The Great Transition, by Bruce Campbell (Part One)

This is a monumental book and, as such, a massive summary. I've split the summary in half. This half covers the period of the High Middle Ages. The next half will cover the Black Plague and the Late Middle Ages.

This is a book about the monumental period of human history from the late 1200s to the late 1400s, which was a time of tremendous social change arguably driven by a global climatic cooling. The Great Transition climaxes with the deadliest event in human history, the Black Plague, which the book explains within the context of economic decline caused by climate change.

Writes Campbell, "To understand and explain the history of the late-medieval world therefore requires an appreciation of these interactions between climate, disease, and society: nature as much as society needs to be acknowledged as a protagonist of historical change" (p. 21).

Campbell clearly rejects environmental determinism --- the idea that history was decided only by environmental factors. History depends on human decisions and free will. "At any given juncture several different outcomes were possible depending upon the precise configuration of human and environmental forces" (p. 3).

Working in concert with environmental change, late medieval Europeans built a mass market for labor and launched the Age of Sail, marking the dawn of the modern world.

The title, "The Great Transition," is a reference to a popular historical debate over "The Great Divergence" --- which refers to the economic divergence between Western Europe and the rest of Afro-Eurasia in the modern period, especially the Industrial Revolution. Campbell argues that this divergence started with a transition in the late medieval period, fueled by climate change.

Around the year 1000, Europe held no global significance. At the time, "Song China was technologically and economically far ahead of Latin Christendom." By the late 1400s, "the more advanced parts of Christendom had caught up and in terms of technology and trade the West was about to switch from borrower to lender and laggard to leader" (p. 400).

The Sun

Campbell makes the sun his protagonist. Drawing on new research in solar activity and climate patterns, Campbell argues that variations in solar output caused massive changes on Earth. Along with variations on the surface of the sun itself, Campbell also argues that multiple volcanic eruptions affected atmospheric chemistry sufficient to lower the Earth's temperature for a period of years, having similar affects.

Variations in solar output cause periods of cooling and warming that last some centuries, including the Medieval Warm Period (from 900-1400AD) and the Little Ice Age (1500-1800AD). Prior to the advent of human-caused climate change in the 1800s, about half of global temperature change is due to solar output and volcanic activity (p 52).

The Medieval Warm Period was an exceptional period of global warmth, with specific benefits for western Europe. In particular, the period from 1100 to 1250, (the "Medieval Solar Maximum") was the longest period of increased solar output in the past millenium.

The High Middle Ages

The Middle Ages comprises three periods: the "Low Middle Ages" (or "Dark Ages"), the "High Middle Ages," and the "Late Middle Ages." This book starts in the High Middle Ages and proceeds through the Late Middle Ages, ending at the start of the modern period.

The High Middle Ages saw a period of favorable climatic conditions accompanied by innovation, population growth, and freedom from disease.

Climate

From the late 1000s to the early 1300s, the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) was characterized by particular, interconnected climatic conditions around the world (p. 49):

• Mild and moist in Northern Europe

• Hot and dry in southern Europe

• Hot and dry in North Africa

• Hot and dry in interior Eurasia

• Dry in East Africa

• Rainy in South America

• Rainy in India

At the beginning of the millennium, these conditions boosted economic and demographic growth in Northern Europe, North-western Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.

A pressure difference in the Atlantic created stronger than usual westerlies --- warm, moist winds blowing across Europe from the Atlantic (p. 45). This kept the cold, dry polar winds at bay and maintained mild temperatures and plentiful rain.

This also created warm sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic, which kept the seas around Iceland ice free and warmed Greenland, creating a golden age of North Atlantic exploration and opening the way for viking settlements in North America (p. 47).

Central Asia had relatively moist conditions until the 1050s, which gave way to extreme dryness through the 1100s and 1200s, which provided the Mongols with incentives to raid and invade (p. 48). Mongol imperialism was briefly bolstered by a rainy period in the 1210s. By consolidating the Eurasian interior, the Mongols created an era of peace and transcontinental movement, opening the westerward route for Marco Polo (p. 49).

These conditions promoted economic and demographic growth in Northern Europe, East Asia, and South Asia. The dry conditions in Central Asia were unfavorable to the spread of plague (p. 50). A La Nina-dominated Pacific Ocean, causing drought in the pan-American west and steady monsoons through Asia

In general, the weather was stable throughout Eurasia, offering a sense of routine and predictability (p. 50).

At the beginning of the 1300s, the NAO weakened at this conditions started to reverse.

"For more than two hundred years, from the late eleventh century until the early fourteenth century, a remarkably stable and resilient global climate regime prevailed." (p. 50)

Volcanic activity spiked between 1167 and 1284 with at least eleven volcanic erptions injecting massive amounts of sulphates into the stratosphere, each of which "had the potential to affect weather patterns for several years afterwards." (p. 55)

Around the end of the 1200s, these patterns shifted through the Wolf Solar Minimum and then the Little Ice Age, which "brought the weakening of the monsoon" and, in the 1350s, the highest ever levels of flooding on the Nile (p. 11).

Population

The medieval warm period saw a boom in Eurasian populations, especially in monsoon Asia and temperate Europe, where a favorable climate supported strong agricultural growth. From a low point in AD 600, the Eurasian population had doubled by 1300, reaching 329 million (p. 58).

The strongest period of growth was the 1100s, when 90% of growth occurred in monsoon Asia and temperate Europe. Meanwhile, growth lagged below average in hot, dry southern Europe and "Mongol-ravaged Russa." In the North Sea region (Britain, Ireland, France, the Low Countries, Germany, and Scandinavia) the population "may have more than trebled" (p. 60).

In England, the population grew from 1.7 million in 1086 to 4.75 million two centures later in 1290 (p. 61). At the same time "significant numbers" of English colonists emigrated to Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, redistributing population "away from areas of established settlement and into those of new settlement. The population growth also repopulated the East Anglian fens, "the emptied lands devastated by William I in the north of England." Across Britain, growth was much stronger in colonizing regions, with the slowest growth in the well-settled south and southwest (p. 61).

High agricultural producivity matched the high population density.

Sometime around the late 1000s, population started growing steadily, after a long period of intermittent contraction and expansion. This is "an enigma" to some extent. However, the period had exceptional good health and peace, "as the Viking, Magyar, Slav, and Muslim menaces retreated and feudal lordship and urban communes developed to provide effective protection at a local level."

At the same time, an abundance of land and scarcity of labor would have given lords and masters an incentive to promote the "multiplication of households and tenancies," encouraging young couples to start their own families. Whatever the cause, it was "pan-continental in scope," since population growth was a Eurasian-wide phenomenon. The cause was also quite strong, as it withstood "periodically severe short-term shocks without stalling or going into reverse."

Population growth was the norm across the 1100s and 1200s, creating a culture of expansionism --- a resurrection of the colonialist politics of the Roman Empire.

"Demand for the basic necessities of food, clothing and housing grew, as did the supply of labour to produce them. Commercialization advanced and, with it, opportunities for achieving a greater division of labour. For a time at least, population growth was economically beneficial and labour specialization and skill advanced." (p. 64)

Exploration

As the climate warm, sea ice melted around Iceland in the 800s, Greenland, Newfoundland, and the Faroe Islands, opening new opportunities for Norse explorers. The warm waters also encouraged fish stocks to migrate north, enriching the Norse settlements. The climate also embolded the Vikings in their southward raids in Ireland, Britain, and mainland Europe (p. 35).

"Not until the global warming of the late twentieth century would environmental conditions in these most northerly of latitudes against be so benign." (p. 37)

Along with Muslim, Magyar, and Slavic invaders, the Viking attacks impeded population growth in Western Europe in the 800s and 900s, despite the warm climate. Nonetheless, observers have commented that this moment --- the end of the 700s marked "the rise of the European commercial economy." (quoting White 1962, p. 35).

As the Roman Catholic church united Western Eurasia and the Mongol Empire united much of Central and Eastern Eurasia, trade routes opened, connecting every corner of the super-continent. Durable doods moved quickly, carried by enterprising traders. The Vikings profitted off of their supply of walrus and narwhal ivory, which funded their explorations and colonies. And so, the High Middle Ages was a time of economic interaction stretching from Newfoundland through Scandinavia across Western Europe through Central Asia to East Asia and Japan.

At the end of the 1200s, the climate would shift, prompting the settlers and conquerers to retreat. The Eurasian economic sphere would fracture into many small fiefdoms. Norse ivory would disappear from the market, replaced by African ivory. The Norse settlements in Newfoundland and Greeland would disappear. (p. 134)

Economy

The High Middle Ages was a period of tremendous wealth and prosperity in Western Europe. The Western Christian Church had reached the height of its power as the largest economic power and landowner in Europe, and with that power it had unified Western Europe, popularized record-keeping, and implemented religious law. As such, we have reliable records for European politics, demographics, and economics in some regions going back to the 1200s (p. 27). The data is skewed towards England, which biases all explorations towards England. Nonetheless, the very existence of English records is pertinent to any understanding of "the great transition."

England is the default case study in the sections that follow. The country was more populous, urbanized, commercialized and monetized than many parts of late-medieval western Europe but on the same criteria nonetheless consistently lagged far behind the leading economies of the Souther Low Countries and Italy. From the late seventeenth century it would catch up, overtake both, and become the world's leading economy and the first to industrialize and make the full transition to modern economic growth. Given its later economic success there is some merit in singling out its earlier history for special attention, although in the Middle Ages there was nothing to indicate that England was destined for greatness. (p. 27)

For many centuries prior to the Black Plague, the European climate was stable and favorable, which provided the conditions for demographic and economic growth. This period of prosperity, which started in the 800s, was the first since the days of Rome almost a millennium earlier.

The main driver of economic growth was population growth, which naturally drove territorial growth. Technological innovation had little role in economic growth for most of the Middle Ages. Rather, "it was those institutional and organizational innovations associated with the commercialization of economic relations and activity that were the vital achievements of the age." That is to say, the High Middle Ages saw a legal and commercial revolution that drove economic growth --- though all of this was built on top of a favorable climate that enabled growth in population, territory, and productivity.

The legal-commercial revoltuion saw the rise of military, policing, and security to safeguard local and long-distance commerce; and double-entry bookkeeping, profit and loss accounting, bills of exchange, commenda contracts and the use of Arabic numerals to facilitate commerce.

The leading commercial ports and financial centres became some of the greatest cities of the age, none more so than the maritime republic of Genoa and Venice and inland metropolises of Florence and Milan.

To maintain its growth and dominance, the church invented and popularized new organizational innovations (what we might today call "business strategy). These new innovations spread outward to the realms of commerce and politics., and "bore fruit in a veritable commercial revolution, during which people became dependent for more of their livelihoods upon engagement with increasingly active commodity, land, labour, and capital markets (p. 30).

The warmth and prosperity of the Medieval Warm Period (and the High Middle Ages that accompanied it) came crashing to an end at the end of the 1200s with a drop in solar output that foretold of the coming "little ice age." This next period of climate change played out very differently in different regions around the world, due to "climate teleconnections."

Religion

In the Middle Ages, Europe was a political mosaic. In Central and Northern Italy, each city was effectively a separate state. Yet the High Middle Ages was a time of religious and commercial cohesion.

As late as the 700s, the church was "at a singularly low ebb":

Central and northern Europe and all of Scandinavia remained aggressively pagan; in the Middle East, North Africa and Ibera, Islam was in the ascendant; and in the Mediterranean a rift was opening between Rome and Constantinople. By the eleventh century this parlous situation had been transformed and Latin Christendom was resurgent. The Saxons, Bohemians, Croats, Scandinavians, Poles, and Hungarians had all been converted to Roman Christianity. In Britain the Celtic Church had began to conform to Roman practice. (p. 66)

In the 1000s, the Greek Church formally seceded from the Latin Church, creating a formal schism but resolving the internal tensions within the church. Christians effectively toppled Islamic rule in the Iberian peninsula. Pope Urban II launched the Crusades and captured Jerusalem, which had been under Islamic rule. Pope Gregory VII created a legal revolution within the church, establishing the pope as the head of the entire Catholic Church, giving the Pope completely unprecedented power over Western Europe, from Croatia to Sweden to Ireland to Spain.

In a politically fragmented world, Gregory VIl's papal revolution established the Latin Church as a powerful over-arching institution which regularized behaviour by, and relations between, Christians across a territorially extensive area that transcended Europe's plethora of competing and often predatory and warring states and lordships.381 This lowered transaction costs and enabled more travel and trade to take place than would otherwise have been possible under conditions of such pronounced political fragmentation. (p 131)

The legal reforms also extended church power in local politics, seizing authority, for example: over the selling of parish property or offices; the right of clergy to marry (the church preferred bachelor clergy, who had no heir to receive their wealth or title, giving church control over those assets); and the choice of who to appoint in regional church positions. Pope Gregory VII had made a revolutionary flex:

Pope Gregory VII... declared the clergy to be independent from secular control and, further, claimed the papacy's ultimate supremacy in secular matters, including the authority to depose kings and emperors. (p. 66)

This was a "papal revolution." The church's law became the law of the land. Through the High Middle Ages, the church industriously codified its rules, creating an extensive and elaborate body of "canon law," and a small industry of scholars and clerks to study, interpret, and enforce the canon law. Canon law tried religious and moral cases, such as blasphemy, heresy, defamation, sexual misconduct, breach of contract, marriage, and wills. This gave the church enormous power:

• The power to decide what is right and wrong

• The power to persecute anyone who disagrees

• The power to decide what contracts are valid

• The power to decide whether political dynasties could form alliances (through marriage)

• The power to seize inheritances

This gave the church an enormous political and economic advantage.

On an individual level, canon law (and the church's elaborate judicial system) "supplied the power by which the Church was able to both transform European marriage rules, and hence family life."

The popularization of canon law promoted literacy and scholarship and inspired local secular rulers to create their own codes of law. Between 1000 and 1300, book production grew six-fold in the British Isles. The church's law provided a regional sense of cooperation, justice, and security that facilitated inter-state commerce.

Because no book was more important than the Bible and the sole authorized version was the Latin Vulgate, all clerks required basic instruction in Latin grammar. Ecclesiastical schools therefore multiplied along with numbers of literate clerics, so that Latin became more widely adopted as the universal lingua franca, read, spoken and written in every parish of Christendom. The upshot was a communication revolution with far-reaching ramifications for the whole of secular society. Literate ecclesiastical bureaucracies developed, soon emulated by those of the state, which created, preserved and increasingly ascribed legal authority to written records. (p. 66)

Today, we have seven times as many letters from the reign of Pope Alexander III in the 1160s as from the reign of Pope Alexander II in the 1060s; and eleven times as many letters from King Henry II in the 1170s as from King William I in the 1070s. The sale of sealing wax exploded almost ten-fold in forty years from 1226 to 1265. It's from this period that we have the first manorial accounts and court rolls.

In a world politically fragmented into more than two hundred competing polities, the Church's powers were in certain respects mightier than those of any monarch, for, whereas a king's sovereignty was circumscribed by time and territory, the Church was a supra-national perpetual institution representing both this world and the next. Unquestioning belief in and fear of God endowed the Church with immense moral authority. From the end of the tenth century the Church ever more actively promoted the idea that Christians should treat the persons and property of fellow Christians with respect: violating and robbing them carried moral opprobrium and the probability of divine retribution. 107 This helped establish the trust upon which commerce and trade depended: deals were typically sealed with an oath and testimonies sworn upon the Bible. Christian morality pervaded how markets functioned and commerce was conducted, underpinning notions of fair trade and justice. (p. 66)

Along with the rise of religious and secular law, the High Middle Ages saw the emergence of three other important commercial innovations:

• Self-governing townships to facilitate local commerce

• Merchant guilds to protect their members

• International fairs to promote trade

The hallmark of the church in this era was labor and commerce. "Increasingly, the Church espoused the sentiment that true virtue lay in productive labour." The new monastic orders observed practices of abstinence, self-discipline, study, and manual labour (these monastic orders were also early capitalist corporations).

The church itself was a major economic actor. By 1300 in England the church controlled more than half of landed resources. Across Europe, the church invested in commercial infrastructure and produced, bought, and sold commodities on a huge scale. The church was the main driver of technological and organizational innovation, adopting drainage, engineering, mills, and clocks.

Through the High Middle Ages, the monasteries grew and multiplied at an exponential rate. In 1066, there were about 1000 monastics in England. One hundred and fifty years later, there were more than 12,000. (p. 75)

Along with the construction of monasteries, the church built huge numbers of cathedrals. This was "The Age of Cathedrals," and most of the world's most famous cathedrals — Florence, Paris, Salisbury, Canterbury, Siena, Mont-Saint-Michel, Cologne, Prague — date from this period. Between 1066 and 1350, England rebuilt and enlarged all sixteen of its cathedrals, "often repeatedly" (p. 133). In the 1000s and 1100s, the church repeatedly expanded Salisbury Cathedral until finally deconstructing, moving, and rebuilding the entire structure in a new "spacious valley-bottom site... in conjunction with planning and building a spacious new town." Then, in the 1330s, a new 123-meter stone spire "daringly added a load of 6,397 tons" to the existing church.

By any standard, the creation of such monumental buildings constitutes a major artistic and organizational achievement. Formidable resources had to be mobilized in order to bring each project to completion. Without peace, prosperity and confidence it would not have been possible to build on such a scale and maintain the momentum of construction for decades at a time. The peace emanated in part from the renewed vigour and authority of the Latin Church following its 1054 separation from the Greek Church, aggressive expansion of Christendom's frontiers through processes of conversion and conquest, and growth of the rule of law. The prosperity arose from rising population, increased agricultural output and, especially, the revival of trade and commerce (it was no coincidence that at Salisbury creation of the new cathedral and new town proceeded hand in hand). The confidence sprang from a resurgent Christianity and the gathering momentum of a materially creative age which, in retrospect, stands out as a 'golden age' of stability, prosperity and high cultural achievement. (p. 133)

The church preached charity to the poor and used such doctrine as rationale for tithes, taxes, and bequests. Nonetheless, "the church probably devoted less than 5 per cent of its own substantial income to poor relief" (p. 69). The church promoted charity as an "obligation of the landed and the wealthy." The church began to differentiate "undeserving" poor from "deserving poor" — "those whose poverty was involuntary because of sickness, or misfortunate, or want of work or land." The new ethics enforced the idea that everyone should be expected to work hard.

By no coincidence, this era also saw the rise of anti-Semitism, pogroms, misogyny, and witch hunts.

This golden era of the Catholic Church:

helped create many of the instutitional preconditions for a Europeanwide economic revival based upon the greater circulation of people, goods and information, technological advance (including improved organization), market exchange, and expanding international commerce and trade. It did so by promoting normative rules, beliefs and attitudes across a territorially extensive area that transcended individual lordships, kingdoms, legal jurisdictions, urban hinterlands, market areas and trading networks.... Nevertheless, if the Church was instrumental in fostering economic development based upon market exchange and technological progress, within their territories it was states that were crucial to sustaining it. States had a greater vested interest in changing the rules upon which continued market growth depended and could use their judicial and military clout to impose and enforce such changes. (p. 70)

Law

By the second millennium, the church had established Latin as "the language of all educated and literate people as well as of most governments and administrations" in Western Europe. This cultural and linguistic cohesion promoted the international exchange of "information, ideas and personnel" (p. 76). This period saw the birth of new university:

• Bologna in 1088

• Paris in 1150

• Oxford in 1167

The church's massive effort to codify canon law had "engendered a general renewal of interest in the law," which initiated the birth of the western legal tradition:

From the twelfth century, monarchs, city-states and other secular authorities began to codify their own systems of civil and criminal law based either on Roman Law, as laid down in the sixth-century Justinian law code, or the Common Law, as in the case of Britain and Ireland. From this diversity of legal initiatives sprang growing interest in the study, teaching, codification, application and enforcement of law and emergence of a class of professional lawyers. Henceforth, all social and economic relationships were bounded within this evolving legal infrastructure, which was itself a by-product of the papal reforms.

Previously, honorial and monorial courts handled most justice. In England, starting in the early 1100s, monarchs handled justice increasingly (p. 76).

This "sudden wave of institutional gadgets," both legal and commercial, "galvanized Europe's hirtherto latent potential for expansion and growth" (p. 132). The most remarkable expression of this change came in the form of land rights.

Land rights

By the 1200s, the explosion of legal rights had made it possible for any person to litigate a complaint in court — even against their lord. Anyone who felt they deserved inheritance someone else had received could argue their case.

The chief economic effect of these institutional developments was to create secure and defensible property rights in land... Legal rights to land took on an existence of their own independently of personal and feudal relationships. Moreover, these individual property rights in land were alienable. Moreover, these individual property rights in land were alienable. As clear legal procedures were gradually established for its transfer and sale, land was transformed into an economic resource and the commercialization of economic and social relations was accelerated. (p. 76)

This was the commodification of land, and while it was not a straightforward or immediate revolution, it was an immensely consequential one (Marx would attribute the birth of capitalism to the rise of the English land market).

In the early days, someone who held a lease for land could ask their lord to transfer it to someone else for a fee. But, over time, the role of the lord was minimized so land holders could freely trade their land. And, as land changed hands more frequently, aggrieved parties turned to the courts more often to table complaints. At the same time, the nature of land changed.

As land became a commodity, basic assumptions about its use and management as an economic resource were changed. For instance, it became possible to realize the full capital value of land by using it as security for loans. Land, thereby, became liquid.

Up to this point, land was not a form of wealth, in the same way that we don't understand oxygen as a form of wealth. By turning land into something that could be bought or sold, the new laws effectively enriched anyone who held land. The earth on which they lived had turned into gold. Of course, if everyone is rich, then no one is, and so there followed "the single greatest known price inflation of the Middle Ages." As anyone in possession of land could now trade that land for goods and services, demand for goods and services increased, and so did their prices.

Initially, this revolution affected free tenants, while feudal subjects in bondage (villeins and serfs) remained in bondage to their lord. Feudal subjects lived on "customary" land, which their family would have held for generations, paying some form of rent (in cash, goods, or services) below the "market rate." But as the unfree subjects watched the revolution among free tenants, their lords struggled to withhold these same rights. Seeing a threat and an opportunity, lords opted to monetize the relationship to their subjects and charged fees for tenants to "buy" and "sell" land.

Over time, the treatment of land as a commodity led to "morecellation" — holdings and plots of lands became smaller and smaller. Ultimately, this divisible and exchangeable land was the grease on the axels of commerce.

Commerce

McCormick dates the beginning of Europe's commercial revolution to the 700s (p. 85).

Starting in the 1000s, Italian merchants organized themselves into confederations and guilds to enforce contracts and "protect their persons and goods against the perils presented by warring armies, arbitrary rulers, brigands, and pirates."

One such conferedation was the Hanse, which started in the 1100s. The Hanse promoted commercial exchange between its members and dominated trade in the Baltic and North Seas.

"Self-governing urban communities" had a similar effect by encouraging freedom and movement and contract ("the twin freedoms... so fundamental to commercial activity") with their charters. The towns would create by-laws to govern conduct at markets and fairs, regulate weights and measures, and enforce contracts. Towns typically appeared near castles, monasteries, or episcopal seats "due to the combination of protection and justice initially provided by the latter." However, towns often sought independence from seigniorial power and established their own courts and taxes.

Most of these towns were motivated to seize control of their own affairs by the quickening tempo of commercial life and the incentive this gave to establish fair and permanent trading relations with like-minded merchant communities elsewhere. That meant respecting the persons and goods of merchants from other towns, upholding property rights, and providing swift and impartial settlement of commercial disputes in courts dedicated to the purpose. (p. 78)

Nonetheless, every town favored its own citizens, engendering mercantilism, where specific merchants held toll exemptions or monopolies.

By the end of the 1200s, according to Janet Abu-Lughod, the trading spheres of Europe, Asia, and East and North Africa had interlinked into "a single global trading network," facilitating trade from the North Atlantic to the Western Pacific. The Sami in Finland produced furs, the Norse in Greenland produced ivory, and the Norse in Iceland produced dried stockfish (p. 85).

By the High Middle Ages, almost no Europeans lived independently ("absolute self-sufficiency was rarely attainable"), but some still spurned commerce for other social relationships:

• Reciprocity, including hospitality and gift exchange

• Ransom, tribute, piracy, and plunder

• Coercive extraction of labour and rents through serfdom However, all of these systems gave way to capitalism sooner or later.

Since these were not mutually exclusive, they long co-existed with market exchange and, outside the core areas of commercial activity, sometimes remained the dominant socio-property relationships. In this respect, most late-medieval European economies were mixed economies. Nevertheless, once a degree of civil order had been established and population levels had risen to the point that labour had to compete for work and land effectively ceased to be free, commerce offered productivity gains and efficiency savings which none of these alternative and often more predatory systems could match. 175 Progressively, from the tenth century, production for exchange supplanted production for use, money became more widely adopted as a medium of exchange, measure of value and store of wealth, and prices acquired an ever more powerful influence upon economic behaviour, shaping decisions both to produce and to consume. The consequences for European society were profound. (p. 86)

Perhaps the greatest driver of commercialization was the demand for high-prestige commodities from European feudal elites. The Mongol unification of the Eurasian interior had opened the pan-Eurasian trade routes and whet European appetites for exotic luxury goods — especially spices and silks. As Abu-Lughod writes, "Never before had so many regions of the Old World come into contact with one another" (p. 89). Chroniclers described the road from the Black Sea to Beijing as "perfectly safe by day and night."

During the High Middle Ages, the winners in Europe's commercial revolution were the Italy city-states, Lombardy, Florence, Venice, Genoa, Pisa. Following the church, they pioneered new commercial innovations like the bill of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, and business partnerships.

Equally important was the realization that it made better financial sense to mobilize coins and bullion for investment than hoard them for safety. Once this occurred, commercial loans became an ordinary part of north Italian economic life, allowing credit, and the economic activity which it supported, to expand. This further added to the money supply. (p. 90)

In England,

Progress was especially marked between 1175 and 1250 when the Crown was actively involved in development of the realm's commercial infrastructure. During these formative years the Common Law came into being, record creation and keeping grew apace, money supply per head surged, weights and measures were regulated, rules of exchange established, numbers of chartered markets, fairs and boroughs multiplied, parish churches proliferated, hospital foundations peaked, the University of Oxford rose to prominence and the University of Cambridge came into being. The first friaries were also founded, bridges were constructed in great numbers and a major ecclesiastical building boom got under way. Key themes in this process of commercialization are the creation of a commercial infrastructure, the establishment of factor markets in land, labour and capital, mint output and coin supply and the expansion of agricultural output and production of agricultural surpluses. (p. 92)

England was unique among its European peers because it was "unified and centralized" with "effectively defined and defended borders within which a high degree of peace and order prevailed." This gave the English crown unmatched power to regulate weights, measures, currencies, and prices, "all of which were instrumental to the ease with which trade was conducted" (p. 92).

Italy, on the other hand, remained fragmented into hundreds of polities until the 1800s. While these "semi-independent city governments" had been the key agents of economic growth in the from the 800s to the 1000s, by the 1300s their potential plateaued. "Strong urban jurisdiction was incompatible with long-run economic growth" (quoting Epstein, p. 150).

In the early 1300s, England's GDP per capita was less than half of Italy's ($750 versus $1650), and the economy was highly rural and agricultural. However, the English countryside was highly dependent on market exchange, which laid the ground for commercial revolution.

Trade

The buildup of wealth had another natural consequence: a new era of warfare. Starting with the crusades in the 1100s, European rulers built the war machines that we know today.

"Kings needed credit on a massive scale in order to wage war" (p. 102), and so war became the main stimulant of the medieval economy. The rulers of England sought finance from Italian merchants — sometimes at extravagant interest rates.

The English crown required all transactions in England to be in English coin, which filled the English mint with silver from foreign merchants, which also contributed to inflation. Prices for staple commodities rose through the 1200s.

by the opening decade of the fourteenth century wheat prices were three times and ox prices four times what they had been 150 years earlier, having risen at mean annual rates of 0.9 and 1.0 per cent... By 1300 a farthing (¼d.), the smallest unit of currency, would buy ¼ loaf of bread, ¼ to ½ pound of butter, ½ pound of cheese, 2 salted herrings, 2 ounces of wax candles, 5 pounds of salt, 6 eggs, 6 ounces of iron nails, or 2 hours of work by an unskilled farm labourer. (p. 106)

The use of coins had lapsed with the end of Roman rule in Britain. The international demand for English wool drove up the value of English currency 90-fold from 1158 to 1319 (p. 106), and England began producing currency again. The supply of currency grew from 2p per head in the 1150s to 90p per head in the 1340s.

As inflation became the norm, the expectation of higher prices in the future created a market for investments.

Resources, too, came to be judged in terms of the money that they could produce and the more astute accountants began to think in terms of profit and loss and calculate the returns being obtained from stock and land. (p. 106)

The market for land and the the inflow of silver were both driven by demand for England's wool and cloth, which were, in turn driven by the benign climate of the Medieval Solar Maxiumum. Wool and hides accounted for over 15% of net agricultural output by value, while wool and cloth constituted most of English exports. At its peak, the wool industry exported 8-10 million fleeces annually, driving a significant English trade surplus. "The single most immediate source of England's increased agricultural output was exploitation of a greatly enlarged agricultural area."

By 1300, England had probably doubled its arable land to 5.5 million hectares, bringing it close to the historical maximum of 5.8 million hectares in the 1800s.

Population also boomed through the period, growing and creating new urban areas — especially London.

Inflation

The economic growth of the 1100s, there was a perception that people were better off. Henry II's treasurer complained that "because people were better off, drunkenness and crime were on the increase." That perception would not last. By the late 1200s, farmers would need to work harder and laborers would earn less.

Until that point, productivity gains stemming from fuller commercialization of the English economy, in conjunction with expanding overseas demand for English tin, lead, wool and unfinished cloth, appear to have kept output growth abreast of population growth. (p. 92)

Villagers traditionally conducted all sorts of exchanges through informal trading — land, labor, housing, clothing, drink, foodstuffs, tools, and craft goods. This was the "hidden trade of the Middle Ages." But, by 1300, most people participated in commercial markets. "Just about everything... could be bought and sold and therefore had its price." With commercialization came crime as well, "Criminal records show that property crime was rife due to the ease with which stole good could be made over and sold on" (p. 95).

By the 1290s, Europe had slipped into a commercial recession. In England, the highly-agricultural economy depended highly on exports. When international trade dried up, manufacturers found no demand for their wares at home. Growth stalled in the manufacturing sector so workers set their sights on agriculture for work, driving a glut of agricultural labor, increasing rents, endless subdivision of property holdings and sublets, and more and more reclamation of marginal land. In this world, the vast majority of people consumed only "the most basic subsistence goods," while "a privileged minority possessed significant disposable incomes." Despite its commercial revolution, England had virtually no domestic market for quality goods. The economy depended entirely on harvests, which swung wildly from one years to the next.

All of this created a precarious situation for the growing peasantry, which spilled into the towns and cities, contributing to urban poverty. By 1300, "two out of five English households could afford little more than a bare-bones standard of subsistence" (p. 9).

How did the country get to this point?

For one thing, the population of England grew two- to three-fold during the 1100s and 1200s. But population growth was not necessarily the cause. More likely, it was an enabling condition.

The commercial revolution required commercial infrastructure — namely, money. Around 1130, miners discovered silver in the north of England, launching a silver rush. Soon thereafter, silver was discovered nearby in Germany. Combined, the mines produced "at least twenty tons of silver a year: colossal quantities by the standards of the day and enough to strike 18 million silver pennies" (p. 104). The flood of silver fueled monetization domestically; over one forty-year span, the amount of English currency grew six-fold, from £33,000 to £200,000. Prices in England, which had held steady for the past two centuries, suddenly rose in response to the influx of coin. In the first 25 years of the 1200s, the price of livestock doubled and of grain tripled.

The economy couldn't absorb the influx of silver because most of it didn't reach ordinary people. The upper classes owned the silver and spent it carefully, meaning they had exceptional leverage to influence prices and markets. In large part, they used their silver to purchase luxury commodities from Asia.

Until this point, land had very little value. It couldn't be easily traded and their was lots of it. This new era unlocked land as a tradable commodity. The growing population virtually guaranteed that land would increase in value and the normalization of commerce encouraged landholders to few their land as an asset. Along with the influx of silver, the unfreezing of land as a commodity also contributed to inflation (p. 113).

By the end of the 1200s, times were hard for ordinary people. The average person could not easily afford to get by. Only skilled workers like master masons would have earned enough money for a comfortable existence. As Campbell writes:

In 1290, when an unskilled agricultural labourer earned around 1¼ pence a day, a farm hand would need to have worked for 166 days in order to afford what R. C. Allen has called a 'respectability basket' of consumption goods (costed at current prices) containing ale, bread, legumes, meat, eggs, butter, cheese, soap, cloth, candles, lamp oil, fuel and rent in sufficient quantities to provide a daily diet containing the minimum of 2,000 kilocalories required to satisfy the essential nutritional needs of an adult male. For a single man that was a realistic possibility but his wages would have fallen far short of the income needed to support a wife and three children. Moreover, that would have remained the case irrespective of whether his wife was earning since women were invariably remunerated at a lower rate. Even to provide a family of five with a coarser and narrower 'bare-bones basket' of oat-meal porridge augmented by limited quantities of legumes, meat and butter and Spartan quantities of soap, cloth, candles, lamp oil, fuel and rent would have required 227 days' waged employment. Since this was barely a living wage, English waged labour at this high tide of medieval population growth was plainly cheap.

This was a "precarious existence," and most people sought other means to supplement their income. Adolescents would go work as servants in wealthier households.

In 1290, 40% of English households were living below the poverty line (they couldn't afford a "respectability" basket of goods) and another 30% on the line. By the 1310s, 70% of families lived below the poverty line. These were households with a garden, one or two hectares of land and perhaps rights to access common land. Or, they might have been miners, fishermen, sailors, soldiers, laborers. Many were paupers and vagrants. None of them could have been self-sufficient. "In one way or another, all therefore depended for their survival on the market."

A large part of the problem was that prices were highly unstable. Years of crop failure or livestock pestilence aggravated dramatic price increases, driving ordinary families to the bring of starvation. Wages hit rock bottom in the famine years of 1315:

Farm workers' purchasing power shrank by a third and building workers' by a half. Never again would labourers' daily real wage rates sink as low, although 1322-3, 1331 and 1347-8 were also years of great hardship.

The recession would last until the black plague. Over more than a half century of hardship, there were many years of abundant harvest and many years of poor harvest, along with a handful of livestock pestilences that devastated the national populations of cattle and sheep. Overall, however, it was not the generally negative average between abundance and scarcity that tipped the balance toward poverty; rather, the wild fluctuations in weather made it impossible for farmers to plan from one year to the next, creating a perpetual state of crisis. Farmers would sell of plots of land at rock-bottom prices to cover shortfalls in hard years and then find the same plot of land impossible to buy back in good years, when the land market was strong again.

In contrast, kings, lords, wealthy townsmen, master craftsmen, beneficed clergy, and wealthier tenants would have had the means to weather the hard years. About 1% of households would have been "truly rich", with an income 100 times greater than the national average. Another 2% were affluent, with incomes 3–5 times the average. The rich and affluent households received 15% of the national income. The middle class comprised millers, skilled artisans, and some tradesmen, who also would have stayed above the poverty line.

Overall, this was a "bottom-heavy socio-economy structure," in which "the vast majority of families were preoccupied with satisfying basic consumption needs." Most people couldn't feed themselves without resorting to the market to earn money to buy subsistence goods. Working people were, effectively, trapped. They couldn't stop working and switch to subsistence, nor could they work enough to get by.

Commercialization and urbanization may have provided the poor with new economic methods of survival but this had been at the price of sapping the means of their subsistence and leaving them increasingly exposed to the vagaries of the market. (p. 163)

The famine years increased inequality. The better-off farmers would have produced wool for international trade, earning the silver that fueled inflation, and using it to pay for valuable goods like iron, millstones, salt, seed, livestock, land, tools, labor, and even food and drink. "Indeed, they found it convenient to buy their bread, ale, joints of meat, pies, and puddings from neighbours or from local markets." Nonetheless, this class had little appetite for luxury goods, which were more often purchased by the upper classes and the church.

Only about 5 per cent of households enjoyed significant spending power by the end of the thirteenth century and were therefore in a position to consume on a sufficiently large scale to stimulate production, influence taste and set fashions. Consequently, it was their more discriminating demand which sustained the national and international trades in exotic and luxury goods and high-quality manufactured wares. Further, the great estates of the landed elite were bulk suppliers of grain, livestock, livestock products, and timber and wood to the market. Sales of these staple commodities combined with rents paid by their tenants and the profits of seigniorial jurisdictions and monopolies financed purchase of a luxury basket of consumables comprising wine, fish, meat, game, spices, wax, fine cloth, hawks, riding horses, arms and armour, religious art, and elaborate and prestigious buildings. (p. 163)

As such, the wealthy had incredible power over the markets for food, land, and money — power which the nobility shared with the other major player of the age, the Church.

The Church "had gained more in lands and wealth than any other social group" during the 1100s and 1200s. "Religion, in fact, was one of the few staple commodities of the age consumed in approximately equal measure by both rich and poor" (p. 163).

Taxes

In the recession years, 70% of the population had virtually no power, while a few small, interconnected groups — royalty, nobility, merchants, and clergy — had almost absolute control of land, luxury goods, money, and many commodities.

Starting in 1275, the government began taxing the export of England's most valuable export — wool. The tax rate increased from £⅓ to £2½ by 1340, driving an increased in the cost of cloth.

In 1296, England invaded Scotland, igniting a period of warfare on the country's northern frontier that would last for sixty years. In 1337, while still engaged in war with Scotland to the north, the king of England initiated a war with France to the south. Ultimately, the English would lose both campaigns. And, in the meantime, the English government spent extraordinary sums to provision its armies. This was effectively the advent of war as a capitalist–industrial project. The government requisitioned merchant vessels and turned ports into naval yards.

Heavy and recurrent taxation, especially in the lead-up to major campaigns... redistributed wealth and spending power to the benefit of the Crown and its military objectives. In an economy otherwise dominated by primary production, the kingdom's involvement in a succession of costly wars against Scotland and France consequently promoted expansion of the state and its tax-raising apparatus. Rising military expenditure ensued. Provided that war was mostly waged abroad rather than at home, this, paradoxically, constituted a source of growth. (p. 181)

While the crown controlled one-thirtieth of the land in the kingdom, this was not its greatest source of revenue. The crown customarily charged low rents for its tenants and struggled with corruption in the collection of rents. As a result, rents made up perhaps a quarter of royal revenue.

To finance his costly wars in Wales, France and Scotland Edward [Edward I, ruled 1272–1307] borrowed bridging funds from first the Ricciardi company of Luca and then the Frescobaldi company of Florence, taxed the movable goods of the laity, received direct subsidies from the clergy, was granted the revenues of several papal taxes, and imposed customs duties on overseas trade... War was the driving force behind these tax demands and the associated growth of government administration and record creation and keeping which they engendered. Between 1295 and 1298, when Edward was most actively asserting his territorial claims in Gascony and Scotland, he received and spent taxes totalling £345,000 (Figure 3.13). Raising such massive sums over such a short period placed the incomes of many ordinary people under great strain and renders the capacity of the country to deliver them all the more impressive. (p. 261)

Large-scale warfare can, in fact, press workers into service for a common goal — either voluntarily (as in the case of soldiers) or coercively (through taxation on producers). The provisioning of armies generates commerce and employment. As David Graeber explains in Debt, taxes pay for soldiers, and soldiers pay taxes. War is the project that primes the fiscal pump.

The Hundred Years' War marked a turning point in history. Previously, wars paid for themselves through plunder and conquest. Starting with the Hundred Years' War, war financed itself on the home front, through taxation and economic development.

By levying taxes, the Crown pressed peasants into commercial activity. If a family was scraping by on subsistence, trade, and a modest income, the new taxes would force them to shift their activity further toward selling in the market in order to earn coin to pay taxes.

In the lead-up to the Hundred Years' War, the crown made "unprecedented financial demands" to fund military spending. Tax receipts were three times greater than they had been thirty years earlier. The heavy taxation "put the Crown's international creditors under financial duress, begot major domestic constitutional crises and, for many poor people, greatly compounded the adverse effects of the bad harvests" (p. 181). The war also impeded commercial activity and international trade, further pushing Europe into recession.

Luxuries

Internationally, English wool was known for its quality. The burgeoning urban centers in Belgium, Holland, and Italy had a voracious appetite for quality wool, to clothe their own nobility and to trade to the East. Italian merchants were major players in London wool markets. Toward the end of the 1200s, Italian merchants from the cities of Piacenza, Lucca, and Florence became the primary buyers of wool from English monasteries. (Cistercian monasteries were major industrial producers and widely known to produce the best-quality wool.) This benefited the Crown in two ways: it heavily taxed the wool exports, and the Italians provided credit that funded the English wars. Italian companies dominated international trade in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the North Sea and opened offices in London. Venice and Genoa were the principal ports for overseas commerce — trading with the East by sea via the Persian Gulf and by land via the Silk Road.

The wool exports far exceeded the value of England main import: wine. Along with wine, silver, and commodities, wool brought luxury goods like silk and spices into the country. By and large, the imports were not destined for ordinary people, they furnished the houses of religion, nobility, and royalty. In effect, the upper classes purchased or appropriated land from the lower classes, repurposed the land from food production to wool production, and then exported the wool in exchange for luxury goods to enrich themselves. What's more, most of the wool was produced by monasteries that didn't even pay for labor — instead using the unpaid monastic labor. They spun arable land into luxury goods, leaving 70% of English families with empty larders.

As Europe slid into recession and international trade routes closed, the price and quantity of wool and cloth purchased for export dropped, leaving textile workers and wool producers with no income.

Labor

With commercialization, labor markets were one of the first to emerge because they had the fewest institutional barriers. Then came land markets. The land markets offered security for loans, unlocking capital markets.

England saw wages paid in cash by the late 1100s, especially in the construction century, which boomed from the 1000s to the 1300s. Commercialization drew migrants into urban centers, where wage work was more common. But, as England was an agricultural economy, the greatest volume of wage work laid in the countryside — especially during harvest season.

Under feudalism — which had been introduced to England in the 1000s — a large share of agricultural work was performed by unfree serfs. By 1300, waged labor had overtaken servile labor in volume. For small manors — which were evermore common as properties were subdivided to serve the growing population — the only option for labor was to hire workers.

Nonetheless, the proportion of workers who lived on wages alone comprised a minority.

Employment opportunities varied too much from season to season and year to year for wage earning by itself to provide a reliable basis for family formation and household survival. Without at least some land, albeit only a cottage and a garden with a cow or sheep on the commons, it was difficult for labourers to survive slack seasons and poor years. The principal suppliers of live-in servants were therefore young adults from established tenant households. (p. 96)

In fact, the growing workforce mostly came from the more affluent classes, whose younger children had little choice but to descend the social ladder in search of paid work. Contrary to stereotypes, poor peasants either died or fell into destitution at a rate to quickly to contribute to a growing workforce.

it was the constant downward social displacement of the surplus children of substantial tenants into the ranks of cottagers, commoners, squatters and sub-tenants that maintained the supply of wage earners on the manor. Those depressed further into true landlessness were always liable to succumb to destitution and vagrancy, becoming beggars and thieves rather than workers. (p. 96)

England had one major urban center: London. So commercialization emerged in countless towns and villages across the country.

The lifeblood of their many fledgling and as yet petty urban places was the weekly and daily exchange of food and drink, crops and livestock, oil and wine, salt and fish, wool, furs, hides and leather, iron, copper, lead and tin, and an array of craft goods including textiles, metal wares and pottery. It was upon regular exchange of these commodities, in trivial quantities by petty traders as well as substantial consignments by wholesale merchants, that commercial life depended. (p. 122)

Compared to Italy, where about 20% of the population lived in settlements of 5,000 people or more, only about 5% of the English lived in urban centers. Northern Italy had three large urban centers: Florence, Venice, and Milan, each with more than 100,000 residents. Italy had a long urban history — stretching back to the days of Rome. However, Italy's urbanization was largely fueled by its fragmentation — hundreds of rival city states competing for power. Whereas England's strength was in its unity. The English Crown controlled most of the island of Britain, which was comfortably defended by natural borders. England and the other rural economies of northern Europe had to invent urban center, "a radical new departure." Nonetheless, by 1300 Belgium and Holland had urbanization levels comparable to Northern Italy. Around 1300, Italy's GDP per head was around $1650 (1990 dollars), while England was around $750 (p. 124).

"By 1300, a dozen cities had achieved populations of at least fifty thousand." Of these, five owed their success to international trade: Constantinople, Venice, Genoa, Milan, and Bruges. A handful owed their success to manufacturing: Florence and the "agglomeration of Flemish textile-producing towns." While a third group served as "ecclesiastical and royal capitals, fashion setters, and conspicuous consumers and distribution centres of the commodities supplied by international commerce": Rome, Naples, Paris, and London. All depended on international trade.

As long as commercial expansion could be maintained, their fortunes were likely to be assured. Such expansion was contingent upon a continued lowering of transaction costs, improved access to overseas markets and sources of prestigious trade goods, and maintenance of the silver production that paid for Europe's net trade deficit with Asia. (p. 126)

This commercial growth relied on labor. Feudal lords encouraged tenants to form new households and start families at a time when the benign climatic conditions improved health and sustained a growing population (p. 131). By the end of the 1200s, the English countryside had likely reached the maximum population it could reasonably sustain. The agrarian difficulties of the early 1300s pushed rural dwellers into urban areas in search of work. Evidence from cemeteries show that urban dwellers lived short, harsh, malnourished lives. While the migrants provided cheap labor, the towns could not necessarily provide adequate employment. Nonetheless, evermore "needy and often impoverished migrants" arrived in a steady stream. A large number of these migrants were likely the younger sons and daughters of well-to-do families who — without any inheritance or having sold or forfeit to creditors what little inheritance they received — had no choice but to look for work. Even in cities where manufacturing work was steadily declining, the population continued to increase. " The upshot was a growing polarization of wealth."

For the nobility and upper-class merchants, the situation was ideal — an endless supply of cheap labor to work as laborers, servants, and soldiers. As more and more workers found employment in towns or in manors — serving the growing commercial economies that popped up around the upper classes — demand grew for commodities to sustain the workforce. First and foremost, food.

Land

As the population rose and the relative scarcity of land increased, so greater emphasis was placed upon agricultural food-chains with higher productivities of food and energy per unit area. (p. 114)

The increasing pressure on food supply drove agricultural innovations. The windmill was invented in 1180. Cash crops grew in popularity. Horses were pressed into service for carting and plowing.

People sacrificed their dietary preferences in exchange for nutritional efficiency. Rather than using grain to make ale, they baked it as bread or stewed it as pottage. Cheaper grains, like oats, grew in popularity relative to more expensive grains like wheat and barley.

Such simple production shifts delivered significant gains in the rate of food output per unit area, albeit at the sacrifice of dietary preferences: ale and meat, especially beef, dwindled in their relative contribution to diets, whereas bread, particularly of the coarser sort, pottage and dairy produce all grew... As relative prices of the better-quality and higher-status foodstuffs rose, growing numbers of poor households were obliged to sacrifice their dietary preferences and trade down to cheaper sources of kilocalories. Eventually probably at least a third of English households were subsisting on merely a 'bare-bones' basket of consumables. (p. 114, 121)

By the end of the 1200s, when England was the wealthiest it had ever been, the average person had substituted their traditional diet of meat and ale for bread and porridge.

All the while, the production of wool continued to increase steadily. "Sheep were the most land-extensive and least food-productive animal of all," and nonetheless landholders continued to turn agriculturally productive land toward shepherding to sell wool overseas.

Land closer to London and the smaller urban areas was much more valuable than more remote land, since it supplied the townspeople with food and resources. As a result, farmers in remote areas had relatively little incentive to adopt new technologies, so many of the farmers across England continued stick to their relatively inefficient traditional practices (p. 119).

The lack of work in the city and low prices for agricultural produce — perhaps caused to some extent by the recession, though also undoubtedly by the unequal distribution of power — meant that the easiest way to generate income was by exploiting more land., so that "between 1086 and 1290 the nation's stock of arable land more than doubled from just under 2.5 million to maybe as much as 5.3 million hectares" (p. 182).

The growing number of land holdings represented a chicken and egg problem: the new land required more workers; the growing population required more land. At the highest level, it's likely that the church and the nobility fed this growth spiral. The church encouraged young families to proliferate, while the nobility encouraged the formation of new households for their tenants and for their own children. As a result, the number of new households grew faster than the amount of arable land. In two hundred years, the number of rural households tripled, with the average property size shrinking significantly.

Had the reduction in holding size proceeded uniformly its consequences for household incomes might not have been too serious. Instead, pre-existing differences in holding size and tenure became magnified so that inequality grew. Especially ominous for living standards and labour productivity was the multiplication of holdings containing five hectares or less of land. By 1290 approximately 700,000 households (over three-quarters of the rural total) subsisted on such petty holdings, 400,000 of them on less than one hectare of land and 240,000 of those dependent upon augmenting their incomes by labouring on the land of others. (p. 182)

The High Middle Ages saw a dramatic growth in inequality. We can perhaps extrapolate that this shift destroyed any semblance of a "traditional" rural English lifestyle.

By 1290, the king owned one-thirtieth of all land in the kingdom, earning revenue of £13.5 million, which was significantly less than its economic potential. The 149 noble households each earned on average £376 from rents on their land, making them the wealthiest group in England after the king.

Even so, the desire to lead a lavish lifestyle, maintain a substantial retinue, and indulge in the tempting array of high-status consumption goods now available to them, including castle and church building on ever more elaborate scales, caused numbers of noble households to succumb to indebtedness. (p. 261)

The higher clergy were as wealthy as nobility, but spent more prudently. The wealthiest monastic houses earned "several hundred pounds a year."

Individual monks may have espoused a life of poverty but the households to which they belonged were anything but poor, hence a monastic life was materially one of the most secure. Bequests and donations by the faithful also meant that... their landed estates had steadily grown by accretion. (p. 261)

More well-off tenants, who might have held 12.5 hectares, may have earned £6/year, about 50% above the average. This group made up one fifth of rural households but held two-fifths of the arable land. They bought land, produced surpluses for sale, hired workers, and likely did little manual labor.

Within the countryside they were a conspicuously well-off and often influential group, playing a leading role in the management and regulation of commonfields and pastures, operation of manor courts, and supervision of demesnes. (p. 261)

A household with five hectares lived just above the poverty line.

Inevitably, poor harvests squeezed them hard, eliminating their slender surpluses, shrinking casual labouring opportunities, withering demand for by-products, inflating the prices of essential foodstuffs, destabilizing fragile credit arrangements and driving many to part with land... In 1290 over a quarter of a million rural house. holds were living in this vulnerable situation. Their numbers increased the proportion of rural households living on or below the poverty line to maybe two-thirds of the total. (p. 261)

The peasants forced to search for work on other land supplied the nascent commercial economy with a steady flow of labor for "the minority of larger producers farming two-thirds of the land." As labor was so cheap and abundant, and technology was still quite simple in most of the country, the productivity of labor remained very low.

Where returns to their labour were so poor, poverty was inescapable and sprang less, as once supposed, from exploitative and arbitrary feudal lordship than the want of resources and enforcement of effective restrictions on the morcellation of land. Economic survival for tenants everywhere depended upon possession of family and land, the twin sources of welfare and subsistence. Providing for adult children was therefore a priority. Creating new holdings by piecemeal reclamation from the waste was one way of achieving this. Employing equitable inheritance practices was another. Partible inheritance had an obviously fragmenting effect whenever there were several surviving heirs. Its divisive effects were the more profound because it was normal practice to give each heir an equal share of each component plot. (p. 182)

For centuries, the Catholic church had bene pushing for primogeniture — the passing of inheritance solely to the eldest son — but English landholders still tended to carve off pieces of land for their younger children in one way or another.

On its own, the subdivision of land would have affected all people equally, and yet this was a period of massive and growing inequality. Rather than family politics, inequality emerged from the concurrent land market.

For subsistence farmers, land markets offered a faustian bargain: an easy way to make money when times were hard, and the promise of augmenting their holdings when times were good.

In thirteenth and early fourteenth-century England their net effect was the opposite. Indeed, once plots had been detached from a family holding and permanently alienated to non-kin there was little prospect of their being reunited. (p. 182)

In practice, tenants would take out loans to buy land in good years. In bad years — when they were already liable to consider selling land below market rate to buy food — they would also default on their debts, losing what they had purchased when times were good. Tenants faced an impossible dilemma — sell the family land, default on the debt and lose the new holdings, and/or starve.

In the longer term, it was recurrent repetition of this scenario that promoted the progressive attrition of holdings and reduced many households to a state of semi-landlessness... Once land markets became established, each sale, by reducing a household's landed resources and increasing its exposure to harvest risk, begot another. Runs of good harvests obviously provided some respite but recouping losses was difficult since sales in bad times were relatively disadvantageous to the seller and purchases in good times disadvantageous to the buyer. Distress sales therefore favoured those who remained economically strong and able to purchase land on beneficial terms at the expense of those who were sliding irrevocably into greater poverty. It was the ability of those who were relatively well off to avail themselves of the misfortune of others and to establish non-inheriting children on purchased land that sustained their own superior reproduction rates... the processes of downward social mobility thereby set in train served to swell the ranks of smallholders whose inferior material wellbeing prevented them from reproducing as successfully. A widening gulf therefore opened between, on one hand, a shrinking minority of households with sufficient land to make ends meet even when times were hard and, on the other, a growing majority of poor households for whom economic survival was an increasing struggle. (p. 182)

Again, it was the upper classes the kept the population growing, while their own children were gradually demoted to the level of poor subsistence farmers, in turn selling off their own land.

Up to this point, there was a clear distinction between feudal serfs and free tenants. Both worked the land of a lord, but the serfs were legally bound to stay on the land. The land market to some extent freed the serfs from these obligations and created an equality of privation.

Free tenants, in fact, had become the new poor. Their landholdings were so shrunken that self-sufficiency was not an option. Instead, to meet their subsistence needs, they were obliged to become increasingly dependent upon the market, hiring out their labour and producing high-value goods for sale so that they might purchase lower-value goods for consumption... Yet market forces were turning against them: the multiplying number of land-hungry poor householders bid up land values and competed for employment in an increasingly glutted labour market. (p. 187)

In a twist of irony, England's free tenants had fallen in large part fallen in status below the unfree serfs. Many free tenants had lost in the land market and ended up landless, becoming "the worst off" in society. "There can be no question that these semi-landless groups constituted a far larger component of English society in 1290 than in 1086." These free tenants had multiplied the most and had participated the most in the rigged land market.

In all likelihood, there were some substantial tenants who profited from these conditions by subletting their customary land, for which they would have paid a low traditional rent, at sky-high market rates. Many cheap, larger plots of land were held by gentry, ecclesiastics, craftsmen, and tradesmen, "who did not cultivate it themselves but acted as 'middlemen', no doubt subletting it piecemeal for terms of years in return for profit rents."

By the end of the 1200s, "these interconnected processes of partition, subdivision, piecemeal selling and subletting" had created a bottom-heavy social structure.

Harvest failure was a key ingredient of the process because it was to mitigate its effects that many small producers availed themselves of the land marlet in the first place and because of its effects that so many were then pushed into making distress land sales... Worryingly, a large, economically vulnerable socio-economic group had come into being at the very time that long-established atmospheric circulation patterns were destabilizing and the frequency of extreme weather events increasing... An intractable problem of structural poverty had been created... For the poorest households grain consumed as pottage, bread and ale contributed over 80 per cent of daily kilocalories. Annual carryovers were small. Dependence upon the annual harvest was therefore absolute and prices typically rose and scarcity mounted during the hungry weeks and months leading up to the next year's harvest. (p. 187)

Subsistence farmers learned to mix varied winter and summer crops, offering protection from total failure, as the conditions to cause failures in one season wouldn't likely cause failures in the other season — to a point. By the middle of the 1300s, changing weather patterns started to regularly cause across-the-board crop failures.

There could be no reversal of this vicious circle without profound reform of tenures and wholesale transformation of the economic and demographic context within which factor markets operated. Over the course of the early fourteenth century England consequently experienced a growing polarization of wealth and purchasing power between a minority of wealthy households with land, capital and income in excess of their subsistence requirements, who were thereby able to profit from trends in relative factor prices, and a growing majority of impoverished and under-employed households who eked out a hand-to-mouth existence on inadequate and under-capitalized holdings and who attempted to sell their excess labour on a glutted labour market. (p. 256)

In this context, even major famines failed to upset the status quo. After massive die-offs caused by crop failures, rural economies would right themselves again and inequality would continue to grow, as would happen in the great famine of 1315–17, which killed perhaps 5-15% of the population.

While the social transformation of the High Middle Ages — including the emergence of widespread, structural poverty — may have been caused by the medieval warm period, the poverty would be dramatically compounded by the looming "little ice age."