The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [91]
For example, in 1225, of the 124 people assessed for a survey in the Wiltshire village of Damerham, fifty-nine owned sheep, with a combined flock of 1,259 animals. That meant they sold wool for cash rather than strove for self-sufficiency. They presumably used that cash to buy bread from the baker who bought flour from the miller, who bought grain from other farmers, who therefore got cash too. Instead of self-sufficiency, everybody was now in the market and had disposable income. People wanted to travel to the market in nearby Salisbury to buy things: so the carter was doing well, too, and the merchants in Salisbury. In 1258 a spectacular cathedral began to take shape in Salisbury, on the back of the wool boom, because the Church was coining it in tithes and taxes. Put yourself in the shoes of a grain farmer in Damerham. The miller wants all you can grow, so you encourage both your sons to marry early and rent a few acres off you. The carter, the miller, the baker, the merchant and the shepherds are all doing the same: setting their children up in business. Family formation – which had always been as much an economic as a biological decision – increased markedly in the thirteenth century. The consequence of all this early and frequent marriage was fecundity. In the thirteenth century the population of England seems to have doubled, from over two million to something like five million people.
Inevitably, and gradually, the population boom overtook the economy’s productivity. Rents inflated and wages deflated: the rich were bidding up land prices while the poor were bid ding down wages. By 1315 real wages had halved in a century, although because of family formation, family income was probably not falling as fast as individual wages. For example, a miller in Feering in Essex in the 1290s agreed to halve his wage when his employer took on another employee. Chances are the new employee was the miller’s son and they were simply sharing the same income within the family. None the less, as pay packets shrank, demand for the goods supplied by merchants must have begun to stall. To feed the growing population, marginal land was being ploughed, and was yielding fewer and fewer grains for each grain sown. Diminishing returns dominated. Predatory priests and chiefs did not help.
Before long hunger was a real risk. It came suddenly in the sodden summers of 1315 and 1317, when wheat yields more than halved all across the north of Europe. The crops rotted in the fields; some people were forced to eat their own seed corn. Mothers abandoned their babies. There were rumours of fresh corpses of criminals pulled from gallows for food. In the years that followed, with continuing poor harvests and unusually cold winters, a fatal murrain spread among hungry oxen, and that left some land unploughed, further exacerbating the food shortage. The population then stagnated for three decades until the Black Death arrived in the 1340s and caused a crash in human numbers. The plague returned in the 1360s, followed by more bad harvests and more plague outbreaks. By 1450, the population of England had been reduced to roughly where it had been in 1200.
Yet neither the boom of the thirteenth century, nor the bust of the fourteenth, can be described in simplistic Ricardian and Malthusian terms. The carrying capacity of the land was not much increased in the first period by Ricardian technological change, nor much diminished in the second by Malthusian falls in yield. What changed was the economy’s, rather than the land’s, capacity to support so many people. After all, the Black Death was not caused by overpopulation, but by a bacterium. Ironically, the plague may have been one of the sparks that lit the Renaissance, because the shortage of labour shifted income from rents to wages as landlords struggled