A Europe of ruined farms, grass-grown fields, nobles in financial trouble (with a compensatory improvement in peasant conditions), gives only one side of the picture. The varied experiences of different regions provoke doubts about whether the demographic crisis can be the sole explanation of the changes that we observe. We should be cautious of attributing so much importance to impersonal ecological forces.
First, the demography of Europe followed no uniform pattern. The plagues of the fourteenth century had a limited impact on parts of eastern Europe and in the Iberian peninsula, especially in Castile. In the case of the duchy of Wroc-aw the drop in population and the symptoms of agrarian crisis were delayed until 1425—80. Castile suffered in some measure a fall in population before 1400, but in the early fifteenth century shows signs of growing numbers.
Secondly, in those countries which experienced the full impact of a fall in population by a half or more, recovery came at different times. In Sicily the population was growing by the 1450s, perhaps earlier, while in rural Tuscany expansion is apparent after 1460. French regions generally began to recover towards the middle of the century — from the 1430s in the Lyonnais, and the 1450s in Normandy. In Brabant a decisive upward movement is not apparent until after 1495, and the English population, though showing slight tendencies to growth from the 1470s, did not really expand until well into the sixteenth century, at a time when parts of France and Italy were near to regaining the population densities of the pre-Black Death era. Movements in the size of population are very complex phenomena, depending in part on the incidence of epidemics, for which there is abundant evidence even in the period of population growth, and on the age of marriage, and rates of fertility within marriage, which were influenced by social customs and such economic factors as the availability of land and employment.
Some regions, thirdly, had special characteristics which help to explain their peculiar paths of development within this period. Parts of north-eastern Europe — now Poland and the Baltic states — are often cited as following a course opposite to that found in the west. Weak states, an underdeveloped urban sector and a powerful nobility meant that peasant conditions deteriorated, beginning the period of ‘second serfdom’, as tenants were restricted in their movement and forced to perform heavy labour services. In fact, the peasants of eastern Europe were being brought under serfdom for the first time (they had been encouraged to settle in new lands in the east with privileges and easy terms in earlier centuries). Enserfment took a long time, beginning in the later years of the fifteenth century, and was not completed until well after 1500. This cannot therefore be seen as an immediate response to any fall in population.
The greater nobles of Castile expanded their wealth and power; the monarchy at the end of the fourteenth century had been weakened by civil war, and made concessions of jurisdictional powers to a largely new generation of rising families. In contradiction of the landlords’ withdrawal from agrarian life found elsewhere, the Castilian nobles’ power over tenants and land grew on such a scale that the marquis of Villena’s lordship, for example, extended over 25,000 square kilometres. They took an interest in the cultivation of demesnes, and owned a large proportion of the sheep in the great transhumance system, the Mesta, which by 1467 took flocks totalling 2.7 million across the country between summer and winter pastures. In northern Castile new villages were being founded in the second decade of the century, and there was some extension of arable.
These examples have been taken from relatively thinly populated regions which could be regarded as escaping from the ecological problems resulting from ‘overpopulation’. However, Sardinia is an example of a place which, though supporting meagre densities of people before 1348, still experienced all of the symptoms of crisis, making us doubt a direct relationship between excessive numbers before the plagues and the subsequent population decline and agrarian depression. The southern Low Countries ought to fit the conventional pattern, because here the densities of people were very high, yet they avoided the crash that in theory should have followed — very small holdings persisted and even proliferated in the early fifteenth century. Not many settlements were deserted in the long term, nor was there a universal reduction in rents. The large and numerous towns help to explain the resilience of a high-yielding agrarian system, based on intensive cultivation of small plots, involving large inputs of labour and manure, and the elimination or reduction of fallows. A survival of smallholdings is found in other urbanised regions, such as parts of northern Italy, where there was some depression in the conditions of the peasantry who felt the uncertainties of short-term mezzaddria (sharecropping) contracts.
Districts specialising in pastoral agriculture, such as those in wooded, heathy or hilly landscapes, sometimes also diverge from the trends normally associated with the demographic crisis. An increasing emphasis on animal husbandry came easily to them, and contrary to the assumption that ‘marginal’ late colonised lands were always more vulnerable to depopulation, the dispersed settlements of the pastoral areas were obstinately long-lived, while lowland corn-growing villages often shrank and sometimes disappeared. The ‘marginal’ districts were especially receptive to rural industry, partly because their resources included raw materials and fuel, and partly because pastoral farming left peasant men and women with spare time to work in crafts. The association of uplands and woodlands with industry is found everywhere, from the mining and metal-working districts of Iberia and Germany, to the cloth-making settlements of Yorkshire and Essex.
The examination of the varied history of different regions suggests that the ‘demographic crisis’ applies most appropriately to lowland arable farming regions. Even here we must doubt the idea of a cycle of demographic contraction and expansion as the sole explanation of change. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, as we have seen, population levels were recovering, sometimes rapidly. As a deterministic demographic theory would predict, many trends went into reverse: new settlements were founded (in Sweden, for example); arable lands were again extended at the expense of pasture (in the Auvergne); smallholdings multiplied (in Franconia); wages began to fall and grain prices to rise (in Normandy). Yet these tendencies are not found everywhere, nor did they apply to all aspects of rural life. Some of the changes of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, like the rise of thegros fermiers of northern France or the yeomen of England, persisted: the large holdings survived and flourished in different circumstances after 1500. Some developments had been proceeding before 1348, and continued thereafter, like the long-term decay of the institutions of lordship and their replacement by more commercial forms of land management in north Italy, or the growth of rural industries everywhere. Clearly structural change was going on in the organisation of production, and the ordering of relationships between social groups, independent of the ups and downs of demography. These lead us to turn to developments in rural Europe which were not determined by population levels, but which sprang from other roots.