England c. 1300 was clearly an unequal society, yet assessing its distribution of wealth and income and levels of poverty with precision is not straightforward. Households earned their living by combining different sources of income that are hard to identify, especially for the mass of smallholders and landless. This article reviews recent attempts to estimate inequality in this period. It argues that such exercises provide a helpful general guide to the distribution of wealth and income, but at the micro-level it can be misleading to focus on either land or movable goods in isolation. The article provides some new evidence drawn from the royal archive and manorial sources concerning the material circumstances of individuals and households. These fragments help to qualify some of the pessimism concerning the share of households living at or below the poverty line at the end of the thirteenth century.
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom - ORCID: 0009-0003-3640-7750
Titolo del capitolo
Material inequalities in England, c. 1290 - c. 1340
Autori
Chris Briggs
Lingua
English
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0705-8.04
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2025
Copyright
© 2025 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
Socio-Economic Inequalities during the Conjuncture of the Fourteenth Century
Sottotitolo del libro
Sources and Methods, Dynamics and Representations (Italy and Europe, c. 1270 - c. 1350)
Curatori
Davide Cristoferi
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
458
Anno di pubblicazione
2025
Copyright
© 2025 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0705-8
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0699-0
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0705-8
eISBN (xml)
979-12-215-0707-2
Collana
Reti Medievali E-Book
ISSN della collana
2704-6362
e-ISSN della collana
2704-6079