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