The Sixteenth-Century Growth of the Market

Abstract

Throughout the fifteenth century the population of England remained low, or even declined because of recurring outbreaks of the plague and other diseases. Consequently, apart from some growth in cloth exports, the economy either stagnated or contracted; as a result the fifteenth century has been described as a period of deep economic depression.² But from the 1520s, the economy once again began to expand because of a renewed population growth. A continually increasing number of mouths to feed and bodies to clothe and house created more demand for goods than in any period hitherto. As a result, prices rose and created an incentive for farmers and artisans to produce more.³ Networks of distribution and marketing also became more complex as traders took advantage of the profits which could be made by shipping goods to places where prices were high because demand was greatest. But purchasing power based on credit increased more rapidly than the technology of production and the organization of distribution, and this resulted in more than a century of constant inflation: in southern England food prices increased at least five-fold between 1530 and 1640, and the prices of industrial goods more than doubled.⁴

I do rejoice rather to see how God hath blessed us with His good gifts; and whilst I behold how, that, in a time wherein all things are grown to most excessive prices and what commodity soever is to be had is daily plucked from the commonalty by such as look into every trade, we do yet find the means to obtain and achieve such furniture as heretofore hath been unpossible.

(William Harrison, Description of England, 1587)¹