Introduction

Crisis is the word which comes immediately to the historian's mind when he thinks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That is, not necessarily a crisis as the word is commonly understood: not regression, absence of creative thought, lack of initiative and audacity, but essentially a break in equilibrium. The end of the Middle Ages was not only a time of decadence but was also one of preparation, of search for new solutions to enduring problems.

This is true in all fields and especially in the economic one, whether it is a question of industry, commerce or agriculture. Needless to say, studies devoted to the economic field during this age of transition (especially on the Continent) are neither numerous nor yet very satisfactory; this is perhaps why this essay offers fewer answers and certainties than questions and hypotheses. But the more the latter unfold, the greater becomes the conviction that from 1300 or 1350 until about 1450 or 1500 the countryside throughout most of the West underwent a difficult time. Its own evolution and the pressure of outside events–not to mention the possible transformation of the climate, which grew both colder and more unstable–forced important and brutal changes upon the two factors of rural life, labour and capital. Consequently, modes in which the two factors combined in earlier periods lost some of their virtue. Did they perhaps also harbour within themselves imperfections which were revealed only gradually, or did they suffer the onset of sclerosis after centuries of wear? They had, nonetheless, to be refashioned, superficially or profoundly, temporarily or permanently, in the light of circumstances, and this could be done only gropingly and at the cost of much friction.