patterns nor the household formation systems of North and South were then – or have ever been – the same. But whereas Mediterranean brides continued to find their partners before the age of twenty-one, post-plague northerners usually waited until their mid-twenties to make a match, and not infrequently stayed single out of choice. Where women married late and were prone to die in childbirth, where infant mortality was chronically high, where breast-feeding postponed conception for two years or more, and where life expectations, already low before the plague, fell still further, populations soon stopped growing. In short, the key demographic variable after the Black Death was arguably not mortality but nuptiality.
‘People are not poor because they have large families’, wrote a student of household systems in modern India. ‘Quite the contrary, they have large families because they are poor.’2 And, in contrast, it was the relative affluence of individual plague survivors – and particularly, in this context, of independent farmers and their wives – which enabled them to settle for smaller nuclear families with fewer children. Traditional extended family systems, while still very much alive in the Third World today, were dying out in north-west Europe by 1400. And those comfortably-off English yeomen and their womenfolk who built the solid oak-framed farmhouses of the fifteenth-century Kentish Weald, were never in the business of offering accommodation to all and sundry. In their big open halls – relics of a life-style once entirely led in common – the uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, grandparents, in-laws and cousins far and near, came together only, as it were, for Sunday lunches.
It was thus high levels of employment and good wages in the West which enabled that critical threshold to be crossed between a ‘situation where people cannot afford not to have children [and] one where they cannot afford to have many of them.’3 And paradoxical though it may sound, it was this new post-plague prosperity that, by discouraging large families, helped put off demographic recovery. Another token of private affluence, of which the outcome was the same, was the single-person household of the unmarried working woman or merry widow. In Florence in 1427, one in four adult women were widows, and many had doubtless chosen to remain in that condition, coming to view the death of older spouses as liberation: ‘as if a heavy yoke of servitude (un grave giogo di servitu) had been lifted from their backs’, observed Lodovico Dolce in the next century.4
Ensnared by Mamma’s cooking, Florence’s affluent bachelors had been reluctant to leave home before their early thirties, or even later. And fathers who had married tardily were another obvious reason why European city populations, even before the plague, had always found it difficult to replace themselves. Traditionally, the gap had been filled by immigration from rural areas. But whereas new recruitment remained steady in the half-century following the Black Death, as the smaller and more marginal settlements lost out to the towns, that pool was drying up by 1400. Newly prosperous peasant families, with too much land at their disposal and too little labour of their own, remained (and kept their children) in their localities. For if the populations of big cities risked extinction in post-plague times, so too – and often more so – did village communities. The Tuscan city of Pistoia was a near-neighbour and dependency of Florence. And Pistoia’s contado (rural territory) had been haemorrhaging population since the late thirteenth century, losing more than 70 per cent of its pre-plague maximum by 1400. That figure conceals huge differences between well-situated lowland villages, which continued to keep up numbers, and remote hill-top communities already in the advanced stages of disbanding. Nevertheless the fact remains that Pistoia the city – regular plague-trap though it was – held its strength marginally better than the contado. When surveyed in 1415, Pistoia’s population had fallen from around 11,000 shortly before the Black Death to just below 4000, or a loss of some 65 per cent.5
‘Death was everywhere’ in post-plague rural Normandy, of which fully half the population had disappeared by 1380.6 In Castile likewise, in the wake of ‘the Great Death’, settlement desertions gathered pace as bubonic plague returned again in 1363–4, in 1374, in 1380, in 1393–4, in 1399 and 1400.7 But while Castile shed many villages in the Black Death’s aftermath, Normandy lost rather few. And here it was the weather, rather than plague, that made the difference. The hot dry summers and mild wet winters of temperate Europe’s high-medieval warm epoch had begun to break up shortly after 1250. And what followed was a much lengthier cooling phase, starting with the great sea-storms and coastal inundations of the late thirteenth century and persisting through the rest of the Middle Ages. Characterized by wild temperature swings from cold to hot again, with their associated floods and droughts, it damaged most particularly those outlying farming communities which, in two centuries of increasing overcrowding before the Great Pestilence, had pushed out settlement into the more marginal territories on the hillsides, in the marshlands, and through the forests. Too hostile to allow survival, Castile’s parched and barren uplands were among the first to be deserted, as were the thin-soiled hill-top settlements of Mediterranean Pistoia, and the eroded slopes of Bray in the otherwise lush green pastures of Atlantic Normandy.
Imposed rather than created, plague and a deteriorating climate were the two principal exogenous factors in the Great Recession of the ‘long’ fifteenth century. No Western European economy was unaffected by them. Yet it was the endogenous factors – made by man himself – which were more likely to touch the arts directly. Chief among these was the weakness of money systems: a combination of politically-driven debasements (almost always to finance a war) and of chronic silver shortages in the West. Precisely because such crises were man-made, their incidence and fall-out could differ spectacularly between neighbours. Weak currencies and bullion famines were everywhere the norm in fifteenth-century Europe. But in Spain, whereas Aragon maintained a strong currency, Castile’s was one of the weakest; and while bullion in Aragon was in short supply, Castile’s location on the trade routes north from Africa kept gold flowing through the markets of Seville.8
For prince and people alike, Philip the Good concluded in 1433, ‘ung des principaulx poins de toutes bonnes policies … es davoir monnoye ferme et durable, tant d’or comme d’argent’.9 And it is perfectly true that a weak currency – the very reverse of une monnaye ferme et durable – was especially damaging to the receipts of great landowners, dependent on long-term leases and sluggish rents. Inflation, on the other hand, suited rent-payers very well, leaving fifteenth-century governments with the dilemma that if they devalued, the aristocracy rebelled, while every attempt to strengthen the currency was certain to be resisted by their tenants. In the event, it was the nobility who cried loudest, swinging the balance in favour of strong money. And the regular savage debasements which alone had enabled Philip VI of France to pay his troops in the opening campaigns of the Hundred Years War, were already largely over by 1360. For the next 350 years, interrupted only by such short-term wartime debasements as those of 1417–22 and 1427–9, France pursued the strong money policy, supported by taxation, which best suited its tax-exempt nobility. Yet the attractions of a stratagem which – explained Guillaume le Soterel (treasurer general of Navarre) – allowed the prince to ‘strike coin as feeble as he likes to have the means to pay his troops to defend him and his people and his land’, were too powerful to resist in a crisis.10 And nowhere was this more obvious than in post-Black Death Castile, where four ‘spectacularly awful’ debasements – starting in 1354, 1386, 1429 and 1463 – each paid for a war but cost the maravedi, or Castilian money of account, as much as 95 per cent of its value.11
In contrast, the post-plague Low Countries under their Burgundian dukes – Philip the Bold (1384–1404), John the Fearless (1404–19), Philip the Good (1419–67) and Charles the Bold (1467–77) – became a model of firm government and strong money. Yet precipitous debasement would return, if only briefly, at the start