Commercial Activity and Population Growth in Medieval England

Over the past two decades there has been an impressive escalation in the literature surrounding the marked economic and commercial growth that characterized the two centuries or so before the advent of the Black Death. This period of growth occurred on a virtually global scale, in that, at the very least, it involved a great swathe of interconnected trading networks stretching from China to the British Isles.1 For Europe this has been described in a number of important publications,2 such that ‘commercialization’ is now widely accepted as a valid characterization of the growth of the economy during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.3 As John Hatcher and Mark Bailey have pointed out recently, however, commercial models for the Middle Ages suffer from a certain theoretical immaturity: In contrast with the maturity of the leading Marxist and population-resources models, which have been refined to a high level of exposition and coherence over many decades, most of the historians working on the significance of commerce and technology have so far operated within a looser conceptual framework and are far from providing comparably taut and rigorous models.4