Was Medieval England more Merrie than thought?

[Viggen]

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...

 

...read full article at Yahoo News

[Kosmo]

Nice!

Not only this book is free on the web but also other books of economic history by the same professor.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/broadberry/wp

[caldrail]

Serfdom in medielval england was a hard life. We have a description of a downtrodden farmer written in his day that spells out the pitiable state that some of them sunk to. However, much depended on the economy and the effects of war, climate, and disease, or for that matter, individual ability to do well. We know that serfs sometimes did very well for themselves, buying small plots of land and accumulating a certain level of prosperity when times were good. One thing that's been made clear to me about this period, two things were certain: Death and Taxes.

[Kosmo]

This finds are not really a surprise. The XIII century was the apex of the Western Middle Ages as proven by rapid urbanization and the power of free cities, the apparition of universities, the building of large cathedrals and castles, large scale and long distance trade, parliaments and charters, etc.

The great thing about this type of studies is that they don't rely on narratives, but on statistical data bringing hard evidence into debate. Unfortunately this methods are much harder to apply for areas and periods that don't have enough data, including Roman history.

Of course, data must be analyzed with care and correlated with the narrative. For example the great increase of GDP per capita they mention in the mid XIV century is provoked by the Black Death killing a third of population and making the survivors richer, but is hard to see that devastating pandemic as a positive development.

Edited December 10, 2010 by Kosmo