The paper's thesis is that the chief causes for the well-known `industrial crisis' of the traditional English textile towns during the period c.1290 - c.1340 was not the emergence of supposedly superior, lower-cost rural competition, as is generally supposed, but rather a far-reaching economic...

Difficulties in sorting out the empirical relationship between technical change and employment is attributable, at least in part, to the shortcomings associated with traditional measures of the former. In this paper, we use new indicators of technical change that we believe resolve many issues...

This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-century era of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the Price Revolution'; and in particular it provides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the...

Bedevilling the ongoing debate about changes in real-incomes in late-medieval western Europe, especially during the so-called 'Golden Age of the Labourer', is the very troubling issue of 'wage-stickiness'. The standard and long-traditional explanation for this supposed 'Golden Age' of rising...

This paper re-examines Earl Hamilton's famous 1929 thesis on 'Profit Inflation' and the 'birth of modern industrial capitalism': namely, that the inflationary forces of the Price Revolution era produced a widening gap between prices and wages, thus providing industrial entrepreneurs with...

One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...

The traditional and almost universal method of expressing real wages is by index numbers, according to the formula: RWI = NWI/CPI: i.e., the real wage is the quotient of the nominal (money) wage index divided by the consumer price index, all employing a common base period (here: 1451-75 = 100)....

The late Prof. Hans Van Werveke, in two very contentious articles, had contended that the monetary policies of Count Lodewijk van Male (Louis de Male) 'had checked, for some time at least, the decay of the Flemish cloth industry' by allowing its industrial entrepreneurs (weaver-drapers) to pay...

This comparative study of money, coinages, prices, and wages in southern England and the southern Low Countries had its origins in a series of appendices and footnotes for the first twelve volumes of the Correspondence of Erasmus (1484-1527), part of the Collected Works of Erasmus, which the...

This paper re-examines the classic demographic or 'real' model, essentially based on a Malthusian-Ricardian model, that the late Michael Postan (Cambridge) utilized to explain the behaviour of the later-medieval western European economy, and in particular the behaviour of price movements. In...