Ultimately, we find that wage inequality in medieval England was shaped by a complex interplay of market forces and persistent customary structures. High levels of commercialization didn’t always lead to higher wages; local customs and labour supply often mattered more.

By 1400, wage gaps shifted. Areas like East Anglia saw big wage increases, likely due to tighter labour markets after the Black Death. But the structure of inequality - who could bargain, and how - still largely hinged on occupation and custom.

Wage inequality also varied regionally. In 1300, ploughmen in the North of England earned far more than those in East Anglia, despite the fact that the latter region was highly commercialized. Occupation AND region played a more important role in determining workers' wages in 1400 than in 1300.

We also find growing commercialization in the labour market. Some roles became more “professionalized” and better paid. Others, especially part-time labour and young workers, were disappearing, in most places, by 1400.

Why? We find that customarily-fixed levels of in-kind wages of many ‘core’ workers insulated them from wage shocks, both positive and negative. By contrast, the jobs which paid more cash and were in high-demand at certain times of the year, like harvest, were more responsive to market forces.

We find that the Black Death reshaped labour markets, but not uniformly. ‘Core’ roles, like ploughmen and carters were well paid before the plague. After the plague, other roles, which had been more peripheral before the Black Death experienced wage growth, while ‘core’ workers saw stagnation.

We develop a new empirical approach using weekly wage rates reconstructed from manorial accounts, facilitating comparison of thousands of wage observations across occupation, region, and time.

The paper attempts to move beyond the focus on average wage trends in pre-industrial economies by examining the broad diversity of pay rates and forms of remuneration of agricultural labourers in medieval England.

@vincentdelabastita.bsky.social, Spike Gibbs and I have a new working paper out! We explore the dynamics of wage inequality in medieval England, which allows us to better understand the commercialization of labour markets in the Middle Ages.

www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-His...

I’m our faculty seminar, Karolina Hutkovà gave an overview of four (!) papers on the development of the British fiscal military state.

In the PhD seminar, @gregorysalter.bsky.social presented the first results of his study on the transition from seigniorial management to lessee farming in medieval England, with particular attention to how risk was managed and transferred.

Very happy to have @vincentdelabastita.bsky.social at the LSE Economic History seminar with some interesting new insights on the role of technological change on labour markets.

#econhist #laboureconomics

Jane Whittle presenting today at the LSE Economic History seminar. A fascinating paper on the gender wage gap in medieval and Early Modern English agriculture.

This negative effect on the share of in-kind payment did not exist before 1370. Workers who successfully bargained for an individual ‘contract’ received higher cash wages and were less reliant on in-kind income.

Further, at precisely the same moment that wages begin to rise, workers begin to be named individually in the accounts that record their wages, which we interpret as the emergence of individual bargaining on medieval manors.

From the 1370s onward, workers continued to be insulated by in-kind payment, but the value of this insurance – and thus its utility as a carrot to keep workers tied to particular employers – decreased significantly because grain became cheaper and its prices less volatile.

After a century of stagnation, the wages of these labourers did rise substantially from the 1370s onwards. This growth was driven by an increasing proportion of cash remuneration, which points to the role of in-kind wages, as defined in our theoretical framework.

What do we find? Unlike workers who were paid by the day, wage levels for these labourers employed on an annual basis did not rise until more than 20 years after the Black Death.

This means that a whole generation of workers who survived the plague did not experience any rise in remuneration.

We collected a new dataset of wages for annually-employed agricultural labourers in medieval England, most of whom were paid a composite wage of grain and cash, where grain was the largest component.