Mortality in the fifteenth century: some new evidence.

F decades medieval historians have placed population at the centre of their concerns, but it is only in recent years that their studies have begun to constitute a respectable branch of historical demography. From the scrutiny of oblique records which provide indications of such matters as settlement, the size of landholdings, land values, prices and wages, attention has increasingly turned towards sources which may be capable of throwing a more direct light on mortality, fertility and nuptiality. The ultimate benefits of such a shift of emphasis promise to be substantial. For although we are becoming ever more coiiident about the general direction and scale of movements in England's population between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, we know relatively little about how and why it behaved as it did. So tmcertain is our grasp of the mechatiics of population change in the middle ages that a detailed explanation ofthe causes ofthe long rise in numbers before 1300, and ofthe demographic mechanisms whereby it was accomplished, has scarcely ever been attempted, and the relative importance of mortality and fertility in the decline of late medieval population seems set to remain a contentious matter for some time to come.2 Yet the prodigious advances which have been achieved in the demography of later periods, most recently and notably with the publication by E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield of The Population History of England, IS41-1871, offer inspiration.^ For they not only provide us with renewed incentive to tackle these medieval enigmas, they appear to offer some of the technical equipment with which the task might successfully be accomplished. A further important shift is taking place: away from the records of the rich to those of the masses. Analyses of the succession records of tenants-in-chief of the crown (inqtiisitions post mortem), which dominated early attempts to