The New Middle Ages?

The economic and social history of medieval England has been a notably animated scene for more than thirty years, since M. M. Postan provided a powerful model of surging growth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, catastrophic demographic crisis in the fourteenth, and economic stagnation in the fifteenth. The historiography of the period is rich and varied; the academic debates lively and productive; the field crowded with textbooks; and the topic still attractive to students despite the collapse of economic and social history as a departmentally distinctive discipline. In the end, the fact that Postan’s view of a complex society over a whole four centuries can be boiled down to such a simple proposition was always going to make him a sitting duck. While his view of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has remained substantially intact, for the period after the Black Death of 1348–9 he has come under sustained fire from every side and all calibres of weaponry, providing target practice for rural and urban historians alike, and for the empirically rich as readily as for the theoretically informed. Christopher Dyer’s new book now takes the whole topic significantly further forward by delineating a new picture of the later Middle Ages in England to replace the mutilated carcass of the old. Dyer’s late Middle Ages stretches to cover the whole period from 1250 to 1550, starting not with the Black Death but well before the demographic peak and the beginnings of economic crisis in the decades either side of 1300. His grasp of the preceding and following periods gives him a clear perspective of what was and was not distinctive about the ‘long’ fifteenth century, the period from 1350 to the 1520s which was the locus of the supposed and prolonged economic crisis. For that period Postan’s duck has been dead some while, and Dyer needs to make only the most perfunctory of post mortems before proceeding to a sustained, persuasive, and highly readable attempt to put something in its place. Dyer explains his approach in the conclusion: much of the evidence which has been taken to represent the period has always been from the archives of the great landed estates, which paint a gloomy picture of ‘decayed rents,