United Kingdom

Poverty in the Middle Ages

In the first half of the 13th century, the English population grew rapidly. The increased supply of labor caused wages to fall. At the same time, the increased demand for food caused prices to rise. The poor were caught in the middle. In the decades after 1250, large segments of the poor population became “harvest-sensitive”—meaning “with each bad harvest, more of them died, either of starvation or of the diseases attendant upon malnutrition,” as phrased by K.O. Morgan. Having land to work, either independently or as a tenant, gave at least some protection against the most abject poverty. Even so, some tenants were better off than others.

A study of one estate in the West Midlands area found that the poorer tenants had a life expectancy of 10 years less than tenants who had a more comfortable income. Workers on large estates were paid both in cash and with enough grain to feed their families. Other landless workers, however, were often prey to starvation. Those who owned land, on the other hand, were in luck. The same factors that impoverished the laboring classes (lower wages combined with higher prices for food) tended to enrich the owners of large tracts of land.

By the early decades of the 14th century, however, the situation was starting to reverse itself. Bad harvests in 1315–16 and 1320–21 condemned many people to starvation. During that period, 15 percent of the population in some areas died either from famine or disease. Disease also decimated herds of sheep and cattle, especially in 1319 and 1321. Finally, several areas of England experienced catastrophic floods in 1324–26 that drowned both people and livestock. These harsh conditions, and the hardships of poverty in general, had caused people to have fewer children.

The final blow was the Black Death, a plague carried by fleas borne on the backs of rats from sailing ships. The plague came to England in 1348 and spread thence to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, wiping out a third of the United Kingdom's population in a few years. Smaller outbreaks claimed even more lives in 1360–62, 1369, and 1375. As a result, the population growth of the previous century turned into a decline, causing a labor shortage—particularly of farming workers. At the same time that landowners had to pay more to their workers, food prices were declining and the landowners got less for their produce.

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