14th Century Social Milieu
Economic Change and Social Tension in the Late Fourteenth Century
In the 1370s, English society was under a great deal of tension.
There were:
Political problems resulting from the lack of an undisputed leader and from the failure of the war effort.
Religious problems due to lack of spiritual leadership from the church, complicated by the same war pressures, which introduced the divisive issue of clerical taxation into relations between clerical and lay politicians.
In the same decade of the 1370s, there were other social and economic problems: Landlords (a class that included almost all rich and important people) and their peasant tenants were set against each other, because economic change had made the social structure of the 12th and 13th centuries obsolete.
The background
The thirteenth century was an era of expansion. Population, agricultural production, commercial activity, and prices for commodities had all been rising since the eleventh century at least. Landlords did well. Land was scarce and labor was plentiful; thus prices for agricultural good and rents were high, while wages were low. There was profit to be made in exploiting the rights most lords held over their peasant neighbors -- rights to labor services, death duties, restrictions on marriages to outsiders.
Management by literate professionals became the norm on big estates, and some of the lesser ones.
An era of "high farming" (intensive investment, specialization, close supervision by the owner).
After 1315, this pattern was disturbed. 1315 was the beginning of the first major famine England and western Europe had seen in a long time. Many people who had been living at the bare subsistence level died. Thereafter the population continued to decline, perhaps because peasants began to marry later and limit the size of their families. The great expansion had come to an end. A long recession, in which markets shrank and prices fell, began.
The greatest single shock was the Black
In the 1370s, English society was under a great deal of tension.
There were:
Political problems resulting from the lack of an undisputed leader and from the failure of the war effort.
Religious problems due to lack of spiritual leadership from the church, complicated by the same war pressures, which introduced the divisive issue of clerical taxation into relations between clerical and lay politicians.
In the same decade of the 1370s, there were other social and economic problems: Landlords (a class that included almost all rich and important people) and their peasant tenants were set against each other, because economic change had made the social structure of the 12th and 13th centuries obsolete.
The background
The thirteenth century was an era of expansion. Population, agricultural production, commercial activity, and prices for commodities had all been rising since the eleventh century at least. Landlords did well. Land was scarce and labor was plentiful; thus prices for agricultural good and rents were high, while wages were low. There was profit to be made in exploiting the rights most lords held over their peasant neighbors -- rights to labor services, death duties, restrictions on marriages to outsiders.
Management by literate professionals became the norm on big estates, and some of the lesser ones.
An era of "high farming" (intensive investment, specialization, close supervision by the owner).
After 1315, this pattern was disturbed. 1315 was the beginning of the first major famine England and western Europe had seen in a long time. Many people who had been living at the bare subsistence level died. Thereafter the population continued to decline, perhaps because peasants began to marry later and limit the size of their families. The great expansion had come to an end. A long recession, in which markets shrank and prices fell, began.
The greatest single shock was the Black