Showing papers in "The Economic History Review in 1971"

England in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: An Economic Contrast?

Abstract: DEAS about the course of economic development in medieval England, many of them long established as more or less unchallenged assumptions, have been subjected to drastic revision during the past generation. Prof. M. M. Postan, in particular, has steadily undermined those views which centred upon a progressive and unilinear transformation of a manorial regime under the impact of expanding exchanges and the rise of a money economy. Medieval realities have been shown to be infinitely more complex than the older notions assumed. In the Middle Ages, as at other times, there were short-range economic fluctuations responding to the vagaries of weather and harvests, to political conditions, and to other circumstances (although many of these minor ripples on the curve of prosperity, especially in their regional manifestations, have still to be charted in detail). It is a further argument, however, that these "recurrent oscillations" were superimposed upon much longer-range ebbs and flows of economic activity.2 In this connexion it has been suggested that there is a basic contrast between the underlying economic trend in the twelfth century and that discernible in the thirteenth, a contrast which may well be crucial for the new economic chronology of the English Middle Ages as a whole. If only for that reason, and also because it involves a view of the twelfth century which is curiously paradoxical, this is a hypothesis which needs to be tested.3

The Standard of Living in the Black Country during the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: T tHE standard of living is determined by what people can buy with their earnings. Several recent writers on the subject have pointed to the need for regional and local studies to get away from the national aggregates which often obscure more than they reveal, and to get down to the study of what real groups of people actually earned, bought, and consumed.' This article attempts to assess the standard of living of working people in the Black Country, particularly for the years i840 to i900. The argument is that for this area at least, and possibly for other parts of the country, conclusions based wholly on wage and price data, even when these relate to specific local market conditions, are liable to be grossly misleading. Furthermore in the Black Country, because of its peculiar regional history, the Great Depression, far from being mythical, was very real indeed.2 The Black Country, an area of about ioo square miles, comprises the present county boroughs of Dudley, Walsall, Warley, West Bromwich, and Wolverhampton, together with Stourbridge and Halesowen. It is situated on the famous ten-yard seam of coal, which together with the limestone and plentiful supplies of ironstone in the coal measures made it a major producer of iron and coal from the I 750's. The coalfield was wastefully worked and eventually became flooded while the ironstone became exhausted at a slightly earlier date. Hence there was a forced transition from an economy based on primary industries to the general economy of heavy engineering which characterizes it today. This transition took place in the period of the Great Depression.