NO ONE CAN tell you exactly how many people there are in fourteenth-century England. Estimates tend to be around five million in 1300 (give or take half a million) and around 2.5 million in 1400 (give or take a quarter of a million).1 The one thing that everyone agrees on is that there are far fewer people at the end of the century than at the start: about half as many. The total population shrinks by five to ten per cent between 1315 and 1325, by thirty to forty per cent in the Great Plague of 1348–9, and by a further fifteen to twenty-five per cent over the rest of the century. Large numbers
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