On Wealth Inequality and Wealth Predictors in Late Medieval England Using The 1381 Poll Tax

Abstract

This thesis deals with wealth inequality in Late Medieval England through the 1381 English poll tax. This contains internally scaled assessments, allowing us to determine the internal wealth inequality of settlements. Furthermore, we use the noted characteristics of people to determine what the influence of these characteristics is on a person’s wealth. We determine that someone’s gender, marital status, occupational sector and whether someone is an employer or employee are strong predictors of wealth. We argue that age is likely the strongest predictor of wealth, even though this is not directly noted in the assessments. The wealth inequality of a settlement is weakly dependent on its number of inhabitants, as we find that below approximately eight hundred inhabitants, there is no correlation between inequality and settlement size. Above this number there is an increase in inequality as a settlement grows. We deem this is due to the migration of unmarried people from the countryside. These create a large share of people living at or below the taxable wealth threshold which increases with settlement size. We identify two hinterland systems in our data set, and analyse these and the occupational structure of the overall largest settlements. From this we find that the primary cities in such systems are characterised by large artisanal sectors, small agricultural sectors, and a small but significant share of highly specialised professions.