Commerce and labor in medieval England: The impact of the market economy on workers' diet and wages, 1275--1315

The medieval English economy reached its apex during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Increases in population, the amount of money in circulation, the number of trading institutions and occupational specialization created a highly commercialized economy. Although most historians of the medieval English economy have recently come to agree that low-level peasants did not reap the benefits of the booming economy, no one has offered concrete evidence of how commercialization affected the lives of individual peasant laborers. Thus, this dissertation will make a significant contribution to the historiography of commercialization and living standards in medieval England.; I have analyzed over 400 account rolls and pipe roils to assess the commercialization of agricultural produce and its impact on 240 manors held by several different lords and located in regionally diverse areas throughout England. I then utilized correlation and regression analyses to compare commercialization levels to the diet and wages of stipendiary plowmen, boon-workers and thatchers and their assistants. I conclude that the influence of the market was strong enough in some areas of England to outweigh local customs that dictated the size of workers' wages. In general, high levels of commercialization seem to have disadvantaged workers by decreasing the value of their wages. As profit became increasingly important to lords, they exploited workers by decreasing the size of their grain liveries and skimping on their wages.