Peasant welfare in England, 1290-1348

In the absence of hard data about peasant budgets, this article draws upon development economics to explore the strategies available to the peasantry, and especially smallholders, when harvest failure and fiscal demands between 1290 and 1348 exacerbated the underlying problems of depressed real wages and extreme fragmentation of landholdings. In particular, it considers the nature of commercial change, and the state of commodity markets, in thirteenth-century England, and their implications for different sections of the peasantry. It suggests how the majority of the peasantry had become dependent upon a system which exposed them to a greater degree of economic risk.