Why was the Population Decline so Protracted?

Abstract

ECONOMIC conditions in the fifteenth century were without doubt conducive to an expansion of population: land and food were cheap and abundant, while labour was scarce and well-rewarded. Conditions such as these, according to a multitude of demographers and historians from Malthus at the close of the eighteenth century to the flourishing French school of our own times, should have led to a rising birth-rate and a falling death-rate. The age of marriage should have fallen in response to the availability of land and work, marriages should have become more fertile in response both to improved standards of nutrition and to a lessening of the burdens of parenthood, and the infrequency of subsistence crises should have led to a lowering of the mortality schedules of infants, adolescents and adults alike.¹⁹ In the words of Malthus in the 1790s: ‘Plenty of rich land to be had for little or nothing is so powerful a cause of population as generally to overcome all obstacles’ [36: I, 304], and of Goubert in the 1950s: ‘The price of wheat almost always constitutes a true demographic barometer’ [28: 468]. If population had expanded apace in the fifteenth century historians would certainly have had few difficulties in explaining why! Yet, as we have seen, it is manifest that such expansion did not take place.