The economic trends which were changing society at all levels at the beginning of the thirteenth century were population growth, agricultural boom and the linked phenomenon of inflation. England was in the middle of ‘a massive increase in both population and the acreage of agricultural land’. Perhaps 2 million people at the time of the Domesday inquest in 1086 would have risen to possibly 5 or 6 million on the eve of the Black Death in 1347. The increase was most marked in areas of reclamation from woodland and from the East Anglian fens, and in the northern and western uplands where it started from a low base, but every county saw a doubling of its inhabitants and Yorkshire probably a tenfold increase. More agricultural labourers produced more crops to meet the swelling demand, and the crops were traded more widely in a growing number of markets; but another result of a sharp rise in a population living from the soil was a land–hunger the consequences of which became apparent as the thirteenth century advanced.

There was also from the 1160s to the early fourteenth century something like a quadrupling of prices. In the long term it was caused partly by the inability of agricultural production to keep up with the growth of the population it had to feed, and partly by the development of a market economy in which money circulated at an accelerating rate in pursuit of a widening range of goods.