cereal growing on the coastal estates of Battle Abbey in Sussex, and flooding was common. Serious inundations by the sea are recorded at Barnhorne (Sussex) in 1356-57, 1371 and repeatedly in the 1420s.

Concentration on these natural disasters can easily leave us with the impression that the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries were a grim, doom-ridden age. This idea is reinforced by the art of the period. The figure of death was represented more often. Depictions of the 'Three Living and the Three Dead' made their appearance in manuscripts and on church walls. Scenes of the 'Dance of Death' adorned the north cloister of Old St Paul's. In the 1440s cadaver tombs, showing the figure of the deceased in decay, were introduced into the British Isles from France. The living were given firm admonition against vainglory - their day, it was implied, would come.

However, the pervasive impression of gloom needs modification. For those who survived the catastrophes, life was good - far better than it had been before. The days of poverty and overcrowding in the countryside were over. Land was abundant. Those without land were able to gain a tenement for the first time, while those already well-off were able to acquire more. Furthermore, the economic conditions of the time favoured the peasantry over the lords. Because labour was scarce, wages shot up. By the early 1380s skilled labourers who had once earned 5s or 6s a year were earning twice that amount. At the same time, the fall in population led to a drop in the price of food. A quarter of wheat, which in the 1320s had cost 8s or 9s, cost no more than half that fifty years later. Among the lower orders there was a general process of betterment. And, inevitably, in its wake came a rise in expectations. The unfree peasants, chafing under seignorial oppression, longed for freedom - freedom from villeinage and freedom to take advantage of the new economic opportunities. In England there was a major rebellion against the government and upper classes in 1381. As Froissart observed, this was not caused by poverty and hardship; rather it was a product of 'the ease and riches that the people were of'. The rebels were thrusting, ambitious folk. The concessions made to them by Richard II at Smithfield were quickly revoked, but time and the changing economy worked in the peasants' favour. By the mid-fifteenth century villeinage had withered away. In Scotland, neyfdom, its northern equivalent, had died out a century before, killed by the dislocation of war.

The rapid population decline paved the way for some major innovations in the structure of landholding and in the tillage of the soil. By the early fifteenth century most of the directly cultivated demesnes had been put out to lease. In Warwickshire the bishops of Worcester had leased all their demesnes by the early 1390s, and Coventry Priory had done so by 1411. In the south-east, the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, had leased virtually all of their demesnes by 1390, while Westminster Abbey and the archbishops of Canterbury leased theirs more gradually between 1380 and 1440. In Scotland and Wales the demesnes, which were anyway fewer and smaller, were also leased.

With the introduction of leasing the landowners became, in effect, rentiers. Responsibility for tilling the soil now passed to the demesne lessees, who were men of varying background. A minority of lessees were substantial gentry figures - men of the rank of knight, esquire or gentleman. But the majority were lesser folk - peasants or yeomen. It was usual for these men to merge, or 'engross', the former demesne lands with their own, creating new estates. The new landholding units differed sharply from the old in the manner of their specialisation. They were often used for pastoral husbandry - in other words, arable cultivation was abandoned and the land primarily given over to grazing. The shift to animal husbandry is to be numbered among the most striking phenomena of the period. The background to it lay in a general improvement in diet. Whereas in earlier times the peasantry had eaten a mainly bread-based diet, in the fifteenth century they were consuming more meat: higher incomes led to a diversity of consumption patterns. Rural landowners responded to the change with alacrity. They chose to specialise in whatever was most profitable. Some went in for cattle grazing, others for sheep rearing, others again for the breeding of rabbits. But all were watchful of costs. Late medieval agriculture was run much more efficiently than its predecessor.

Alongside this agrarian revolution there occurred a minor industrial revolution. The late Middle Ages witnessed a spectacular revival of the cloth industry. Before the Black Death cloth-making had been based mainly in the towns of southern and eastern England - Winchester, Beverley, Lincoln, Northampton. Under pressure of foreign competition, the industry had gone into decline. However, in the late fourteenth century, aided by the high export tax on English wool which added to foreign competitors' costs, the industry recovered. But its geographical basis was very different. No longer was it based principally in the old established towns; it flourished in the countryside. The main cloth-producing areas were to be found in the West Country - notably the Cotswolds and north Wiltshire, East Anglia and Yorkshire. The attractions of these areas were several: there was plenty of wool to be obtained locally; there were ports nearby for exporting the end-product; and labour was cheap because women and casual workers could be used. No similar industrial recovery occurred north of the Border. Wool was just as plentiful in Scotland as in England, but the domestic market was smaller and so there was less incentive to industrialise. The patterns of the English and Scottish economies were beginning to diverge.

In this story of change the year 1400 is of no particular significance: it represents merely a moment in an evolutionary process which began in the wake of the Black Death. But in terms of political and cultural history its significance is greater. 1400 represents something of a turning point. Only months beforehand, in 1399, a political revolution had taken place in England, with Richard II (r. 1377-99) overthrown by his cousin Henry of Lancaster (r.1399-1413). The year also witnessed the deaths of some of the leading creative figures of the age: in August the distinguished architect Henry Yevele died, and in October the most celebrated poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. At the same time, events in the non-English parts of the British Isles were reaching crisis point. In Wales the escalating feud between Owain Glyndwr and Lord Grey of Ruthin culminated in a national uprising, while in Ireland the collapse of Richard II's settlement fatally undermined English lordship.

Some of these events were of chiefly symbolic importance. Yevele's death admittedly removed from the scene one of the giants of English architecture: Yevele had been the designer of such supreme works as Westminster Hall and the nave of Canterbury Cathedral. But his death did not precipitate any change of style. The lean, economical style which he had popularised was to dominate English architecture for the next half century, and he left behind him some notable successors - men like Stephen Lote. In the early fifteenth century there was a shift in building activity from so-called 'great' churches - cathedrals and abbeys - to parish churches and colleges, but there was no revolution in architectural vocabulary.

The death of Chaucer was of greater significance. Even in his lifetime Chaucer had been recognised as a writer without peer, and both contemporaries and successors honoured him. His achievement was substantial: he gave the English vernacular new status. Hitherto courtly writing in England had chiefly been in French or, where appropriate, Latin. Chaucer brought English into the mainstream of contemporary French and Italian poetry. He 'Europeanised' English poetry by accommodating it to the broader Latin and vernacular traditions, and he fashioned the metrical form that was long to dominate English verse - the pentameter, which he used in both couplet and stanza. His two visits to Italy had introduced him to the work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and he translated such key works as the Roman de la Rose and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. Chaucer had a higher sense of the importance of poetry than any English poet before Spenser.

But the creative impulse in poetry which he had unleashed slowed after his death. The fifteenth century produced no Brahms to follow his Beethoven. The poets of the new age were a fairly lacklustre bunch. Thomas Hoccleve, author of The Regement of Princes (1411-12), was the most accomplished of them, and John Lydgate, a monk of Bury St Edmunds, the most prolific; in Scotland James I (r.1406-37), author of The Kingis Quair, stands out. But not until the time of Malory in the second half of the century was there again a writer of the first rank. In the fifteenth century writing in England became more inward-looking.

The introspection which the English showed was reinforced by the challenges to their ascendancy in Wales and Ireland. In English-ruled Ireland the position of the Dublin government had been precarious for almost a century. Richard II's two expeditions in 1394 and 1399 had sought to arrest the decline, but in the wake of the King's fall the Dublin administration was left largely to fend for itself, and assistance from Westminster was slight. In Wales at the beginning of the century English authority was virtually eliminated. Glyndwr's rebellion (1400-12), which had begun as a local rising in Merioneth, swelled into a mighty bid for national independence. For many decades there had been growing resentment at the weight of seignorial burdens, but around 1400 this sentiment swelled into a more general hatred of England and the English. The rebellion coincided with the series of risings against Henry IV in England, and Glyndwr was able to capitalise on the latter's misfortunes to establish a broad ascendancy in Wales. In the end, his rebellion was crushed and English authority reimposed. In the new century, however, the political mood in Wales was healthier. The English learned to treat the Welsh with greater sensitivity, while the Welsh appreciated that they would have to cultivate their identity within the experience of conquest, not against it.

The final upheaval of these years - Richard II's overthrow by Henry of Lancaster - is one that is more difficult to assess. For Shakespeare, writing in the 1590s, the usurpation was to be the cause of all England's later misfortunes. Shakespeare's history cycle tells the story of a realm afflicted. Henry's action in seizing the crown, according to Shakespeare, brought a fatal curse on his dynasty. In the short term, Henry's own reign was to be blighted, while fifty years later, in his grandson's time, the dynasty itself was toppled amid bloodshed and civil war.

Today, we tend to a less fatalistic interpretation of events. For a modern historian, the Lancastrians' downfall was caused not so much by dynastic curse as by Henry VI's personal inadequacy. Nonetheless, political life in the fifteenth-century was certainly bloody: Shakespeare was right there. In strife-ridden England no fewer than three kings met violent deaths, while in Scotland two did: one assassinated and the other killed in a rebellion. Yet, at least in the case of Scotland, appearances can deceive. Scottish political life had the advantage of an underlying stability which was lacking in England. In Scotland there was no prolonged civil war and no dynastic rivalry. Scottish kingship was successful because it was informal - much more informal than in England. Kings still itinerated round the realm, allowing their subjects to meet them. And government remained relatively decentralised: so communities could regulate themselves. These conditions made for a less competitive political society than in England. Small wonder that in 1603 James VI was to encounter such problems of adjustment when he succeeded to the throne of England. In political terms England, like the past, was a foreign country; they did things differently there.

Further Reading

P. Strohm, The 1390s: The Empty Throne; Fins de Siècle. How Centuries End 1400-2000, ed. A. Briggs and D. Snowman (New Haven and London, 1996); J.L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy 1150-1500 (London, 1980); R.R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales 1063-1415 (Oxford, 1987); A. Grant, Independence and Nationhood. Scotland 1306-1469 (London, 1984).

Nigel Saul is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London and the author of Richard II (Yale, 1997).

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