Economy of England in the Middle Ages

[3] By the end of the period, England had a weak government, by later standards, overseeing an economy dominated by rented farms controlled by gentry, and a thriving community of indigenous English merchants and corporations.

[7] The descendants of the Jewish financiers who had first come to England with William the Conqueror played a significant role in the growing economy, along with the new Cistercian and Augustinian religious orders that came to become major players in the wool trade of the north.

[14] William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, defeating the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings and placing the country under Norman rule.

William's system of government was broadly feudal in that the right to possess land was linked to service to the king, but in many other ways the invasion did little to alter the nature of the English economy.

[19] In the century prior to the Norman invasion, England's great estates, owned by the king, bishops, monasteries and thegns, had been slowly broken up as a consequence of inheritance, wills, marriage settlements or church purchases.

[28] The wealthier, formerly more independent Anglo-Saxon peasants found themselves rapidly sinking down the economic hierarchy, swelling the numbers of unfree workers, or serfs, forbidden to leave their manor and seek alternative employment.

English economic thinking remained conservative, seeing the economy as consisting of three groups: the ordines, those who fought, or the nobility; laboratores, those who worked, in particular the peasantry; and oratores, those who prayed, or the clerics.

[70] The Church in England was a major landowner throughout the medieval period and played an important part in the development of agriculture and rural trade in the first two centuries of Norman rule.

[82] Mining did not make up a large part of the English medieval economy, but the 12th and 13th centuries saw an increased demand for metals in the country, thanks to the considerable population growth and building construction, including the great cathedrals and churches.

[7] Many of these new towns were centrally planned: Richard I created Portsmouth, John founded Liverpool, and successive monarchs followed with Harwich, Stony Stratford, Dunstable, Royston, Baldock, Wokingham, Maidenhead and Reigate.

The nobility purchased and consumed many luxury goods and services in the capital, and as early as the 1170s the London markets were providing exotic products such as spices, incense, palm oil, gems, silks, furs and foreign weapons.

[100] Many towns in this period, including York, Exeter and Lincoln, were linked to the oceans by navigable rivers and could act as seaports, with Bristol's port coming to dominate the lucrative trade in wine with Gascony by the 13th century, but shipbuilding generally remained on a modest scale and economically unimportant to England at this time.

[106] There was a gradual reduction in the number of locations allowed to mint coins in England; under Henry II, only 30 boroughs were still able to use their own moneyers, and the tightening of controls continued throughout the 13th century.

[109] At any particular point in time, though, much of this currency might be being stored prior to being used to support military campaigns or to be sent overseas to meet payments, resulting in bursts of temporary deflation as coins ceased to circulate within the English economy.

[110] One physical consequence of the growth in the coinage was that coins had to be manufactured in large numbers, being moved in barrels and sacks to be stored in local treasuries for royal use as the king travelled.

[118] From the 12th century onwards, many English towns acquired a charter from the Crown allowing them to hold an annual fair, usually serving a regional or local customer base and lasting for two or three days.

[124][nb 1] One response to this was the creation of the Company of the Staple, a group of merchants established in English-held Calais in 1314 with royal approval, who were granted a monopoly on wool sales to Europe.

[135] After an initially peaceful start to John's reign, the king again began to extort money from the Jewish community, imprisoning the wealthier members, including Isaac of Norwich, until a huge, new taillage was paid.

[139] Royal revenue streams still proved insufficient and from the middle of the 13th century there was a shift away from the earlier land-based tax system towards one based on a mixture of indirect and direct taxation.

[142] At best, Edward I was struggling in 1300 to match in real terms the revenues that Henry II had enjoyed in 1100, and considering the growth in the size of the English economy, the king's share of the national income had dropped considerably.

[142] In the English towns the burgage tenure for urban properties was established early on in the medieval period, and was based primarily on tenants paying cash rents rather than providing labour services.

[145] The 12th century also saw a concerted attempt to curtail the remaining rights of unfree peasant workers and to set out their labour rents more explicitly in the form of the English Common Law.

The famine centred on a sequence of harvest failures in 1315, 1316 and 1321 and combined with an outbreak of murrain, a sickness amongst sheep and oxen in 1319–21 and the fatal ergotism, a fungus amongst the remaining stocks of wheat.

[151] Many people died in the ensuing famine, and the peasantry were said to have been forced to eat horses, dogs and cats as well as conducted cannibalism against children, although these last reports are usually considered to be exaggerations.

[16] Agriculture itself continued to innovate, and the loss of many English oxen to the murrain sickness in the crisis increased the number of horses used to plough fields in the 14th century, a significant improvement on older methods.

[215] The result was a substantial influx of money that in turn encouraged the import of manufactured luxury goods; by 1391 shipments from abroad routinely included "ivory, mirrors, paxes, armour, paper..., painted clothes, spectacles, tin images, razors, calamine, treacle, sugar-candy, marking irons, patens..., ox-horns and quantities of wainscot".

[220] Nonetheless, the great fairs remained of importance well into the 15th century, as illustrated by their role in exchanging money, regional commerce and in providing choice for individual consumers.

[222] Late Victorian writers argued that change in the English medieval economy stemmed primarily from the towns and cities, leading to a progressive and universalist interpretation of development over the period, focusing on trade and commerce.

[225] Power and her colleagues widened the focus of study from legal and government documents to include "agrarian, archaeological, demographic, settlement, landscape and urban" evidence.

[234] Sociological and anthropological studies of contemporary economies, including the work of Ester Boserup showed many flaws with Postan's key assumptions about demography and land use.

Detail from an illuminated book, with three figures shown talking, a monk on the left, a knight in armour in the middle and a peasant with a spade on the right. The picture is accented in rich blues.
The medieval English saw their society as comprising three groups – the clergy , who prayed; the knights , who fought; and the peasants , who worked the land.
GDP per capita in England, from 1270 to 1530
A crude medieval line drawing, showing a man with a team of two oxen ploughing a field, assisted by a woman. Both the man and woman are dressed in long medieval cloths.
Ploughmen at work with oxen
A map in ink and colour wash, showing an archetypal medieval village in the centre with numerous field divided into strips radiating out across the view.
The open field system , central to many medieval English communities
A photograph of moorland in summer; in the foreground is a dirt track on a small hill, in the mid-ground a small wood; in the background a treeless moorland skyline.
The Forest of High Peak , a moorland forest established for royal lead mining
A page from a medieval book, with hand writing in brown ink in two columns on an aged vellum page.
A page of the Domesday Book , which captures the economic condition of England in 1086
Detail from a medieval illustrated manuscript, showing a bearded peasant in long red robes digging with a spade; a stylised tree makes up the right hand side of the image.
An English serf at work digging, c. 1170
A painting showing a man in orange clothes playing a pipe and ringing a small bell. He is surrounded by numerous small white sheep, and two trees sit on either side of him. A small village is depicted in the upper left hand corner.
Sheep, shown here c. 1250, became increasingly important to English agriculture.
A photograph of a ruined abbey; a river passes by in the lower left hand of the picture, overhung with dark trees. A ruined abbey building in stone makes up the midground of the right side of the photograph.
Fountains Abbey , one of the new Cistercian monasteries built in the medieval period with wealth derived from agriculture and trade
A sketch of four men working in an open air workshop; one is putting objects into a chimney-like object in the middle of the picture, from which smoke is emerging. Behind them is the front of another building with a tiled roof.
Early iron-smelting using a bloomery
A black and white map, showing a town with a central street, criss-crossed by two adjoining small roads and a small castle on the far right of the map.
The medieval plan for Liverpool , a new English town founded by order of King John in 1207
A faded silver coin with an indistinct king's head in the centre with long hair, surrounded by faded writing.
An Edward I silver penny from Lincoln; Edward increased the controls on the minting of coins begun under Henry II, creating the Master of the Mint .
A photograph of a building on a clear summer's day, with a white stone base and a black and white timbered first floor. An archway leads through the middle of the building, apparently located in the middle of a small town.
The market place at Bridgnorth , one of many medieval English towns to be granted the right to hold fairs , in this case annually on the feast of the Translation of St. Leonard
A photograph of a small castle on top of a green mound; the castle has three circular walls visible. Behind the castle the sky is overcast and dark grey.
Clifford's Tower in the city of York , a major hub for Jewish economic activity and the site of an early Jewish pogrom in 1190
A photograph of a sandstone carving, broken into two pieces; on the left is the front half of a donkey, in the middle a fat man with a stick and a whip whilst on the right is a stylised windmill.
A medieval carving from Rievaulx Abbey showing one of the many new windmills established during the 13th century
A computer generated map of Europe, with bands of colour marking the spread of the Black Death. England appears in amber, showing infection halfway through the epidemic
The Black Death reached England in 1348 from Europe.
A detailed medieval painting showing a group of wealthy men in a wooden boat on the near left, apparently arriving or leaving a large number of armed soldiers on the right. In the background is a large city on the left, and an open area of ground on the right.
Richard II meets the rebels calling for economic and political reform during the Peasants Revolt of 1381.
A photograph of a small stone church with open, glass-less windows. The church is surrounded by rough, uncultivated ground and the sky behind the church is bleak.
The ruined church in the deserted village of Embleton, County Durham , one of nearly 1,500 medieval villages abandoned after the agrarian crisis of the 14th century
Two triangular pieces of hung, preserved cod; the nearer piece is more brightly lit.
The more prestigious salted cod began to replace the herring as the catch of choice for English fishing fleets in the 15th century, requiring deep-sea fishing.
A photograph of a small wooden ship with white sail traversing an estuary; behind the ship is a wooded shoreline.
Cog ships were increasingly important to English trade as both exports and imports grew.
A photograph of a medieval building with white rendering and plain woodwork; a barrel is hung above the entrance and a small visitor's sign is placed on the street alongside the building.
A medieval merchant's trading house in Southampton , restored to its mid-14th-century appearance
A black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged woman facing the camera. She had dark black hair and has her hands clasped. She is wearing a plain necklace and earrings.
Eileen Power , one of the academics responsible for the reinvigoration of the study of the English medieval economy in the inter-war years
A photograph of a wide flat area of dirt, with a handful of men scattered across it engaged in some sort of work. In the near ground one man is standing looking at the camera. All the men cast long shadows across the picture.
Rescue archaeology , such as this investigation into a medieval site, has increasingly contributed to understanding the English economy.