The Renaissance Depression Debate: The View from England

Abstract

FOR MORE THAN FOUR CENTURIES, historians of England have depicted the century and a half after the Black Death as a period defined overwhelmingly by its failures: failure to win the war with France; failure to find a solution to the political contest between Yorkists and Lancastrians; and failure to check the corruption of a church preoccupied with persecuting Lollards. Over the course of the present century, scholarly interest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has shifted away from war and politics and towards the economy and society, but on the whole, economic historians have been no kinder to the period than their forerunners in other fields. When, in 1962, Roberto Lopez and Harry Miskimin included England in their argument for a European-wide Renaissance depression, they echoed what many English economic historians were saying about their country's past economic performance.' In the quarter-century since the Lopez and Miskimin article appeared, much has been published on the late medieval economy, including more expansive works on the subject by Miskimin himself.2 Most of the work related to England has subscribed, at least implicitly, to the depression thesis. There have been a few fairly strenuous efforts to rehabilitate the period, most notably by A. R. Bridbury, but the majority view among economic historians continues to be that a prolonged depression in total economic output occurred in the fifteenth century.3