An Assessment of the Economy in the Reign of Henry VII.

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An Assessment of the Economy in the Reign of Henry VII

Henry VII was King of England from 1485-1509 and during his reign there were several significant changes and developments in the economy. During the Middle Ages society was arranged in a hierarchy based on wealth, occupation and status; labourers, ordinary soldiers, paupers and vagrants formed the base of the hierarchy and were the greatest in number, the middle classes were made up of those distinguished by occupation such as merchants, master craftsmen, lawyers and the clergy, and at the top of the hierarchy were the elite, composed of Lords, knights, esquires and gentlemen. This hierarchical society was held together by a feudal system that had been in place since as far back as the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century. This medieval system of land tenure meant that all peasants had allegiance to their landowner and depended on them for survival.

The population was very small in comparison to the present day; the entire country was made up of only approximately 2-3 million people. However, the Black Death, high infant mortality rates and the destructive effects of the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses radically reduced the population from 6 million in 1300 to 1.5 million in the 1480´s. (Many of the hundreds of deserted medieval villages that have been identified by archeologists were the direct result of the Black Death. The picture on page 130 of Cambridge Perspectives in History, Lancastrians and Tudors by Andrew Pickering illustrates one of such villages.)

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Consequently there was an economic decline in landowners that forced some to sell or lease parts of their land hence creating a market that made land available to a much larger range of society. As a result in the reduction of the economic power of the landowners, the feudal system was beginning to collapse, so by the start of the sixteenth century everyone had the right to move around the country as they wished. The lower orders being able to exercise choice was the fundamental change in rural society in the late fifteenth century.

Agriculture made up the vast majority ...

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