Urban population in late medieval England: the evidence of the lay subsidies

Abstract

Was there a growth in the proportion of the population living in England's towns in the later middle ages? Uncertainty about national population trends and about the taxation multipliers needed to arrive at population totals has made it difficult to answer this question. A direct comparison of the proportion of taxpayers that was urban in 1377 and 1524 suggests that the urban share of population was static or may even have declined in this period. However, such decline provides no simple index of urban prosperity or decay: a decline in urbanization could be the product of rural buoyancy rather than of urban recession.A fter decades in which historians presented the rise and fall of population as the prime mover of change in the medieval English economy, recent work has returned to an emphasis on commercialization as an autonomous factor determining medieval economic development. 2 Central to this renewed interest in commercialization has been a focus on fluctuations in the share of townspeople within English society. 3 Change in the level of 'urbanization' (a term used here simply to refer to the proportion of townspeople within the population as a whole) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is relatively uncontroversial. Scholars are agreed that while England's population doubled or trebled in this period, the number of townspeople grew even faster, increasing from around 10 per cent of the national total in 1086 to 15 or even 20 per cent by the early fourteenth century. 4 However, change in the level of urbanization in the post-plague period has proved to be a far more contentious issue. On the one hand, it has been argued that 1 This article has greatly benefited from the comments that were generously provided by

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Decline or Transformation? Archaeology and the Late Medieval ‘Urban Decline’ in Southern England

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