We have an authentic instance, and probably a typical instance, in the manor and barony of Castle Combe, of which the social history has been pieced together from the rolls of its manor court by one of the earliest students of that class of documents. Before the middle of the fifteenth century this village situated among the Wiltshire hills, difficult of access and almost secluded from the highways, had grown into a thriving community of weavers, fullers, dyers, glovers, and the like, with their attendant tradings and marketings, all upon its old manorial basis, and with its old agriculture going hand in hand with its new industries. There were free or copyhold tenants occupying their farms, while several clothiers and occupiers of fulling-mills held farms also, “driving a double and evidently a very thriving trade, accumulating considerable wealth and giving employment to a large number of artizans who had been attracted to the place for this purpose. Yet, strange to say, some of the wealthiest and most prosperous of these tradesmen were still subject to the odious bonds of serfship, adscript the soil[376].” It is clear, however, that the jury of the manor court took care that the lord should not have the best of it. The morals of this industrial village were, as might have been expected, somewhat lax[377]. At the same time the removal of nuisances was insisted upon by this self-governing community as effectively, perhaps, as if it had been under the Local Government Acts[378].
Another kind of effect than the industrial, upon the state of the towns, is exemplified in the case of Shrewsbury. The dislocation of the old social order had somehow touched the privileges and monopolies of municipal corporations and guilds, and given power to a hitherto unenfranchised class. The general question, besides being a somewhat new one, is foreign to this subject; but the reference to Shrewsbury is given, as the “late pestilence” is expressly connected with the municipal changes. A patent of the 35th of Edward III. (1361), relating to the town of Shrewsbury, recites the grievous debates and dissensions which had arisen therein, “through the strangers who had newly come to reside in the said town after the late pestilence, and were plotting to draw to themselves the government of the said town[379].”
It has been conjectured that population in the country at large speedily righted itself, according to the principle that population always tends to come close to the limit of subsistence. But there is reason to think that the means of subsistence were themselves reduced. We read of corn-land running to waste, although most of the references to desolation are perhaps to be taken as true for only one or two harvests following the plague. Again, it is undoubted that sheep-farming and the pasturing of cattle at length took the place of much of the old agriculture. It is not easy to make out when the change begins; but there are instances of rural depopulation as early as 1414[380], and the same had become a burning grievance in the time of cardinal Morton and the early years of sir Thomas More. It has been assumed, also, that the “positive checks” to population had been taken off, when they ought in theory so to have been: that is to say, after the inhabitants had been enormously thinned. The statement of Hecker, that there was increased fecundity after the pestilence, appears to be an instance of that author’s a priori habit of mind[381]. What we read in an English chronicle of the time is just the opposite, namely, that “the women who survived remained for the most part barren during several years[382].” The authority is not conclusive, but the statement is in keeping with what we may gather from Langland’s poem as to ill-assorted and sterile marriages, and as to illicit unions, which, as Malthus teaches, are comparatively unfruitful. The alleged sterility is also in keeping with, although not strictly parallel to, the experience of crowded Indian provinces, such as Orissa, where a thinning of the population by famine and disease has been statistically proved to be followed by a marked decrease of fecundity. More direct evidence of a permanent loss of people occurs a generation after the Black Death, at a time when the circumstances of health were such as would explain it.
The poll-tax of 1377 was a means of estimating the population. The tax was levied on every person, male or female, above the age of fourteen. In estimating the population from the poll-tax returns, it is usual to add one-fifth for taxable subjects who had evaded it, and to reckon the taxable subjects above fourteen years as two-thirds of the whole population. On that basis of reckoning, the population of the whole of England, except Cheshire and Durham, in the year 1377 would have been 2,580,828 (or 1,376,442 who actually paid their groat each). The population of the principal towns is calculated, in the second column of the Table, from the numbers in the first column who actually paid the poll-tax, according to the Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III.
Laity assessed for the Poll-tax of 1377 in each of the following Towns,
being persons of either sex above the age of fourteen years.
| Taxed | Estimated Population | |
| London | 23,314 | 44,770 |
| York | 7248 | 13,590 |
| Bristol | 6345 | 11,904 |
| Plymouth | 4837 | 9069 |
| Coventry | 4817 | 9032 |
| Norwich | 3952 | 7410 |
| Lincoln | 3412 | 6399 |
| Sarum | 3226 | 6048 |
| Lynn | 3127 | 5863 |
| Colchester | 2955 | 5540 |
| Beverley | 2663 | 4993 |
| Newcastle-on-Tyne | 2647 | 4963 |
| Canterbury | 2574 | 4826 |
| Bury St Edmunds | 2442 | 4580 |
| Oxford | 2357 | 4420 |
| Gloucester | 2239 | 4198 |
| Leicester | 2101 | 3939 |
| Shrewsbury | 2082 | 3904 |
| Yarmouth | 1941 | 3640 |
| Hereford | 1903 | 3568 |
| Cambridge | 1722 | 3230 |
| Ely | 1722 | 3230 |
| Exeter | 1560 | 2925 |
| Hull | 1557 | 2920 |
| Worcester | 1557 | 2920 |
| Ipswich | 1507 | 2825 |
| Nottingham | 1447 | 2713 |
| Northampton | 1447 | 2713 |
| Winchester | 1440 | 2700 |
| Stamford | 1218 | 2284 |
| Newark | 1178 | 2209 |
| Wells | 1172 | 2198 |
| Ludlow | 1172 | 2198 |
| Southampton | 1152 | 2160 |
| Derby | 1046 | 1961 |
| Lichfield | 1024 | 1920 |
| Chichester | 869 | 1630 |
| Boston | 814 | 1526 |
| Carlisle | 678 | 1271 |
| Bath | 570 | 1070 |
| Rochester | 570 | 1070 |
| Dartmouth | 506 | 949 |
That this indirect census was taken on a declining population may be inferred from the language of contemporaries. In the year of the poll-tax (1377), Richard II. addressed certain questions to Wyclif concerning the papal exactions of tribute; the reformer’s reply gives as the second objection to the tribute “that the people decreases by reason of (praetextu) the withdrawal of this treasure, which should be spent in England[383].”
In the political poems of the time there are numerous references to the pestilences and famines. One of these doggerel productions, “On the Council of London,” 1382, contains a clear reference to a decrease of the people:
“In nos pestilentia saeva jam crescit,
Quod virorum fortium jam populus decrescit[384].”