The Economy of Medieval Wales by Matthew Frank Stevens

Author:Matthew Frank Stevens [Matthew Frank Stevens]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Challenges to the Englishries

The Englishries of Wales also suffered from the catastrophic effects of famine and plague. It is estimated that the Great Famine resulted, directly or indirectly, in the death of 15 per cent of the population of England, with a similar effect on Wales.³⁴ Wheat and oat prices in the lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd, for example, remained above the crisis thresholds indicative of increased mortality – 7s. and 3s. 3d per quarter respectively – throughout most of the 1315–22 period, peaking in 1315–17 at 14s. to 16s. per quarter of wheat and 7s. to 11s. per quarter of oats.³⁵ The loss of livestock in the cattle murrain of 1319–22, perhaps killing half or more of the animals that ploughed the fields and provided peasant cultivators with protein in dairy and meat, would have been devastating in upland and lowland areas alike.³⁶

Yet it was the Black Death, rather than famine and cattle murrain, that was permanently to alter lowland economic structures. Thus, it is a great shame that no modern, systematic study of the Black Death in Wales has yet been undertaken. Estimates of plague mortality are notoriously difficult, principally because historians must make estimates from the proxy data such as clerical mortality, fallen rents, and inheritance taxes, but a death-rate of at least a third of the population is generally accepted for the first outbreak of plague, and suits the limited Welsh data.³⁷ The main impact of the plague was to break up patterns of communal agriculture centred on the nucleated villages and on the manors that had been carved out of lowland areas by incoming Anglo-Norman conquerors, and to encourage individual property accumulation. Moreover, this individualism would begin with the effective end of the onerous form of unfree personal status that had come to Wales with the conquerors, especially to the south-east, as peasants sought to renegotiate their rights in the light of lords’ new-found desperation to keep their fields tilled. Indeed, as Philip Ziegler poignantly observed in his classic study of the plague: ‘In Wales, the Black Death accomplished in a year or two a revolution which in England was worked out over the whole of the fourteenth century.’³⁸ At Caldicot manor, mid-way between Chepstow and Newport, exceptional mortality meant that by 1362 only 4 of 40 unfree tenants remained alive to perform a paltry 114 of 2,000 days of labour the lord relied upon to maintain and to farm his lands.³⁹ Landlords were forced to rethink how to generate revenue from their lands as surviving unfree peasants fled or were manumitted.⁴⁰ In the Englishry, as in the post-plague Welshry, those entrepreneurial peasants with capital were able to purchase vacant holdings, to enrich themselves, and to enter the emergent squirearchy of Wales.

‘The castle’, embodying the lord’s interests, also saw its economic fortunes transformed. The marcher lords of Wales progressively gave up on attempting to manage directly the cultivation of the demesne lands that they had retained at the conquest and engrossed thereafter for their profit and the provision of their households.

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