According to the economists Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, from the 1500s to the 1700s real wages declined by as much as 70%.13 Nutrition deteriorated and starvation became commonplace: some of the worst famines in European history struck in the 1500s, as subsistence economies were ripped up. The social fabric was left so shredded that between 1600 and 1650 populations across Western Europe actually declined.
