A caristia of labourers

How much suffering can one short, forgotten phrase contain?

"Caristia" is a Latin word, but Caesar wouldn't have understood it. It came into use in English records during the Middle Ages, meaning a "dearth", or shortage. Manorial records sometimes refer to a caristia of labourers.

This phrase seems to have meant both fewer hands than were needed, and increased wages for those that could be found. Both prices and wages were fairly slow to change, in the long term, during the Middle Ages partly because they were often set in terms of long term contracts for tenancy or service, partly because there were strong, especially religious, conventions about the correct levels for prices and wages, and against arbitrage.

But you can't buck the market entirely. Short term price and wage fluctuations were inevitable. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for example, wheat prices rose gradually from under 3s a quarter to over 6s. But during the bad harvests of 1315-17 the price hit 25s.

That was an extreme case, the sudden onset of global cooling after the wealth and comfort of the Medieval Warm Period. But there would be shortages of labourers from time to time anyway, with the normal fluctuations of the years and their harvests. I have a very heavy crop of cherries this year in my garden. Last year there were almost none. When that happens with cherries in a developed economy, I go to the shop and buy some that were grown somewhere that had a better harvest this year - trade smooths out supply. When it happens with wheat in a peasant economy, people die. During the Middle Ages, some years so many men died that it affected the level of wages.

A moment's reflection on what the reality of this must have been like gave me my opening sentence.

Why did ordinary variations in production have a greater effect during the Middle Ages than they do today? The answers are surprisingly relevant to us now, and to the sorts of arguments put forward by what you might call the neo-primitivists - that odd assortment of people from the green left to the isolationist, protectionist and libertarian right who want to return us to a golden age of disease and starvation.

The problem they had, in the past, is that they didn't trade*, and they didn't try to make profits - they weren't capitalists. This killed, from time to time, sometimes two digit percentages of the populations unnecessarily.

Here's an odd thing: in a tenant-peasant economy, when farmers produce just enough to feed themselves and to pay their dues, rents, tithes and so forth, market forces invert. When the price of a commodity rises (through scarcity) production falls and when prices fall, production rises. Higher prices mean you need less to pay your rents, lower prices mean you need more. This means that price swings, and scarcity and surplus, are amplified to damaging effect.

Capitalism, the investment of resources in trade for a profit within an economy and between economies, restored the positive relationship between supply and demand and gave rise to the stockpiling that buffers us against shortages today. And because we have capitalism, because we have relatively free trade, wages are no longer set by the number of people who died during the most recent famine.



* I wrote this in too much of a hurry. They didn't trade enough. Of course there was trade; without it there would have been no prices. But the classic pattern for the medieval Manor did not include the production of a surplus beyond subsistence and taxes/rents. Trade existed because of surplus production on estates that deviated from this classic pattern.

Moreover, they weren't sufficiently capitalist. Some people did buy grain and stockpile it, holding reserves until prices rose so they could make a good profit (regrating, something that was even illegal at times). As still happens today, such activity was roundly condemned by the Church as immoral.

This immoral practice saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, it saves hundreds of millions.




[No online references for any of this; see Postan pp 257-263.]