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"In the fourteenth century the Old World witnessed a series of profound and abrupt changes in the trajectory of long-established historical trends. Transcontinental networks of exchange fractured and an era of economic contraction and demographic decline dawned from which Latin Christendom would not begin to emerge until its voyages of discovery at the end of the fifteenth century. In a major new study of this 'Great Transition,' Bruce Campbell assesses the contributions of commercial recession, war, climate change, and eruption of the Black Death to a far-reaching reversal of fortunes from which no part of Eurasia was spared. The book synthesises a wealth of new historical, palaeo-ecological and biological evidence, including estimates of national income, reconstructions of past climates, and genetic analysis of DNA extracted from the teeth of plague victims, to provide a fresh account of the creation, collapse and realignment of Western Europe's late medieval commercial economy"--

This article compares chronologies reconstructed from historical records of prices, wages, grain harvests, and population with corresponding chronologies of growing conditions and climatic variations derived from dendrochronology and Greenland ice‐cores. It demonstrates that in pre‐industrial, and especially late medieval, England, short‐term environmental shocks and more enduring shifts in environmental conditions (sometimes acting in concert with biological agencies) exercised a powerful influence upon the balance struck between population and available resources via their effects upon the reproduction, health and life expectancy of humans, crops, and livestock. Prevailing socio‐economic conditions and institutions, in turn, shaped society's susceptibility to these environmental shocks and shifts.

ABSTRACTModern English factor markets originated during the two centuries of active commercialization that preceded the Black Death. An active labour market was established by the late twelfth century. Evolution of a land market followed the legal reforms of the 1170s and 1180s, which created legally secure and defensible property rights in land. These rights stimulated growth of a capital market, since land became a security against which credit could be obtained. Nevertheless, none of these nascent factor markets functioned unconstrained and each became embedded in legal, tenurial, and institutional complexities and rigidities which it took later generations centuries to reform.

Estimates are assembled for England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and for Britain and Ireland as a whole, of the numbers of religious houses, regular clergy, parishes, towns of more than 2,000 inhabitants, and townspeople, and the value of dutiable exports and volume of currency at the watershed date ofc.1290. Absolute and relative levels of economic development are then compared. A range of possible population estimates are considered and corresponding set of per capita estimates thereby derived. The results highlight significant differences in the pattern of economic development between and within these four countries.

Manorial accounts allow detailed investigation of the market involvement of medieval seignorial demesnes. Production decisions taken locally emerge as strongly, if indirectly, influenced by the market. Disposal decisions, in contrast, were much more a matter of estate policy and therefore of institutional factors. Probably because of differential transaction costs, many lords preferred to provision their households directly from their estates rather than sell the bulk of their produce and purchase most of their provisions. The forces promoting commercialization within the seignorial arable sector appear to have been stronger at the opening than the close of the fourteenth century.

Statistics on crop yields for the period 1268–1430 from 62 demesnes in the eastern half of Norfolk are used to demonstrate a new method of measuring arable productivity. The method takes into account seeding rates, the frequency of cropping, and the relative importance of the different crops grown, and it acknowledges the existence of different farming regions. Within eastern Norfolk two such regions are shown to have existed, which cut right across estate affiliations and had radically different productivities. The wider implications of these findings are then discussed.