Posted on 12/06/2010 1:36:58 PM PST by decimon
LONDON (Reuters) – Maybe being a serf or a villein in the Middle Ages was not such a grim existence as it seems.
Medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world's poorest nations today, according to new research.
Living standards in medieval England were far above the "bare bones subsistence" experience of people in many of today's poor countries, a study says.
"The majority of the British population in medieval times could afford to consume what we call a 'respectability basket' of consumer goods that allowed for occasional luxuries," said University of Warwick economist Professor Stephen Broadberry, who led the research.
"By the late Middle Ages, the English people were in a position to afford a varied diet including meat, dairy produce and ale, as well as the less highly processed grain products that comprised the bulk of the bare bones subsistence diet," he added.
He said a figure of $400 annually (as expressed in 1990 international dollars) is commonly is used as a measure of bare bones subsistence and was previously believed to be the average income in England in the Middle Ages.
But the researchers found that English per capita incomes in the late Middle Ages were actually of the order of $1,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Also, as someone pointed out, the Plague brought about both a labor shortage and a crying need for better recordkeeping — the town elders having succumbed to disease — which led to mechanization (and eventually strikes against mechanization), more production, greater demand for raw materials, and more and more Crown taxes on everything in sight. By (and before) Elizabeth’s time wool production was (in law) a state monopoly, even though it was carried out by people we would call family farmers or even entrepreneurs, the feudal system having broken down. Shakespeare’s father was a bootleg wool merchant, and got nailed for it a couple of times.
The Jamestown settlers nearly starved because they landed during a period of prolonged and severe drought. This drought lasted for seven years from 1606 to 1612 and was the worst in 8 centuries. The settlers landed in 1607, and the Indians were already lacking food to the point they were not very interested in trading with the English. Communal living had nothing to do with it.
Ping
“Surprisingly, the Black Death in 1348 destroyed that system. With up to a third of the population wiped out, laborers became extremely valuable. Wages and opportunities rose and serfdom was pretty much done in Western Europe.”
You’ve been reading “A Farewell to Alms,” haven’t you :)
The Wars of the Roses interrupted things to be sure, but that was mostly aristocrats and their retainers cutting each other up, which was probably welcomed as much by the people as we enjoy our politicians leaving Washington for whatever reason so they can't do any more damage to us. Come to think of it, there was probably an advantage to having the monarchs out of the country fighting so much - it limited the time they could come home and dream up stupid decrees to limit business and competition to line their own and their syncophants' pockets, as Medieval monarchs were want to do.
Now, you've got me when it comes to the turmoil surrounding the Tudors and particularly the Stuarts. But that's not the Medieval period, we're to the Early Modern by then. And by that time the English had bested the Flemish merchants and had seized the preeminent role in the wool trade and textiles.
The worst period in Jamestown history was not the first couple of years. It was actually the winter of 1609-10. John Smith had returned to England in October of that year, allegedly to receive medical treatment as a result of a hunting accident suffered some weeks earlier. But it is more likely that he returned for his own safety and that the accident was arranged. He was not at all popular with some of the leading gentlemen in the colony who had been forced to engage in manual labor as a condition for sharing the limited provisions of the colony the two previous years. Several of the leading gentlemen wanted to hang Smith for his autocratic style and failure to appreciate their high station, sort of like our modern Libtards who want to silence Fox News.
Long story short, when Smith left, these gentlemen took what they considered their rightful places as rulers of the colony and decided that the provisions should be allocated according to needs, as they perceived them, rather than according to the sweat equity rules which John Smith had established. As the winter progressed, the Jamestown Colonists began eating their cats, brought in to control the rodent populations which got into their granaries. And, when the cats were gone, they resorted to eating the rats. Finally, as the supply of rats dwindled, they dug up the corpses of those who had starved and ate human flesh.
When spring arrived, there were fewer than 100 colonists remaining of the 500 or so who had been their that fall when Smith departed from England.
Of that number, only 60 were well enough to work. It was decided to abandon the colony. The survivors were rescued by two small ships which arrived from Bermuda on May 23. On June 7, they loaded all survivors on board and set sail for England. They were met at the mouth of the James River just two days later by a resupply ships from England with the new governor on board who forced them to abandon their abandonment of the settlement.
Of course, by this time, the electoral dynamics of the colony had changed, the "gentlemen" were no longer in charge because they were mostly among the 80% or so of the colony which perished. The new governor, Thomas West, saw fit to revert to the John Smith model of governance, a decision which was overwhelmingly supported by the surviving colonists.
“If you liked bad smells, bad teeth and absolutely no personal freedom at all - then yes, England was a merry place.”
They haven’t changed all that much since then.
Thank you for the enlightening peek at Jamestowne history. I had not known those stories before. I am descended from those early settlers — I think from First Supply. Edward De Gurganoy, I think. The records are at home, and I’d have to look it up. I’m not sure what happened to him (he was one of those ill-equipped “Gentlemen”) but his daughter arrived from England a few years later to claim her inheritance, married, gave birth to one child, and died. We’ve been here ever since.
One of the Jamestowne stories that has always curled my hair was about the young man who led one of the rebellions. I forget which one. It was an early rebellion where some of the people thought that the town folk were not doing their fair share to protect the plantations on the outskirts of Jamestowne and they started a civil war. The leader was wounded, but his men didn’t want the other side to know, so they hid his body and hid the news. The leader eventually died — not from his wounds, but from BODY LICE. That gives me the creeps beecause he had joined the colony a few months earlier as the bridegroom to the daughter of one of the leaders. Can you imagine crawling into bed with him?
Yeah, but a serf couldn’t leave and he had to let the master have first night privileges, if he got married.
See, Chaucer, there’s a good example. Look at all of those middle class people on pilgrimage in the Canterbury Tales. And what was a pilgrimage but a vacation with a religious rationale? People could afford vacations. The people in the stories sounded well enough off as far as that went. Hey, England has always been a green and pleasant land, I don’t know why these fool anthropologists don’t understand that. Because it messes with their preconceived notions of ‘progressivism’, per chance?
I don’t know about that, but fees for milling the grain INTO flour were a constant source of aggravation.
Almost everybody lives better now than kings of old. We have central heat to keep us warm now and don’t have to put up with all those young lovely bed warmers the king had...............
The stronger the monarch, the weaker the count. If the monarch is weak, the count is much more like a king in his own county. Earlier, it is my understanding that England had essentially regional and countywide kingdoms, and endless wars of succession.
The best example is the legendary King Arthur (4th century), but Henry IV, Elizabeth I and Edward III all inspired genuine affection from the people whom they ruled. As pointed out in my previous post in the pre-Elizabethan Tudor's clan loss of territories, powerful rulers often translated into weakened countries.
Hmmmmm, we have more than a few modern examples of the same, don't we?
Actually, the first night privileges are largely, if not wholely, a myth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_seigneur
Droit de seigneur - “the lord’s right”, often conflated with the Latin phrase “Jus primae noctis”), is a term now popularly used to describe an alleged legal right allowing the lord of an estate to take the virginity of his serf’s maiden daughters. Little or no historical evidence has been unearthed from the Middle Ages to support the idea that it ever actually existed.
I’ve read a small amount (compared to actual scholars etc) of contemporaneous medieval documents in books and have never even seen that mentioned.
OK, BUT, could the Lord not have any privileges he wanted with the serf girls? Who was to stop him.
Absolutely. Whether it’s taxes or coercion, if the government is on the producer’s back he’s going to either do as little as possible or escape. And, though I don’t know THAT much about life as a feudal serf, I’m pretty sure there were ways of getting back.
Other than the fact that this supposed custom predates the 16th century and the vulgar street term can be traced to the early part of that century, there is no evidence to support either urban legend. That does not necessarily mean that they are false, just no evidence that they are true.
There are those who attribute to the returning troops from the Hundred Years War (and they must have been pretty old by then) the beginning of the Wars of the Roses.
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