Should the fifteenth century be regarded as a period of economic growth or decline? The debate is closely connected to the ‘demographic crisis’ interpretation: we must decide to emphasise either the overall drop in production, or the increases in the productivity and living standards of individuals. Advocates of ‘economic decline’ point to the lack of technical discoveries. We do find, however, that methods were, if not introduced for the first time, disseminated in this period. Industrial crops like flax, woad and madder; fodder crops such as turnips and rape; crops designed to provide for new consumption patterns, like sugar, oranges, saffron, hops and mulberry trees, were grown more extensively than before. New commercial vineyards developed in Spain in such districts as Jerez and Rioja; profits might be increased if land was flooded for fishponds (in Bavaria) and in East Anglia by the extension of rabbit warrens. Meadows were increasingly irrigated to give a better growth of hay, and scythes were more widely used instead of sickles as a harvest tool. Drainage of land in the Netherlands was assisted by the introduction for the first time of pumps operated by windmills. Rotations which had been devised in earlier centuries were spreading, especially in the Low Countries: either systems in which long fallows over a number of years alternated with periods of continuous cultivation, or more intensive sequences of crops without fallows, including more fodder crops. Above all, in almost every part of Europe, a new balance was established between the land cultivated as arable, and that used as pasture.
These adjustments and developments did not amount to an agricultural revolution. But instead of judging the century alongside the thirteenth or the eighteenth, and finding it wanting because of its lack of ‘improvements’, we ought to ask whether the peasants and farmers of the period were effective in their methods of production. Did they cater for their own needs and those of the consumers? Some very high grain yields could be achieved, such as eighteen hectolitres of wheat per hectare (twenty bushels per acre), or twelve times the seed sown, in the areas of intensive husbandry in northern France and the southern Low Countries. Generally, however, yields were nearer to a half of these figures, and tended to decline, reflecting the shortage of labour, and the lack of stimulus from prices. High yields were perhaps not necessary. We cannot regard the century as an exceptionally hungry one. The severe famine of 1437—9 was not accompanied by a long succession of bad years. There were a number of subsistence crises and food riots in Castile, and the period saw hardship and reduced living standards in the Low Countries, but mostly grain could be bought quite cheaply. Agriculture supported a percentage of nonfood producers (notably town dwellers) as high as at any time between c. 1300 and 1750. This can be attributed to many factors — stable weather, a quite efficient marketing system — but above all to the relative abundance of land, and the enhanced productivity per worker achieved by the reduced number of people employed in agriculture. In short, the agrarian system evolved to satisfy the needs of the society which depended on it.