Felons’ chattels and English living standards in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

<p dir="ltr">The later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have long occupied an intriguing and<br>contested place in discussions of England’s long-run economic development. One<br>key issue around which debate has coalesced is the living standards of the<br>population as a whole and of different groups within it. We contribute to this debate<br>by bringing forward new evidence on the material living standards of peasants,<br>artisans, and wage-earners in the countryside and small towns. This consists of lists<br>of goods and chattels forfeited to the crown by felons, fugitives, and outlaws. This<br>material, found in the archive of the royal escheator, is not without its problems. Yet a<br>careful quantitative analysis of both the overall valuations of forfeited goods, and the<br>incidence of specific items in such lists of forfeitures, shows that there was relatively<br>little change in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This is surprising, given<br>the traditional characterization of this period as a time of rising consumption during the ‘golden age of the labourer’. This later medieval evidence is contextualized through the analysis of similar forfeiture data relating to the sixteenth century.</p>