The Great Transition, by Bruce Campbell (Part Two)

In part one of this review, I described how the Medieval Warm Period generated the wealth of the High Middle Ages, which itself produced a commercial society defined by the emergence of markets in land and labor — and a corresponding growth in inequality.

This part will cover the dramatic transition from the High Middle Ages to the Late Middles Ages — when the Medieval Warm Period plunged into the "Little Ice Age," launching an era of plague, pestilence, famine, warfare, and — ironically — leisure and innovation.

Cooling

By the beginning of the 1300s, Europe had entered period of cooling that would last about four centuries, finally abating in the 1700s. This era was defined by "politico-economic tensions and interstate conflicts."

In the late 1200s, Italy saw perhaps the highest GDP per person ($1,750) ever attained by any European economy until the 1800s. But by the beginning of the 1300s this boom had collapsed and Europe sank into a recession.

The cold weather reduced crop yields and increased general adversity, but it wasn't necessarily the main causal factor in the coming calamities. Rather, highly climatic instability posed a much worse problems (p. 203). Subsistence farmers depend on predictable weather to plan crops from one year to the next. The climate of the 1300s swung from warm to cold and wet to dry, destroying summer crops some years, winter crops other years, and both summer and winter crops in a few disastrous years.

Moreover, an unstable climate is hostile to human health. Humans depend on reliable weather to design homes and villages with adequate warmth, ventilation, and drainage. Unstable whether creates the breeding grounds for plague and disease — the main defining quality of the 1300s.

Overall, the weather of the 1300s — especially the first half of the century — created an environment where weather ruined crops, pestilence destroyed livestock, poverty famished the populace, and disease crept in. "Repeated exposure to extreme natural and human events was eroding the capacity of the system to cope with such hazards" (p. 23).

Starting in the 1280s, the North Atlantic began to cool. From the 1310s to the 1380s, this cooling became more intense, but alternated with periods of warming. The cool periods tended to be dry, while the warm periods were wet — sometimes to the point of flooding.

The first prolonged warming event, from 1315 to 1318, proved to be particularly disastrous, for it seems to have been responsible for the prolonged summer rains and storms which ruined northern European grain harvests in 1315 and 1316 and depressed that of 1317, thereby precipitating the Great European Famine. (p. 205)

The variation between warm and cold was the most exaggerated from 1315 to 1345 — the years from the Great European Famine to the beginning of the Black Plague. "Precipitation tended to be either deficient or excessive."

The cold weather put pressure on the Norse colonists in Greenland, while the European recession reduced demand for their exports of walrus ivory and narwhal tusks. They abandoned their settlements through the 1300s and 1400s (p. 206).

In Europe, the new climate imposed challenges on all aspects of life. The cold, wet weather made it harder to produce salt through solar evaporation, and by the middle of the 1300s salt production had dropped to the lowest point in history (p. 279).

1338–43 brought major storm surges to the North Sea, causing serious flooding in England and the Netherlands. 1342 saw the worst flood in the history of Germany, the St Magdalene's Day Flood (p. 208, 283).

In October of 1348 — a few months after the Black Plague had reached Paris — the Paris Medical Faculty reported:

For some time the seasons have not succeeded each other in the proper way. Last winter [1347/8] was not as cold as it should have been, with a great deal of rain; the spring windy and latterly wet. Summer was late, not as hot as it should have been, and extremely wet the weather very changeable from day to day, and hour to hour; the air often troubled, and then still again, looking as if it was going to rain but then not doing so. Autumn too was very rainy and misty. (p. 282)

The Florentine writer Giovanni Villani wrote of the year 1347,

Not in a hundred years had there been such a bad harvest of grain and fodder and wine and oil and everything else in this country as there was in this year... all because of too much rain. (p. 325)

Whereas the preceding centuries saw warm, regular weather patterns, one of the "most striking features" of the new era was instability.

Pestilence

In the credit economy of Europe, sheep and cattle were the most popular form of liquid assets, as they were easily transported over long distances. Toward the end of the 1200s, an epidemic of scab infested the sheep of Europe. The mobility of the flocks — constantly trading and traveling — meant that the disease spread quickly. Moreover, when a husbandman noticed scab in his flock, he would sell as much of the flock as possible before they died off, thereby spreading the infection to other flocks (p. 210).

The scab damaged the wool that could be produced by a sheep, so that the weight of wool produced fell by a quarter in the decade from 1275 to 1285. After centuries of a booming wool industry, wool exports dropped.

The largest producers of wool were monasteries, who had pioneered the industry and early futures contracts on wool. The scab forced many of these ecclesiastical producers into insolvency (p. 214).

The sheep scab persisted through the 1300s. Meanwhile, another animal disease emerged.

1314–1316 saw years of extreme rain and cold that destroyed crops and created generally misery. In this environment, a plague of rinderpest emerged — a viral disease that kills cattle and oxen (p. 218). Rinderpest hadn't appeared in Europe for at least three centuries, which meant no one knew how to deal with it and no animals had any immunity to it. The disease spread easily amongst the highly mobile bovines:

oxen were widely used for carting and hauling, and cattle of all sorts (and their skins and hides) were exchanged and traded over sometimes quite considerable distances, as well as being favoured targets of thieves, rustlers and war bands.

The disease was exacerbated by the weather and resultant famine, which meant that cattle spent more time sheltered indoors in close contact, and had less food to eat.

Disease became rife among the beleaguered human population and, probably for equivalent reasons of scarce forage and fodder, stress, overcrowding, poor sanitation and malnutrition, cattle seem to have suffered a similar fate.

In 1319, the national livestock population fell by 60%. More than 250,000 oxen died.

Since each ox possessed the muscle power of six men, this was equivalent to a manpower loss of at least 1½ million adult males in a society with an adult male population of probably fewer than 1½ million (p. 222).

The disease was devastating.

Everywhere it devastated herds, destroyed vital working oxen and depressed dairy output, thereby compromising nutritional standards and massively magnifying and prolonging the damage already inflicted by the devastating harvest failures (p. 227).

Famine

Through the late 1200s, the growing population continually glutted the labor market, depressing wage rates. Since England was a heavily agricultural economy, no manufacturing industry absorbed the excess labor. With no way to survive off customary land holdings, rural dwellers went to work as servants, sublet their land, subdivided land into smaller holdings, and colonized evermore difficult land. "Either way, structural poverty became entrenched and... power and wealth became more polarized... The longer that the commercial recession continued, the more intractable became these problems... Cruelly, risks of major harvest failures and, worse, of consecutive bad harvests rose at the very time that the proportion of economically vulnerable households was growing" (p. 142).

Everywhere in northern Europe's many upland regions, harsher winters and shorter growing seasons were making life for pastoralists more difficult. p. 207

In Northern Europe, the harvest failed in 1315 and again in 1316 — an incredibly rare catastrophe.

Coming at the climax of two centuries of population growth and mounting income inequality, the timing of this weather-inflicted collapse in output of staple foodstuffs could not have been worse... Sequel shortfalls in 1321, 1324, 1328 and 1331 (Figure 3.15) progressively undermined the budgets of many normally solvent households, leaving them deficient in grain and unable to satisfy their subsistence needs and credit obligations. Hardship reached higher up the socio-economic scale than ever before, with the result that more households were obliged to resort to distress land sales in order to make ends meet... Most transactions were contracted between non-kin and typically involved pathetically small pieces of land... An initial surge in transactions followed the famine years of 1315 and 1316, another accompanied the devastating cattle plague of 1319, a third was triggered by the disastrous harvest of 1321 and a fourth by the dismal harvests of 1328 and 1331. Each successive output shock with its sequential inflation of prices elicited a disproportionately greater spate of land sales. (p. 191)

While the poor bore the brunt of adversity, they had no recourse but misery and death. For that reason, impoverished populations didn't grow through reproduction — they died too quickly for that. Instead, the lower classes were filled by demotion from the upper classes. Some farmers held customary rights to relatively large plots of land that they could not sell and below-market rents. They managed to stay afloat through the hard years, still bearing more children than they could afford who then fell into poverty (p. 196). Meanwhile, the wealthiest benefited from "scarcity-inflated prices, glutted labour market and abundance of land available for purchase" (p. 196).

As a result, despite the recurring famines of the 1300s, the population continued to grow, placing evermore pressure on a precarious society. All the while, since the livestock population had been destroyed by rinderpest, farmers couldn't return to pre-famine levels of production. It took at least twenty years for England to rebuild its agricultural capacity (p. 227).

War

By the 1300s, Europe had lost access to Asian markets due to a changing political situation. Through the High Middle Ages, Europe had enjoyed a period of peace and unity, but the Pax Christiana came to a close as society grew disillusioned with a greedy church and instead opted to resolve disputes through violence. Theft in the form of brigandage (on land) and piracy (on water) led to military buildup (p. 141).

The feudal fabric of Europe lent itself to territorial (and economic) expansion through conquest. As time went on, the many small territories gradually consolidated into fewer large ones, with the scale of military conflicts growing as did the stakes. In 1337, one of these conflicts hit a boiling point.

The king of England held the title of Duke of Aquitaine, making him technically a vassal to the king of France. To avoid subordinating himself to another ruler, the king of England claimed the throne of France for himself. In retaliation, the king of France confiscated the English king's land in France. This was the worst possible time to go to war, and yet desperation is a powerful motivator in itself. The English king "taxed the realm more heavily than ever before, quadrupling the country's real annual tax burden during the first five years of the war" (p. 268). While waiting for the tax revenues to roll in, the king procured expensive loans from Florentine bankers, imposed embargoes on wool export, and requisitioned merchant ships for naval use.

The new policies had dire effects for ordinary people. The taxes were so heavy that some farmers couldn't afford to sow their own land so that "arable land sufficient to provision a city the size of London had been withdrawn from cultivation" (p. 268).

This was the Hundred Years' War, the first major war in the history of Western Europe, and the inception of an era of perpetual warfare that has continued to the present day.

1347 saw food riots at English ports. Nonetheless, England managed to secure military success at both Northern France and the Scottish border.

The way was open for Edward III to employ force of arms to pursue his French ambitions, doing so now at the expense of the French realm. It was France's turn to bleed and she did so from her arteries. (p. 268)

England imposed heavy taxes on the poor, populous of Northern France, seeking to recoup losses from the military campaign, while marauding English soldier plundered villages. France became trapped in a downward economic spiral where population decline caused economic decline which increased mortality and caused population decline.

Italy, too felt the crunch. England reneged on the loans that had financed the war, bankrupting Florence's last great banking company. As the Mongol Empire fractured, trade routes to the east closed.

In Belgium, the commercial recession of the early 1300s caused massive social unrest.

The economic slowdown fed mounting tensions between tenants and landlords, countryside and town, weavers and fullers, proletariats and patriciates, one city and another... Social unrest became endemic in the towns while growing inequality and the economic marginalization of many rural households bred discontent in the countryside. (p. 158)

Plague

By the middle of the 1300s, Europe was in a uniquely terrible position. Overpopulation. Recession. Recurring famines. Poverty.

In 1346 when the English invaded France, the Scots invaded England, in Florence the Society of the Bardi was declared bankrupt, in the Crimea the troops of Khan Janibeg were besieging Kaffa, the Byzantine Empire was still locked in a self-destructive civil war, in Asia Minor Ottoman power was in the ascendant, and in the eastern Mediterranean the Mamluks were poised to capture Ayas in Lesser Armenia Latin Christendom's economic prospects looked bleak. Currencies had been destabilized and credit exhausted, the volume of international trade was much reduced, brigandage and piracy were rampant, the Champagne fairs were a shadow of their former selves and the once great Flemish textile industry was at a decidedly low ebb. In the summer of 1346 no European could have foreseen that release from this impasse was imminentlv to hand in the form of a sudden and massive downsizing of Old World populations. Yet it was then that plague spread from Asia into Europe and contaminated the Mongol siege lines around the Crimean port of Kaffa. Its hosts and/or vectors had only to surmount that city's defences and stow away on board the Genoese galleys moored in its harbour to be spread with devastating and transformative demographic consequences throughout Europe's extensive and close-knit commercial system. Unlike other more belligerent invaders, plague ratcheted populations down but left infrastructures, institutions and capital assets largely intact. It selectively delivered windfall gains to many of the survivors by redistributing resources, realigning relative factor prices, and reflating coin supplies. Further, it spared northern Europeans a repeat of the Great European Famine by curtailing the numbers of mouths to be fed at the very time when anomalous weather caused three consecutive outright harvest failures in 1349, 1350 and 1351. (p. 297) All the while, something had been brewing in the heart of Eurasia.

Emergence

The Black Plague, scientific name Yersinia pestis, survived for millennia among ground-burrowing rodents, like the gerbils of the Tibetan grasslands. The gerbils develop some immunity to the plague and carry it permanently. The plague can also survive in the soil alone for some time. The plague is primarily transmitted by the fleas that feed on the gerbils. Occasionally a hunter, trapper, or herdsman may have contracted the plague through contact with the rodents, but the disease would have stopped with him (p. 323).

As least three times, it has crossed from rodents to humans as a devastating global pandemic: in the sixth century, the fourteenth century, and the nineteenth century (p. 235). Mild, wet weather promote vegetation growth, which encourage gerbil populations, creating a large enough population to carry and spread the disease more widely (p. 228).

While Y. pestis remained in this quiescent state it was rarely present in sufficient concentration in both sylvatic rodent hosts and their flea vectors to pose more than an incidental threat to humans. The sparse vegetation of these semi-arid grasslands kept populations of sylvatic rodents below the densities required to sustain an epizootic outbreak and low humidity acted as a similar constraint upon flea numbers and activity... A shift to increased precipitation and higher moisture levels allowed the productivity of this grassland ecosystem to rise. More rainfall meant more vegetation, increased food supplies for sylvatic rodents, greater survival of young rodents, and a corresponding elevation of population densities to the levels required to maintain natural stocks of Y. pestis at more dangerous levels. Survival of flea larvae also increased with humidity... Humans directly exposed to sylvatic rodents and their skins, especially hunters, trappers and herders, were now at greater risk of contracting the infection, although while rodent hosts existed in substantial numbers there was little danger of their fleas switching wholesale to humans and thereby amplifying the outbreak into a full-blown human epidemic. In regions with well-established sylvatic reservoirs of plague, infection of humans by this route could be quite common but typically produced sporadic deaths rather than great surges of mortality. Plague only became a serious threat to humans when it made the crossover from svlvatic to commensal rodent populations... Quite possibly this only occurred after plague had already spread to a variety of other sylvatic rodents and small mammals all of which then served as maintenance hosts of the disease. Spillover of Y. pestis to commensal rodents should therefore be regarded as an exceptional development, most likely to occur when a sudden contraction in sylvatic populations, either from an abrupt drought-induced reduction in food supplies or abnormally heavy disease mortality, caused their blood-hungry and pathogen-bearing flea vectors to seek alternative hosts. It was at this stage that domestic rats became implicated in spread of the pathogen. As well as living in immediate proximity to humans, rats were far less resistant to Y. pestis than their sylvatic counterparts, so that, as fleas rapidly transmitted the pathogen through their colonies... and rats began to die en masse. Death typically occurred within ten to fourteen days of a rat becoming infected. The consequent collapse of commensal rodent populations had grave consequences for humans. Once again, flea vectors... were obliged to seek alternative hosts, this time humans, who proved as susceptible to the infection as the commensal rodents. (p. 237)

Scientists see the connection between climate and plague as so strong that they theorize the first plague pandemic (in the 500s) may have been precipitated by a volcanic explosion (p. 228) that altered the climate in favor of rodent populations, while the gap between the pandemic of the 500s and the pandemic of the 1300s was filled with the Medieval Warm Period, which fostered a dry climate in Central Asia, unfavorable to plague (p. 322).

Dry climate in the 1100s kept plague levels low in Tibet:

The natural aridity of this elevated continental region tended to increase over the course of the twelfth century, with a succession of dry years of increasing severity in 1108-9, 1112, 1145 and 1152, until the sustained drought of 1191-1201, with 1200 the single driest year since AD 374. Drought returned with a vengeance in 1207 (as Chinggis Khan launched his second raid across the Gobi Desert against the Western Xia) and did not ease until 1210... Diminished rainfall naturally restricted vegetation growth and, thus, populations of the ground-burrowing sylvatic rodents that were plague's natural hosts. The combination of high temperatures and low humidity ought also to have depressed their flea burdens. Consequently plague is likely to have remained in an enzootic state, posing little threat to humans throughout this long period. (p. 247)

But, the climate began to shift in the 1200s:

Higher grassland productivity also benefited Chinggis Khan's cavalry-based troops and thus helped sustain the momentum of Mongol military conquest (first partly set in motion by the adverse effects of persistent drought upon the nomadic pastoral peoples of the steppes) with the result that by the middle of the thirteenth century virtually the whole of Eurasia's steppe grasslands had been brought under Mongol control. This opened up this vast and hitherto politically fragmented region to greatly increased latitudinal movement by armies, couriers and caravans, with all the consequences this potentially had for wider human-assisted metastatic diffusion of the plague pathogen via transportation of the insect vectors responsible for its transmission between sylvatic rodents, commensal rodents and humans. (p. 249)

The erratic whether of the late 1200s then caused population fluctuations in the rodent populations, encouraging crossover between gerbils and rats.

The impact of climate change upon ecological conditions in plague's parched core-reservoir region... appears to have been the catalyst that advanced plague from an enzootic to an epizootic state and galvanized its wider geographical dispersal. (p. 325)

As the plague spread eastward, it traveled at a speed of up to 2.5 kilometers per day.

soldiers, officials and traders travelling west by horse, ox-cart and camel caravan must have carried the plague with them (p. 252).

In 1342, temperatures dropped almost everywhere around the world. This climate change put stress on the gerbil population, causing the gerbils to seek new habitats or simply die, prompting the fleas that lived on them to seek new hosts — either rats or humans.

As the rat hosts died of plague, the fleas would seek new hosts, jumping to humans in desperation. (Rodent fleas can't survive on humans in the longterm, but they will bite humans when hungry.) The fleas could survive on humans long enough to travel from one town to the next before their host got ill. After a rat got infected, it would take up to two weeks for the plague to spread through the rat population. Then three days to transmit the disease to a human. Then up to five days of human incubation. And finally up to three days for the sick human to die. All in all, three weeks could elapse between the time the plague arrived in a town and the first human died.

Humans can transmit plague directly, but this only happens through close contact in the end stages when an infected person coughs "copious amounts of bloody sputum" (p. 235). But human-flea-human transmission would suffice to transmit the plague around the world at the speed of maritime shipping and overland trade.

Enabling human preconditions included dense populations, integrated networks of communication, high levels of movement, and famine and/or war-induced breakdowns of nutrition, hygiene and public health. Poor, over-crowded and insanitary populations infested with ectoparasites were therefore especially at risk. At this final stage, the pandemic will have assumed the outward appearance of an infectious disease spread contagiously from human to human, notwithstanding that insect vectors of one sort or another remained intrinsic to its transmission. (p. 239)

Eventually, with all of the rodents dead, the fleas would finally die, as they cannot survive on humans permanently. This would take at least four months (p. 297).

By 1346, just four years after the climate downturn, plague erupted in the port of Kaffa on the Black Sea. According to a famous legend, Mongol soldiers laying siege to Kaffa catapulted plague-infected corpses over the walls into the city (p. 301). The following spring, Genoese merchants and mariners fled the city by sea, carrying the plague with them. By May of 1347 the plague had arrived in Constantinople. By September it reached Sicily and mainland Italy soon thereafter. In November it arrived in Marseille. The plague followed trade routes, "moving in a chain reaction from town to town, hierarchically between centres of descending rank, and outwards from ports and cities to their rural hinterlands" (p. 305).

Western Europe was in a poor state to receive a plague. Poverty had given rise to crowding, malnutrition, and vagrancy — perfect conditions for the infection, transmission, and mortality. Meanwhile, military campaigns meant large movements of soldiers through France, England, and Scotland (p. 285).

Plague then as now was a disease of poverty, breaking out and flaring up whenever ecological and economic stress brought humans into closer contact with plague's rodent hosts and flea vectors. At such times it probably acted in combination with other infections that thrived on the malnutrition, over-crowding and poor hygiene engendered by harvest failure, notably murine typhus and possibly epidemic typhus. Disease, consequently, endowed these years of adverse weather and scarcity with a demographic significance out of all proportion to their economic impact. Herein possibly lies the greatest and most insidious influence of contemporary climate changes upon society. (p. 351)

By the time the plague entered a vulnerable population like this, its rodent hosts were no longer necessary, as the fleas could leap from human to human (p. 233). It became a true pandemic.

This was the deadliest event in history.

Impact

The plague was lethal, swift, and total. Once symptoms appeared, the plague ran its course in one or two days. It had a fatality rate of 80%. It killed regardless of age, gender, or class. And no one knew what caused it or how to treat it.

In six years, at least 25 million Europeans died — a third of the population.

In Paris, the plague killed 800 people a die — 66,000 in a year and a half (p. 306). A Scottish clerk wrote,

So great a plague has never been heard of from the beginning of the world to the present day, or been recorded in books; for this plague vented its spite so thoroughly that fully a third of the human race was killed. (p. 306)

The most vulnerable population was the medics and clerics on the frontline, "ministering to the sick in their homes and the dying on their deathbeds." 45% of parish priests died. On the other hand, no king, prince, or ruler died in the Black Plague (p. 306).

Plague may little have respected person, rank or office, but it did not kill indiscriminately. Today, plague is above all a disease of poor people in poor countries and the same applied in the fourteenth century. The more detailed historical evidence available for England indicates that the rich experienced lower mortality than the poor, probably because ecologically they were less directly and regularly exposed to the disease's insect vectors. Thus, it was the poor who lived in the most overcrowded and least sanitary conditions and in closest proximity to plague's vermin hosts and vectors. It is to be expected that their persons, bedding and clothing were particularly heavily infested with ectoparasites. Analysis of skeletal remains from Black Death burials also indicates that the malnourished, physically frail and aging were disproportionately represented among the dead. 179 Consequently it is no surprise that the death rate of 27 per cent estimated for English male tenants-in-chief of the Crown was among the lowest of any social group. Only bishops, with a death rate of 18 per cent, appear to have escaped more lightly... Abbots, in contrast, fared far worse, probably because they lived and worked in close-knit cloistered communities. Their death rate of 42 per cent was much the same as the 44 per cent death rate of monks in twelve of the most important monasteries.

In England, at least 40% of the population died, shrinking by 2 million from 4.8 million to 2.8 million in a mere twenty months, between August 1348 and March 1350. Half of those deaths occurred in the worst months: June, July, and August of 1349. Across Europe, the bulk of the mortality would have happened in a similarly short summer watersheds. (p. 308) The survivors buried their dead in mass graves.

As the plague subsided, couples set to work rebuilding. One town, which had seen 11–29 marriages a year before the plague, saw 86 the year after the plague. On one estate in England, the price of a marriage license doubled after the plague. Another estate saw a three-fold increase in marriage payments in 1350 compared to pre-plague levels.

With 40-50 per cent fewer people but two to three times as many marriages, nuptiality rates, at least in the short term, soared and, although it cannot be documented, it is to be expected that an upsurge in births soon followed. This happy demographic situation did not last. (p. 352)

Little more than a decade later, the plague returned between 1360 and 1363 (p. 313), with a death rate around 10% of the population. This time, though, the plague hit the young children exceptionally hard. Born after they last plague, they were the ones without immunity.

Within twelve years the first of a succession of sequel plague outbreaks swept across Europe, with many of the fresh cohort of children born immediately after the Black Death prominent among its victims. Each disease outbreak triggered a surge in mortality, which ratcheted populations down in size and, by elevating infant and child mortality rates, sapped populations of the capacity to reproduce themselves.(p. 352)

The plague returned in 1369, 1374/5, and 1382/3 (p. 316).

By the end of the century, the European population had been cut down in half, with an entire generation almost wiped out. The weather remained poor into the late 1300s, so that "an entire generation experienced little respite from poor weather, inferior harvests and recurrent bouts of heavy disease mortality" (p. 325).

Even the highest tenants couldn't sustain their reproduction levels. Among social elites, population replacement rates remained negative for four generations after the plague. "Not until the final quarter of the fifteenth century were numbers of sons once again consistently in excess of numbers of fathers" (p 353.)

Aftermath

For centuries, the European had been booming, chasing a growing commercial economy. Neither war nor famine had slowed the creep of new farmland and growth of towns and cities. The plague presented the first check to human population.

Because plague was to recur repeatedly over the next 350 years, this first plague outbreak marks a decisive turning point in Latin Christendom's epidemiological environment. The demographic shadow cast by the Black Death was therefore dark and long. Major sequel outbreaks... extinguished any prospect of a post-Black Death fertility-driven demographic recovery. (p. 14)

This change was so profound it completely transformed human's relationship to the land and to each other. For one thing, the plague boosted money supply per person.

Survivors benefited from substantial gains in daily real wage rates, improved access to land, and the potential to enjoy enlarged household incomes. (p. 14).

Farm workers found that their work was now "worth a great deal more, since the work of producing food and organic raw materials continued but there were far fewer workers to undertake it." Wages immediately rose by 50%. The government retaliated against the wage hikes with legislation in 1349 and 1351 to curb wages.

Resources per head were now available in relative abundance but the economic incentives to exploit them more intensively were persistently weak and environmental constraints upon both human and agricultural reproduction remained strong. (p. 15)

Survivors inherited land from their dead relatives, reversing the trend of the morsellization of land holdings. As the price of land dropped, feudal lords had less power to extract rents and the entrenched hierarchies of the feudal era gave way to a more fluid commercial economy. Lords and tenants alike bought, sold, and traded land to consolidate larger holdings. Seeking to increase profits, landlords enclosed the open fields that peasant laborers had traditionally worked in a collectivist system.

The poor weather had lowered the altitudinal limit of farming in uplands, while marshy farmland had become inundated. Now, the farmers who had subsisted on such poor marginal land could move to more productive areas, leaving their old plots free for pasture and woodland. Rural villages became deserted (p. 348).

With far fewer mouths to be fed, food security and standards of nutrition improved and, for a time, the real incomes of many households rose and income distributions became more egalitarian. (p. 333)

From the late 1370s, falling food prices kept daily real wage rates rising, so that by the 1440s the daily wages paid to building labourers and farm labourers purchased two-and-a-half times what they had bought in the 1340s. Wage rates then fluctuated around this historically elevated level until almost the end of the fifteenth century.

By 1381, the number of English households living below the poverty line had dropped to 20 per cent from a high of over 40 per cent in 1290.

With the higher wages, workers generally dismissed luxury consumption and instead opted to use their increased earning power to take more leisure time, as "increased consumption of leisure rather than of goods and services perforce became the default option of many." As a result, the supply of labor shrank even more than the population had (p. 357).

By the midfifteenth century, when daily real wage rates were at their peak... labouring for just three days a week was sufficient to provide workers with a satisfactory standard of living... this gave manual labourers the option of enjoying more leisure or working more industriously in order to acquire more consumables... agricultural workers were more likely to opt for leisure. (p. 308)

This time saw a brief, though unsustainble economic boom as survivors exercised their new purchasing power.

For the nobility and merchant class, this was a hard time, as "economic growth remained flat and prone to sag" (p. 18). Towns struggled to sustain themselves with weak commerce that couldn't compete with the high farming wages, so urbanization levels stagnated or fell, "with the result that most towns were caught up in a competitive survival of the fittest, which left many diminished in population, narrowed in function and downgraded in status."

By the 1370s, the GDP had dropped from pre-plague levels by 26–40% in Spain, England, and Italy, remaining almost as low to the 1500s.

Construction workers were left behind, as the economic halt brought about by the plague put a stop to many construction projects.

In the Tuscan city of Siena the half-completed scheme to add a vast new nave to the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta was the most conspicuous casualty; today, the unfinished structure stands as Europe's most tangible monument to the human devastation wrought by the Black Death. (p. 308)

The economic slowdown reduced demanded for land and lumber, and Europe's depleted woodlands and cleared fields began to regenerate with new trees (p. 312). When construction restarted in the following century, builders found an abundant supply of lumber in the new woodlands, but tree felling did not return to pre-plague levels until the 1500s.

Almost everywhere, in fact, the Black Death marks the point where the tide turned and a sustained phase of woodland depletion gave way to one of widespread regeneration. (p. 313)

For the church, the plague was a major blow to its authority, as ordinary people had become disillusioned with the protective power of religion. At the same time, the church diminished its own credibility through internal squabbling and political drama, including proto-Protestant reformist movements and a papal schism in 1378.

Indeed, religious conflicts and heretical movements were one source of the endemic warfare that continued to consume resources and disrupt trade and commerce across Europe. Bandits on land and pirates and slave raiders at sea all flourished for want of strong public authority and imposed burdensome costs of self-defence and protection upon those who engaged in long-distance trade. (p. 333)

The slack economy kept commerce low for about a century, and Europe ran persistent trade deficits with the east, draining the silver supply. The silver mines of Western Europes had dried up in the 1300s, creating a bullion shortage that encouraged more trade and barter over financial exchange (p. 367).

As silver exchange typically flowed directly into royal and aristocratic coffers, silver production was vital to the luxury markets — the trade in spices and fine cloths that kept international exchange flowing. In the immediate aftermath of the plague, the mass die-off "served as a surrogate silver mining boom" (p. 368), keeping the supply of silver per head growing for a time. But, by the 1370s, the silver supply had stagnated.

At the same time, the boom in the supply of land per person lowered the cost of capital, causing interest rates to drop by half over the 1300s. These low interest rates persisted through the Middle Ages (p. 357) and they

had the obvious effect of making capital investment much cheaper.94 Investment in labour-saving technology spinning wheels, horizontal looms, fulling and gig mills, mechanized forges, blast furnaces, printing presses and three-masted ships offered real pay-offs in an age when labour was becoming dearer. (p. 360)

The higher price of labor had an outsized impact on labor-intensive goods — i.e. manufactured products — relative to primary goods — i.e. agricultural products. Manufacturers sought ways to reduce labor costs through technological innovation while consumers shifted their spending away from manufactured products toward foodstuffs, especially more labor-intensive foods like ale and meat. "Following the Black Death, cheaper land and dearer labour increasingly swung prices in favour of pastoral land uses and animal husbandry, with its significantly smaller labour requirements than arable production."Workers sought employment in the manufacturing sector, which offered high wages. By 1381, "15 per cent of the male, 28 per cent of the female, and 19 per cent of the total English labour force were employed in industry" (p. 360).

As land usage dropped, landlords found themselves with an abundance of cheap arable land. They soon discovered an opportunity in evicting their remaining tenants and replacing them with sheep.

Creation of large pastoral enterprises formed part of the general reconfiguration of farming systems taking place at this time, as land-intensive farming systems gained, and labour-intensive farming systems waned, in importance. Incentives to specialize, invest and innovate weakened as urban populations shrank and their provisioning hinterlands contracted, so that low economic rent locked most farming regions into low-yielding, land-intensive systems of production.

To keep costs low, manufacturers located their operations in cheap rural labor markets, especially pastoral and woodland areas where workers welcomed the opportunity for part-time manufacturing work and manufacturing inputs — like wool — presented themselves in abundance. By 1450, "the majority of towns were substantially smaller... than they had been in 1300" (p. 365).

In England these developments collectively gave rise to a profound redistribution of rural populations as difficult and marginal environments were abandoned, tenants were displaced and dispossessed by the expansion of pasture farming, tenant engrossment of land reduced the availability of holdings, manors offering tenures on generous terms attracted tenants, and industrializing localities, often of wood-pasture and weak lordship, prospered and grew. (p. 360)

Given that by the mid-fifteenth century, in cities across Europe, urban building labourers were paid at daily rates that would not be bettered until the very end of the nineteenth century, it is tempting to regard the century or so that followed the Black Death as the golden age of waged labour, when ordinary working people were better off than they had been or would be for centuries and could look forward to steadily rising incomes... dearer labour may also have established a momentum of investment in labour-saving technology and human-capital formation that centuries later in the high wage economies of the southern North Sea region bore fruit in the industrial revolution. In fact, when the drudgery involved in labouring was high, as in much building work, higher wage rates gave workers a clear incentive to labour for fewer days and enjoy more leisure. (p. 373)

It was during the commercially depressed and bullionscarce middle decades of the fifteenth century, when labourers could earn enough from just three days' work to purchase a respectability basket of consumption goods, that daily real wage rates were most inflated relative to GDP per head. This was prosperity achieved by the opposite of modern economic growth, since it sprang from a combination of labour scarcity and price deflation. In England, it was rural producers and craftsmen rather than urban artisans and traders who most benefited from rising consumption per head of the basic subsistence goods of food, clothing, housing and religion. This shows up in changes in the agricultural product mix, as producers responded to the stronger demands for bread grains (wheat and rye) than for pottage grains (oats), for brewing grains (barley) than for food grains, and for dairy produce and meat than for food grains. Increasingly, consumers wanted refined wheaten bread, not coarser and cheaper rye and multi-grain bread; ale brewed from the best barley malt, not oats malt; and beef rather than bacon. Their consumption of kilocalories went up and the forms in which those kilocalories were consumed became more highly processed, as witnessed by lower food-extraction rates... During the fifteenth century, country people ate, drank and made merry more heartily than ever before, thereby creating work for millers, bakers, maltsters and brewers. In an age when sudden death was omnipresent, most took their religion seriously and invested heavily in church building and private devotion. As the climate cooled, they dressed more warmly and rebuilt their houses and farm buildings. A minority worked industriously, amassed land, property and material possessions and hired domestic and farm servants... It was the relocation of cloth making and metalworking to low-cost rural locations that contained the seeds of future economic growth and which during this period began to make the English economy less exclusively dependent upon primary production. (p. 380)

This economic situation persisted more or less through the 1400s. While this was a golden age of work, not everything was peachy.

For a brief moment at the end of the 1300s, Europe enjoyed warm, benign weather. But, by the 1400s, the climate had turned cold again. The middle of the 1400s saw the lowest temperatures in a millennium and increasing extreme weather (p. 332). Yet again, Europe saw weak harvests of gain, wool, and grapes, and more recurrences of plague, prohibiting any population growth.

Between 1435 and 1442, GDP dropped 13% in Italy, Holland, and England. In this cold weather, the fashion shifted toward fuller, darker, heavier woollen and fur-lined clothes. Private fireplaces became more popular. Farmers built barns and stables to protect their livestock (p. 346).

As the North Atlantic climate cooled and fish stocks migrated south, the last European settlers left Greenland and Iceland struggled under the harsh weather (p. 348).

By the 1500s, population began to grow again, starting in rural regions. (p. 354)

Modernity

The climate hit a cold point in the 1460s, around the eruoption of Mount Kuwae in 1458, which injected massive amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere (p. 16). For generations, Europe had been locked in a permanent state of population stagnation as recurrent bouts of plague continued to check the population. The decades of the late 1460s, while perhaps a golden age for workers, was the nadir of the European economy. As the Hundred Years' War drew to a close, England fell into a devastating internal conflict, the War of the Roses (p. 371).

Piracy and slave raiding blighted Mediterranean maritime commerce, and the Ottomans took Constantinople, gained control of the Black Sea and overran the Balkans. Not in centuries had Europe been so commercially isolated. International trade continued but at a reduced level; its risks were high and unless niche markets could be tapped into there was little to encourage business optimism. In England, for instance, the contribution of exports to national income was only half in the third quarter of the fifteenth century what it had been during the first quarter of the fourteenth century. (p. 17)

By the end of the 1400s, the Eastern Mediterranean was under Muslim control and "Christian merchants were effectively excluded from all direct contact with the commerce of the Indian Ocean."

While these conditions lasted, want of adequate stocks of bullion doomed European commerce to self-perpetuating stagnation. (p. 368)

Economically, politically, climatically and epidemiologically, the 1430s to 1470s were an extremely testing time when the brakes were firmly on and European societies were in retreat on many fronts. A situation more different from that prevailing in 1271 when the three mercantile Polos had set out on their Chinese adventure would be hard to imagine. To resolve this impasse, environmental and biological constraints had to ease, population growth had to replace stagnation and decline, the Muslim stranglehold upon European trade with the East had to be circumvented or broken, and stocks of bullion had to be replenished, especially the silver used in everyday monetary exchange. (p. 371)

Europe had two notable exceptions in the recession. Starting in the 1440s, Portugal "bucked the trend by tapping... into external supplies of African gold bullion" (p. 368). And the Netherlands had gained a competitive edge through control of intra-European trade.

Exploration offered a further potential escape from this economic impasse. Its risks and costs were great but stood to be repaid many times over if new sources of bullion could be found, fresh markets for European exports secured, and ways discovered of reaching the East that avoided running the gauntlet of the Muslim middleman. (p. 387)

During the boom years of the 1200s, Genoese sailors had unsuccessfully sought passage to the East around Africa, abandoning the project. Nonetheless, they acquired skill as expert long-distance navigators on their voyages around Europe, learning to sail on the open Atlantic waters. They developed the large three-masted, high-sided armed ships that would eventually be used by Chrisopher Columbus on his trans-Atlantic expedition.

Working with the experienced merchants of Genoa, who had been cut off from their eastward trade routes, Portuguese explorers set off on southward trade routes "in their quest for the gold-rich lands of the fabled Mali Empire" (p. 387). In 1443, Portuguese sailors brought the first consignment of African gold and ivory back to Lisbon.

By the 1440s it had circumvented the Saharan caravan routes and was importing gold and ivory directly from West Africa, and from the 1450s its newly established Madeiran plantations were actively supplying markets across Europe... Buoyed up by these successes, during the 1480s state-backed Portuguese mariners made a further determined effort to break Venice and Egypt's monopoly control of the Indian spice trade by discovering how to sail directly round Africa and into the Indian Ocean. (p. 385)

As fish stocks migrated south, the Atlantic fisheries grew in importance in place of those of the North Sea. Basque, Breton, English, and Dutch fishermen and whalers voyaged out on the open Atlantic in search of rich fish stocks. Rumors abounded about the fisheries of Newfoundland's Grand Banks and islands across the Atlantic.

From the late 1300s, the Spanish developed an interest in the Atlantic archipellago of the Canary Islands, annexing them in 1415. In 1420, Portugal claimed Madeira and shortly therafter the Azores. In the late decades of the 1400s, the English sponsored John Cabot on his voyage to North America, the Spanish sponsored Columbus on his voyage to the Carribean, and the Portuguese sponsored Bartolomeu Dias on his voyage around the tip of Africa.

In the 1490s Europeans finally regained the direct access to the commerce of the East which they had lost in the 1340s. They also gained access to the undreamt-of mineral wealth of the, to them, hitherto unknown Americas. Within the space of fifty years Europe's commercial isolation had been ended and state of bullion scarcity reversed. At about the same time... epidemiological constraints upon European demographic recovery were finally relaxed so that from c. 1500, notwithstanding continued outbreaks of plague and other diseases, populations were at last growing again almost everywhere. (p. 387)

By the 1500s, England had (inadvertently or otherwise) laid the ground for a social and technological revolution. The 1500s would see the English Reformation and the English Renaissance and the 1600s would see two English Revolutions, transitioning England to a firmly capitalist economy and laying the ground for the Industrial Revoltuion.