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The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages the Case of France

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The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages the Case of France THE CRISIS OF THE LATE MIDDLE AGES THE CASE OF FRANCE JAMES L. GOLDSMITH' Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/9/4/417/622520 by guest on 01 October 2021 For nearly fifty years, historians have thought of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France in terms of the crisis, or rather crises, of the late Middle Ages. Our intention here is not to review once again the historiography of the crisis debate in its entirety,1 but to examine a considerable body of monographic literature which casts light on, and raises doubts about, widespread interpretations of the economic-demographic crisis of the late Middle Ages. Historians initially viewed the economic-demographic crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France as the result of the Hundred Years War and the Black Death. Depopulation, war destruction and dislocation of the economy produced distress and depression in the agricultural sector. Robert Boutruche's famous study of the Bordelais reflected this conceptualiza- tion of the crisis.2 Soon after the appearance of Boutruche's thesis, Edouard Perroy introduced French readers to a different notion of an economic and demographic crisis which appeared before the Hundred Years War and the Black Death.3 Perroy spoke of a succession of crises. The severe grain shortages of 1315-20 thinned the population, and the financial crisis of 1335-40 weakened the economy even before the arrival of the catastrophic Black Death of 1348. Although Perroy opted for a population figure of 10 or 11 million for France in the early fourteenth century rather than Lot's figure of 15 or 16 million, he still argued that France was overpopulated for its primitive agricultural systems. The fertile areas were saturated with people. Only poor soil pastures and forest remained to be cleared, the ploughing of which produced only low yields and threatened the survival of the livestock. France faced a severe economic crisis by the early years of the fourteenth century. The Hundred Years War added to the misery, not so much from war destruction, but through the imposition of ever more burdensome taxes on an economy and * The author is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Oklahoma. 1 See the six successive editions of J. Heers, L'Occident aux xiif et xtf siecles (1963-93); R-H. Bautier, 'Les mutations agricoles des xiv* siecles et les progres de Pelevage', B PhilolHist (1967), 1- 27; P. Contamine, 'La guerre de Cent Ans en France: une approche economique', B I Hist R, 47 (1974), 125-49; E. Carpentier, 'Autour de la peste noire. Famines et epidemies dans I'histoire du xiv* siede', Annales ESC 17 (1962), 1062-92. 2 R. Boutruche, La arise d'une sodete: seigneurs et pay sans du Bordelais pendant la guerre de Cent Ans (1947). 3 E. Perroy, 'A I'origine d'une economie contractee. Les crises du xiv* siede', Annales ESC (1949), 167-82. © Oxford University Press 1995 French History, Vol. 9 No. 4, pp. 417-450 418 THE CRISIS OF THE LATE MIDDLE AGES population in severe contraction. Moreover, the French crisis was only one manifestation of a more general European economic and demographic crisis of the late Middle Ages. While few historians today would accept the idea of a generalized economic and demographic crisis for all of Europe,4 the crisis theory remains a fundamental theme in historical accounts of late medieval France. The French interpretation undoubtedly drew inspiration from British scholarship, especially 5 from the work of M. M. Postan; Philippe Wolff in France lent his support. Later Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/9/4/417/622520 by guest on 01 October 2021 in the hands of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the early fourteenth-century crisis became part of a much broader theory of economic and demographic stagnation in which cycles of expansion and contraction alternated ineluctably from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century in an essentially stable ecosystem. Le Roy Ladurie has argued the case for cyclical economic and demographic crises forcefully and brilliantly in a great number of books and articles that span a quarter of a century.6 The basic features of Le Roy Ladurie's Malthusian-Ricardian ecosystem model will be familiar to most readers: at the time of the famous 1328 fiscal survey, France had a population of some 20 million souls, 85 to 90 per cent of whom were peasants. France was vastly overpopulated in terms of its agrarian and general economic structures. Total grain production peaked in the fourteenth century at a level barely able to sustain the population in good years. The recurrent famines of the first half of the fourteenth century were a clear sign that population was pushing at the limits of the food supply. Likewise, the fragmentation of peasant tenures into microproperties underscored the extent of overpopulation. The Black Death fell on a society which was already weak from malnutrition. Le Roy Ladurie argued further that levels of population and of grain production reached ceilings in the early fourteenth century which remained unsurpassed until the mid-eighteenth century. France was locked in an ecosystem in which cycles of population expansion, land fragmentation and lower-class impoverishment led inevitably to famines and disease, population decline and the resumption of the cycle anew. This Malthusian-Ricardian ecosystem was a Mercantilist world in which profits, wages and rents fought for slices of a largely static pie. Le Roy Ladurie's viewpoint of a stagnant ecosystem has been enormously influential in French scholarship. It appears as a fundamental interpretative framework in the most authoritative scholarly syntheses of the last twenty-five * Heeis, L'Occident, 6th edn, pp. 384-9; P. Wolff, Automne du moyen age ou printemps des temps nouveaux: I'economie europeenne aux xitf et xtf siecles (1986). 5 M. M. Postan, Essays on medieval agriculture and general problems of the medieval economy (1973); P. Wolff, Commerce et marchands de Toulouse, vers 1350-vers 1450 (1954), p. 630. 6 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc (1966); idem, 'Dimes et produit net agricole, xv'-xviii* siecles', Annales ESC, 24 (1969), 826-32; idem, 'L'histoire immobile', Annales ESC, 29 (1974), 673-92; idem, 'Les paysans francais au xvi' siecle', Conjoncture economique, structures sociales (1974), pp. 333-52; idem, 'L'hlstoriographie rurale en France, xiv'-xviiie siecles. Essai d'histoire agraire systematique ou eco-systematique', Marc Blocb aujourd'bui (1990), pp. 223-52. JAMES L. GOLDSMITH 419 years: in the Histoire econotnique et sociale de la France? in the Histoire de la France rurale;6 and more recently in the Histoire de la population francaise.9 The notion of an early fourteenth-century crisis prior to the Hundred Years War and the Black Death figures also in recent surveys of the period.10 Nevertheless, despite the widespread acceptance of much, if not all, of Le Roy Ladurie's interpretation, there is a considerable body of monographic literature which paints a very different picture of France in the late Middle Ages. It is quite possible that France was not overpopulated in the early fourteenth century, but Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/9/4/417/622520 by guest on 01 October 2021 actually underpopulated; possible also that the agrarian systems, far from having reached an unsurpassable ceiling of production, were operating, so to speak, at less than half throttle. It is possible that the famines of the early fourteenth century pointed not to a fundamental imbalance between food supply and population, but rather to an entirely different set of problems, unrelated to the level of population or the level of food production. In short, it is possible that the French economy and society of the early fourteenth century did not face a crisis at all; possible that both economy and population continued to expand in most areas right up to the Black Death. It is possible that France, in the early fourteenth century, had not reached the limits of a Malthusian-Ricardian ecosystem in a state of exhaustion, but rather was in full stride when the exogenous and infortuitous forces of plague and war temporarily knocked it off course. I At issue here is the nature of the fundamental structures of the French economy and society in the late Middle Ages, rather than the Hundred Years War and the Black Death per se, the structures not the conjuncture. Historians of all persuasions are in substantial agreement about the dislocation and recession that warfare and the plague produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The disputed point is this: were the French socio-economic systems at an impasse by the early fourteenth century? Let us begin with population. Was France overpopulated for its economic structures on the eve of the Black Death? Theories of overpopulation rest on estimates derived from late medieval fiscal sources and comparisons of these figures with population estimates for 1700-50, or later.11 The use of fiscal sources for demographic purposes is a very 7 F. Braudel and E. Labrousse (eds.), Histoire econotnique et sociale de la France. I. De 1450 a 1660 (1977), pp. 484-647. 8 G. Duby and A. Wallon (eds.), Histoire de la France rurale. II. L'dge classique des pay sans, 1340-1789 (1975), pp. 19-39. 9 J. Dupaquier (ed.), Histoire de la population francaise. I. Des origines a la Renaissance (1988), pp. 301-7. 10 M. Bourin-Derniau, Temps d'equilibres, temps de ruptures, xiif siecle. Nouvelle bistoire de la France medievale, IV (1990), pp. 261-70; R. Fossier, Le moyen age. 111. Le temps des crises, 1250- 1520 (1983 and 1990).
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