Medieval England Book

This book offers the reader an entirely fresh view of England's Middle Ages. It argues that the long Roman occupation was an unmitigated disaster for the native population because so little was done to raise the output of farming once a sophisticated Mediterranean society was settled in its midst. The Anglo-Saxons, having cleared the land of most of their British predecessors, then set about revolutionising farming technology. This enormously increased the area available for the growing of food, and hence the size of the population. There was more land under the plough in Domesday England than in late Victorian times. The Black Death then revealed how big the population had by then become. Initially plague removed between a third and a half of the population we can trace on records. But there were many more families to feed than we can trace in records. We can tell that that was so because farm output was not much affected by the Black Death's first strike. Apparently farmers, at first, were able to recruit as many replacements for lost labour as they required. Nor did devastating plague check the waging of the French war which was very soon resumed with its customary ferocity. In the end, the Black Death succeeded in cutting the population down to size; and this had the beneficial effect of removing want, and the ill-health that want generates, from the lives of those who survived. Paradoxically this infused new life into those who survived. The wool export trade dwindled irrevocably; it was replaced by a prodigious export of dyed woollen cloth. The farmers produced so much grain in this plague-ridden period that famine, once endemic, became unusual. Indeed, general standards of living probably rose to levels not again achieved until the late nineteenth century.