Material inequalities in England, c. 1290 - c. 1340 Chris Briggs University of Cambridge, United Kingdom This is a section of Socio-Economic Inequalities during the Conjuncture of the Fourteenth Century(DOI: 10.36253/979-12-215-0705-8) by Davide Cristoferi Firenze University Press Florence 2025 https://doi.org/10.36253/979-12-215-0705-8.04

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England c. 1300 was clearly an unequal society, yet assessing its distribution of wealth and income and levels of poverty with precision is not straightforward. Households earned their living by combining different sources of income that are hard to identify, especially for the mass of smallholders and landless. This article reviews recent attempts to estimate inequality in this period. It argues that such exercises provide a helpful general guide to the distribution of wealth and income, but at the micro-level it can be misleading to focus on either land or movable goods in isolation. The article provides some new evidence drawn from the royal archive and manorial sources concerning the material circumstances of individuals and households. These fragments help to qualify some of the pessimism concerning the share of households living at or below the poverty line at the end of the thirteenth century.

 Middle Ages c. 1290 - c. 1340 England households material inequality

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