Wages in the Middle Ages
What happens to a country’s economy when half its population dies within a few years? Historians have been puzzling over how standards of living and patterns of work changed in the Middle Ages for more than a century.
What happens to a country’s economy when half its population dies within a few years? Historians have been puzzling over how standards of living and patterns of work changed in the Middle Ages for more than a century.
Wednesday 15 March 2023 | 2 minutes 19 seconds
What happens to a country’s economy when half its population dies within a few years? The Black Death did exactly this to England in 1348-50, and historians have been puzzling over how standards of living and patterns of work changed in the Middle Ages for more than a century.
To answer this, Dr Jordan Claridge is developing a new dataset of wages earned by men, women and children, working both on annual contracts and more casually, in order to understand wages in medieval England and the massive economic and societal changes of the late Middle Ages.
Find out more about Wages in the Middle Ages: here.
Visuals sourced from: Freepik, Vecteezy, Battle Abbey Archives, The Huntington Library, California