How the Recession ended is the subject of The Closing of the Middle Ages’ England, 1471–1529 (Oxford, 1997) by Richard Britnell, who has written usefully also on the earlier period in Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge, 1986), in The Commercialisation of English Society 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993), and in ‘The Black Death in English towns’, Urban History, 21 (1994), pp. 195–210. And there are summaries of the views of Campbell and Dyer, the two most prolific authors on this period, in Bruce Campbell’s ‘A fair field once full of folk: agrarian change in an ere of population decline, 1348–1500’, Agricultural History Review, 41 (1993), pp. 60–70, and Christopher Dyer’s Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages. Social change in England c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989). Valuable regional studies, each of much wider application, include Mark Bailey’s A Marginal Economy? East Anglian Breckland in the later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989); P. J. P. Goldberg’s ‘Mortality and economic change in the diocese of York, 1390–1514’, Northern History, 14 (1988), pp. 38–55, and his Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy. Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992); Mavis Mate’s ‘Agrarian economy after the Black Death: the manors of Canterbury Cathedral Priory, 1348–91’, Economic History Review, 37 (1984), pp. 341–54, and her ‘Labour and labour services on the estates of Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the fourteenth century’, Southern History, 7 (1985), pp. 55–67; A. J. Pollard’s ‘The north-eastern economy and the agrarian crisis of 1438–1440’, Northern History, 25 (1989), pp. 88–105; L. R. Poos’s ‘The rural population of Essex in the later Middle Ages’, Economic History Review, 38 (1985), pp. 515–30, and his A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991); and the many West Midlands studies of Zvi Razi, beginning with Life, Marriage and Death in a medieval parish. Economy, society and demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), and including his two important papers. ‘Family, land and the village community in later medieval England’. Past & Present, 93 (1981), pp. 3–36. and ‘The myth of the immutable English family’, ibid., 140 (1993), pp. 3–44.
Razi, Poos and Goldberg are demographers as well as social historians. And the two specialisms are combined again in the work of John Hatcher and Barbara Harvey. John Hatcher’s survey of Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348–1530 (London, 1977) has been reprinted many times. He subsequently moved to an earlier period, but has since returned to the later Middle Ages with two important papers on ‘Mortality in the fifteenth century: some new evidence’, Economic History Review, 39 (1986), pp. 19–38, and ‘England in the aftermath of the Black Death’, Past & Present, 144 (1994), pp. 3–35. Hatcher’s research on the obituary lists of Christ Church (Canterbury) was what gave him the ‘new evidence’ for that article in 1986. And the heavy mortalities and characteristically short life-spans of Canterbury’s post-plague monks have been found to be matched exactly in the Westminster Abbey data, discussed by Barbara Harvey in her Ford Lectures of 1989, and published in Living and Dying in England 1100–1540. The monastic experience (Oxford, 1993).
Philip Ziegler ends his book with three wide-ranging chapters on the effects of the pestilence in the longer term, with particular reference to English instituions and the economy. But as everybody writing on the Black Death has found, disentangling its consequences from those of other contemporary factors has not been easy. Was it plague, episcopal benefactions, or new chantry-related employment opportunities, for example, which brought increasing numbers of students to Oxford and Cambridge in the Late Middle Ages, as William J. Courtenay noted in The effect of the Black Death on English higher education’, Speculum, 55 (1980), pp. 696–714? What part did plague or fear of Purgatory play in the Corpus Christi gilds described by Miri Rubin in ’Corpus Christi fraternities and late-medieval piety’, Studies in Church History, 23 (1986), pp. 97–109, and again in her Corpus Christi. The Eucharist in late medieval culture (Cambridge, 1991)? Was the horror of an unsecured death more responsible than plague itself for the developments in art discussed by Joseph Polzer, ‘Aspects of the fourteenth-century iconography of death and the plague’, in The Black Death, Ed. D. Williman (Binghamton, 1982), pp. 107–30, by John B. Friedman, ‘“He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence”: the iconography of the plague in the Late Middle Ages’, in Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages,ed. Francis X. Newman (Binghamton, 1986), pp. 75–112, by Louise Marshall, ‘Manipulating the sacred: image and plague in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (1994), pp. 485–532, by Phillip Lindley in ‘The Black Death and English Art’ in The Black Death in England, eds. Mark Ormrod and Phillip Lindley (Stamford, 1996), and by myself in Chapter 9 (‘Architecture and the Arts’) of King Death (London, 1906)?
On mortality art and its associated rituals, Paul Binski’s Medieval Death (London, 1996) is especially useful But there is much relevant material also in Kathleen Cohen’s Metamorphosis of a death symbol The transi tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renassance (Berkeley, 1973), Philippa Tristram’s Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London, 1976), R. C. Finucane’s ‘Sacred corpse, profane carrion: social ideals and death rituals in the later Middle Ages’, in Mirrors of Mortality. Studies in the social history of death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London, 1981). J. M. Maddison’s ‘Master masons of the diocese of Lichfield: a study in 14th-century architecture at the time of the Black Death’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 85 (1988), pp. 107–72, Pamela King’s ‘The cadaver tomb in England: novel manifestations of an old idea’, Church Monuments, 5 (1990), pp. 26–38, Howard Colvin’s Architecture and the After-Life (New Haven and London, 1991), Nigel Llewellyn’s The Art of Death. Visual culture in the English death ritual c. 1500 – c. 1800 (London, 1991), Malcolm Norris’s ‘Later medieval monumental brasses: an urban funerary industry and its representation of death’, in Death in Towns, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, 1992), pp. 184–209 and 248–51, Richard Marks’s Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (London, 1993), Ann Eljenholm Nichols’s Seeable Signs. The iconography of the Seven Sacraments (Woodbridge, 1994), and Christopher Daniell’s Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–1550 (London, 1997).