ABSTRACT
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the end of the long period of expansion in population, settlements, arable land, towns, trade and monasteries. Instead this was a period of population decline, of frequent poor harvests, recurrent plagues which reached a peak but did not end with the Black Death of 1348-49, of retreat from marginal lands, abandonment of settlements and of decline in the fervour of monasticism and in the popularity of the religious orders, while men concentrated upon individual salvation through the foundation of chantries and the extension, rebuilding and costly adornment of parish churches. There were throughout Wessex notable exceptions to the general recession; as will be shown later, the woollen cloth industry of the region underwent a massive expansion, the ports of Bristol and Southampton flourished during much of the fifteenth century, many clothproducing towns and villages prospered from the overseas demand for English cloth, and the ornate fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century parish churches throughout the region, with their fine towers, elaborate stone-carving and expensive woodwork bear witness both to the available wealth and to the popular piety of the period. The profits to be made from trade and commerce, from wool and cloth production, from energetic pasture farming and careful estate management can also be appreciated in the numerous fine fifteenthcentury merchants’ dwellings, manor houses and castles of the region. But neither architectural achievement nor the copious evidence of individual wealth and religious zeal affect the basic fact that, compared with the expansion of the thirteenth century, this was a period of prolonged economic decline.
