"For 400 years in the "dark ages", England managed to maintain a stable population without major wars, without famine, without plague, and without starvation, while maintaining a life expectancy that would not be reached again until the 20th century. Meanwhile, the peasants worked on average only three days a week,......."
Wow, what pooched that deal?
Blame the monks. In his "The Victory of Reason," Rodney Stark of Baylor reminds us that the Benedictines established thousands of monasteries which provided "business models" that were copied by the business establishments if the middle ages. His argument is that capitalism grew out of their endeavors. because work was an integral part of the monastic disciple, they began by farming and small scale production (e.g. vineyards) and ended with the employment of tens of thousands of hands.
>> Wow, what pooched that deal? <<
Eventually, war caused disease, disease caused population declines, and population declines caused... cheap land. Cheap land meant emancipated serfs, and the development of a middle class of traders.
Life on the manor had been communal. With traders came economic competition, and with economic competition came the temptation to work through the festivals and holidays. This then caused economic growth, and with it population growth.
Suddenly land was not so cheap anymore, but there were other ways of making wealth besides farming, with the development of traders and a middle class. Soon, cities began developing; sustenance agriculture became insufficient.
Where once landlords' ambitions were limited by the amount of land they could effectively govern, landlords now became greedy. They didn't want their serfs pacified by religious festivals; they wanted their surfs to work, so religious festivals, feast days, and sabbaths became scarcer and scarcer. People didn't abstain from work anymore... or sex. (that was the catch... no sex on the feast days either!) So they made more babies and more mouths to feed.
The lords' share of the crops became burdensome to the peasants. Disconent grew, and people m oved to the cities. The once stable population now saw raid growth spurts and sudden urban-filth-caused plagues.
Most importantly, with the evolving of the middle class, the priesthood shrivelled. (Once the massive land holdings of the churches offered certain comfort and education in exchange for celibacy, further stabilizing the population.) Now, with land valuable,and the priesthood in decline, the church became hated for what was now seen as hoarding land unproductively.
ANd hence the reformation, industrial revolution, Malthusian crisis, and plague.