Numismatic Evidence and Falling Prices in the Fourteenth Century

Abstract

INCE scholars first detected a fall in the level of prices in the later Middle Ages a number of different arguments have been put forward to explain it. Initially, it was believed that prices fell because of a shortage of money and money metals. Then in the I950's it was argued that changes in population were the cause of falling prices and, although advocates of the monetary theory have continued to question it, it is the population thesis which still largely holds the field. No one has done more to scatter the ranks of the monetary theorists than Prof. M. M. Postan, and his explanation of the economic fluctuations of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries makes a good startingpoint. His argument is that increasing population in the thirteenth century first stimulated the economy of Europe but later began to exert undue pressure on the food supply. Disaster was postponed by the colonization of marginal lands, but survival based on the cultivation of poorer soils became more and more precarious. In these conditions a fortuitous combination of adverse events, such as the succession of bad seasons in the second decade of the fourteenth century, was sufficient to reverse the entire trend of agricultural production and to send the population figures tumbling down.2 On the other hand it has been suggested that there was no fall in the population before the Black Death and that prices fell because of a decline in the stock of money metals.3 This application of the quantity theory of money to the question was quickly rejected by Prof. Postan4 but it reappeared in a modified form in an

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