ABSTRACT
The new way of looking at the Middle Ages was part of a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of economic history that set modern economic growth apart from earlier experience. It was a central tenet of this approach that before the age of modern economic growth - usually considered to have begun somewhere in the mid-eighteenth century - both population levels and standards of living were held within some ‘traditional’ bounds by constraints upon productivity growth. The likelihood of an increase in the ratio of townspeople to country-people inevitably depends upon how much increase is attributed to total population during the three centuries in question. Some urban development would have been required just to maintain the population of towns at a constant proportion of the rising total. The comparison between the eleventh century and the late thirteenth strongly suggests, meanwhile, that commercialisation had changed the character of taxation.
