Agrarian class structure and the forces for change I: trade, population and the money supply

Abstract

If property rights were one of the major forms of exclusionary closure in medieval England, giving rise to its major economic classes and subclasses, the forms and extent of such social closure were by no means fixed. On the contrary, they underwent a number of shifts during the later middle ages. When our period begins, in the early thirteenth century, England’s landlords were on the offensive, working their demesnes with labour-services, tightening up the law of villeinage, and effecting a redistribution of wealth through an increase in the level of rents and a reduction in real wages. Yet by 1500, their demesnes had largely been leased out, villeinage and labour-services were a thing of the past, and the population of the English countryside had won its freedom and was enjoying the benefits of low money-rents and high real wages. How had this transformation in agrarian social relations come about?