Necessities and Luxuries in Early-Modern Textile Consumption: Real Values of Worsted Says and Fine Woollens in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries

If mankind’s three basic necessities have always been food, clothing, and shelter, whose production, trade, and consumption have rightly been a primary focus of economists and economic historians for many generations, we may ask this vital question: how do they distinguish between necessities and luxury products? Indeed, any examination of later-medieval, early-modern commodity prices soon reveals that for all three of these basic categories there was a seamless continuum from the very cheapest to the most expensive goods sold on the market, so that making clear cut divisions becomes virtually impossible. How, when, where, and why did the consumption of food and drink, for example, shift from being a basic necessity to ensure survival to become a luxury that enhances and enriches the quality of life? Obviously the very same considerations apply also to clothing. For many people, if only for a much smaller segment of the population, chiefly to be found in the aristocracy, the higher clergy, and wealthy bourgeoisie, clothing has also served and still serves other wants, in terms of luxury consumption: for decoration and for the assertion of personal values, and especially of one’s social status. Indeed, for such people, luxury textiles may have been deemed as personal ‘necessities’. This study is based upon two statistical tables, for the southern Low Countries, in the early to mid-sixteenth century, which, together permit us to make such a valid contrast between the nature, forms, and relative values of two major types of textiles. Representing ‘necessities’ in clothing are light-weight, coarse, relatively cheap worsted-type says (from the leading producer, Hondschoote, in Flanders); and representing ‘luxuries’ are the heavy-weight, very fine, and very costly woollen broadcloths from Ghent (dickedinnen) in the county of Flanders and Mechelen (Rooslaken) in the neighbouring duchy of Brabant. Table 1 provides the technical features of the composition of the cloths, the type of wools used, warp-counts, the dimensions, and weights, and finally the weight per square metre in grams. The luxury woollen broadcloths in Table 2 were all made uniquely from the finest English wools, then the world’s best; but Table 1 also provides, for comparison, a fine but cheaper woollen (from Armentières) made from a mixture of Spanish merino and English wools. The other textiles in Tables 1 are worsteds and semi-worsted says from several towns in sixteenth-century Flanders (including Hondschoote) and England. Table 2 presents the prices, in pounds groot Flemish for two types of Hondschoote says, and for the luxury woollens of Ghent and Mechelen for the decade 1535 - 1544. Two measures have been adopted in order to calculate the ‘real values’ of these textiles: (1) a comparison of the prices (nominal money-of-account values) of these textiles with the value of a ‘basket of consumables’, the one used to compute the Van der Wee Consumer Price Index for Brabant (Antwerp region); and (2) the purchasing power of wages: i.e., the number of days’ wages that a master mason in Antwerp would have had to spend to acquire each one of these textiles; and more particularly to buy 12 square metres of cloth, for a man’s annual clothing requirement. In terms of the latter measure, the average number of days’ wages required to purchase that same quantity of cloth would have been: 13.725 days for a Hondschoote single say; 16.958 days for a Hondschoote double say; and 5.4 times as many days, 91.413 for a Ghent dickedinnen, and 74.144 days for a Mechelen Rooslaken. That is certainly a much greater gulf in values that would be found today between every-day clothing and luxury apparel, for men at least. Consider that in Toronto, in July 2008, a journeymen carpenter earns a minimum of $33.07 per hour. In 91.413 days (i.e., the number of days’ wages to purchase that Ghent dickedinnen), at 8 hrs a day, that carpenter would earn$24,184 CAD (about € 15,115) and would never spend even 10 percent of that on clothing.luxuries, necessities, clothing, wools, woollen broadcloths, worsteds, says, serges, Flanders, Brabant, Antwerp, Hondschoote, masons, wages.

Usury, Calvinism, and Credit in Protestant England: from the Sixteenth Century to the Industrial Revolution

This study analyses the impact of Protestantism on interest rates in England from the 16th century to the Industrial Revolution. One of many myths about the usury doctrine - the prohibition against demanding anything above the principal in a loan (mutuum) - is that it ceased to be observed in Reformation Europe. As several authors have demonstrated, however, early Protestant Reformers, beginning with Luther, had essentially endorsed the long established Scholastic usury doctrines. The one major exception was Jean Calvin. Though retaining a strong hostility against usury, he permitted interest on commercial loans, while forbidding usury on charitable loans to the needy. That view may have been partly responsible for a crucially important breach in civil support of the usury doctrine. The first, in 1540, was an imperial ordinance for the Habsburg Netherlands permitting interest payments up to 12%, but only for commercial loans. In England, Henry VIII's Parliament of 1545 enacted a statute permitting interest payments up to 10% (on all loans); any higher rates constituted usury. But, in 1552, a hostile Parliament, with radical Protestants, revoked that statute, and revived it only under Elizabeth, in 1571. Since the maximum rate was also taken to be the minimum, subsequent Parliaments, seeking to foster trade, reduced that rate: to 8% in 1624, to 6% in 1651 (ratified 1660-61), and to 5% in 1713: a rate maintained until the abolition of the usury laws in 1854. The consequences of legalizing interest payments, but with ever lower maximum rates, had a far-reaching impact on the English economy, from the 16th century to the Industrial Revolution. The first lay in finally permitting the discounting of commercial bills. Even if medieval bills of exchange had permitted merchants to disguise interest payments in exchange rates, the usury doctrine nevertheless required that they be non-negotiable, held until maturity, since discounting would have revealed the implicit interest. Evidence for the Low Countries and England demonstrates that discounting, with legal transfers either by bearer bills or by endorsement, with full negotiability, began and became widespread only after the legalization of interest payments in both countries. The importance for Great Britain can be seen in the primary role of its banks during the Industrial Revolution: in discounting commercial bills, foreign and domestic, in order to finance most of the working capital needs for both industry and commerce. The second is known as the Financial Revolution; and its late introduction into England, from 1693, was in part due to the limits imposed on interest rates. In its final form (1757), it meant the establishment of permanent, funded, national debt based not on the sale of interest-bearing bonds but on perpetual annuities or rentes. The origins can be found in 13th-century northern France and the Low Countries in reaction to the vigorous intensification of the anti-usury campaign by the new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans. Fearing for their mortal souls, many merchants refused to make loans and chose to finance town governments instead by purchasing municipal rentes (annuities). In 1250, Pope Innocent IV ruled that no usury was involved, because those buying rentes could never demand redemptions. Instead, they were licitly purchasing future streams of income. Continuing debates were not finally resolved until the issue of three 15th-century papal bulls (supporting Innocent IV). By the 16th century, the finances of most western Europe states had become largely dependent on selling both life and perpetual annuities. England was thus a late-comer, in importing this system of public finance. Fully immune to the usury laws, this Financial Revolution permitted the English/British governments to reduce borrowing costs from 14% in 1693 to just 3% in 1757, so that the British economy could finance both 'guns and butter', without crowding out private investments. Furthermore, since these annuities (Consols) were traded internationally on both the London and Amsterdam stock exchanges, they were a popular form of secure investments, which became, with land, the most widely-used collateral in borrowing for the fixed capital needs of the Industrial Revolution.usury, interest, annuities, bonds, public finance, bills of exchange, discounting, Scholastics, Old and New Testaments, Calvin, Luther, Protestant Reformers, Dissenters, Financial Revolution, England

Monetary Policies, Guild Labour-Strife, and Compulsory Arbitration during the Decline of the Late-Medieval Flemish Cloth Industry, 1390 - 1435

This paper explores the impact of the Count of Flanders' monetary and wage policies upon the fortunes of the Flemish woollen cloth industry in a crucial but penultimate phase of its irredeemable decline, from 1390 to 1435, when it was beginning to yield to the growing supremacy of the now rapidly expanding English cloth trade. More narrowly (leaving larger issues of industrial decline to other papers), it focuses upon the sudden imposition and enforcement of Flemish monetary reforms in the early 1390s, after a half century of inflationary coinage debasements; those reforms greatly exacerbated other existing forces of deflation in north-west Europe. In the view of the count, his officials, and entrepreneurs in the cloth trades, this monetary reform could work effectively only if wages were cut proportionately; and such wage-cutting policies naturally provoked bitter resentment (even though the ongoing deflation in fact raised real wages). In the Flemish cloth industry, the only wage-earning artisans who were organized into a guild, and one that resembled a modern labour union, were the fullers, exclusively male workers, whose tasks were crucial in ensuring the luxury quality of the Flemish industry's chief exports. Their reaction to the post-Reform wage cuts of the 1390s was to go on strike (uutgangen), thus forcing the intervention of the count's officials, who imposed compulsory wage arbitration, establishing new wage contracts that gave the draper-entrepreneurs only half of their demanded cuts. One of these contracts specified the fullers' new wages in terms of both the silver and gold coinages, in an era when the gold:silver ratio was unusually low. After the Flemish count had resumed inflationary coinage debasements in 1416, leading to a rise in the gold:silver ratio (i.e. making gold coins more valuable in terms of the silver), some fullers' guilds now cited these contract provisions and demanded payment in gold coin, provoking new labour strife, which ended only with another monetary reform in 1433- 5. The paper also poses and answers the question: why did the draper-entreprenuers not respond to this labour strife by displacing fullers with water-powered machines? Mechanical fulling would have ruined the reputation for luxury quality on which the industry vitally depended, while reducing prices only minimally.

The Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Warfare, Transaction Costs, and the 'New Institutional Economics'

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major 'institutional' international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the European economy, serving financial as well as commercial functions, from the 12th to late 16th centuries. The three distinguished models that provided the major inspiration for this paper are, in the chronological order of their publication: (1) the Van der Wee thesis (1970) on the macro-economic impact of the major shifts, first, from continental, overland- trade to maritime-based routes, and then back to continental-overland trade routes, over this same four-century era; (2) the North-Milgrom-Weingast 'institutional' model (1990) on the role of law-merchant courts and judges in reducing incentives to cheat or renege on contracts in fair-oriented trade amongst 'unacquainted' participants (i.e. in the Champagne Fairs), and thus in reducing transaction costs in international trade; and (3) the Epstein model (1994) on the various ways in which the later-medieval regional fairs further reduced transaction costs in commerce (even if his model implicitly contradicts elements of my own favoured Van der Wee model). The central theses of this paper are that: (1) the changing intensities, scope, and nature of late-medieval and early modern-warfare played the decisive role in determining the fate of international fairs: (a) in that the consequences of such warfare fatally undermined the economic viability of the earlier medieval fairs (English, French), by raising to a prohibitive level the transportation and other transaction costs involved in overland- continental trade, and more particularly in the mass-market trade in cheap, light textiles, on which these fairs had fundamentally depended; and thus conversely (b) that a restoration of relative security combined with other factors that reduced both transportation and transaction costs led (in accordance with the Van der Wee model) to a revival of continental, overland-trade, to a revival and even more dramatic growth in international trade in cheap textiles, and to a rebirth and renewed pre-eminence of international fairs in early modern European commerce; and (2) that the financial role of fairs was as important as their commercial role; and thus that another major factor in the pre-eminence of early-modern international fairs were financial innovations that led to full negotiability of both private and public forms of credit -- especially the rentes, innovations developing chiefly out of fair-based law merchant courts (thus leading us back to the North- Milgrom-Weingast model). The chief criticisms of these models, or parts of them, lie in their inadequate or wrongly formulated explanations for the decline of the Champagne and English fairs, either by adducing incorrect arguments (North-Milgrom-Weingast) and/or by neglecting the very major adverse consequences of the spreading stain of chronic, debilitating, and ever so disruptive European and Mediterranean-wide warfare from the 1290s -- and not from the Hundred Years' War era, consequences that also fatally undermined the international trade in, and thus the production of, the cheap light textiles, over the next two centuries. Such analysis is extended to criticize other favoured models to explain the decline and fall of the Champagne Fairs: the De Roover 'commercial revolution' thesis on Italian branch-plant firms with their use of bills-of-exchange; the Bautier-Verlinden model on the 'industrialization of 14th century Italy'; and the most favoured one of all -- the establishment of the Italian galley route, the direct sea-route, to NW Europe. One merely has to point out the dramatic impact of the revival of overland, continental trade routes and of so many international, fairs from the 15th century, to see why these three latter theories lack credibility in explaining a general commercial- financial phenomenon on the supposed 'decline of fairs' in the international economy.

The Low Countries' Export Trade in Textiles with the Mediterranean Basin, 1200-1600: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Comparative Advantages in Overland and Maritime Trade Routes

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom in European economic history that long-distance maritime transport was always more cost-effective than overland trade routes. Thus the majority of historians in the past century have attributed the rapid decline of the medieval Champagne Fairs, governing the textile trades between the Low Countries, northern France, and Italy, to the establishment of an effective and permanent' direct sea-route between Italy and north-west Europe from the early 14th century (though the first, a Genoese galley, can be dated to 1277). The paper concludes by examining the various factors and forces that led to a fall in transport and transaction costs in the international textile trades, via the overland routes, including river routes, between north-west Europe and the Mediterranean basin from the later 15th to early 17th centuries.

Textiles as Articles of Consumption in Flemish Towns, 1330 - 1575

The precocious economic development, extensive urbanisation, and wealth of medieval Flanders was based largely upon producing and exporting a wide range of essentially wool-based textiles, from cheap mass consumption products (the coarse and light says, biffes, etc.) to extremely expensive and also very heavy woollen broadcloths, the most luxurious of which rivalled the better Italian silks in elegance, quality, and price. During the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, and again in the 16th century, the Flemish manufacture and export of cheap, light says and other similar products of the draperies leg,eSres were probably the more important in terms of employment and export revenues; but during the intervening 14th and 15th centuries radical changes in European market structures, transport routes, and distribution networks made it more profitable for the Flemish to concentrate upon exporting very costly luxury woollen broadcloths [for reasons explored in my other publications and working pers]. But how cheap was cheap; and how costly indeed were the luxury woollen broadcloths? I measured their relative values, i.e. costs to an urban Flemish craftsman consumer, by using various sets of urban wage and commodity price data that I have collected from archival sources in the Low Countries. In particular, for the period 1350-1500, I have constructed a Flemish Basket of Consumables Price Index, modelled on the well known English index of Phelps Brown & Hopkins, splicing this Flemish commodity-price index to a similar index for Brabant constructed by Herman Van der Wee, for the 16th century. I have thus computed how many days' wages a master mason or carpenter would require to buy one of these broadcloths from the 1330s to the 1560s; similarly to buy says in the 16th century; and I have also computed the value of each broadcloth or say in terms of the value of these commodity baskets (i.e. how many baskets equalled in value one cloth). The data show a marked rise in the relative value of luxury broadcloths from the 1360s and again from the 1430s, as measured both in terms of wages (purchasing power) and of the commodity baskets, for reasons explored in other publications.

The Maze of Medieval Mint Metrology in Flanders, France and England: Determining the Weight of the Marc de Troyes and the Tower Pound from the Economics of Counterfeiting, 1388 - 1469

In 1795, the French Revolutionary government, in establishing our modern metric system, also established the metric values for the historic European mint weights of the ancien re,gime era. If those mint-weights are undoubtedly valid for the 18th century, can we be certain that all had remained unchanged over the centuries; and in particular that these metric values, and thus the mathematical relationships between the various mint weights, are valid for the later Middle Ages? That is important if we are to measure with confidence the coinage outputs and relative coin values of various medieval European principalities, and thus their relative price movements. Furthermore, were the marcs de Troyes used in both France and the Low Countries the same mint weight? This question is still hotly contended because there are no surviving mint weights or coin dies for the medieval Low Countries, and none in France dated before 1483; and surviving coins do not provide unbiased random samples. In this paper, I seek to vindicate the modern metric equivalents by resorting to the mint accounts of 14th- and 15th- century Flanders and England, and in particular Flemish data on minting gold nobles that were coined as counterfeits of the widely-circulating English gold nobles; I have also used various ordinances that describe the weights of the nobles in terms of both the English Tower Pound and the Flemish marc de Troyes. With mathematical examples, I demonstrate that only if the modern metric equivalents of these mint weights were precisely valid for this period (1388-1469) would the Flemish mints have been successful, i.e. in gaining the substantial seigniorage profits so recorded: and successful in minting a noble close enough in weight and fineness to the English to "pass" undetected, except by those using well-calibrated scales, yet inferior enough in gold content to allow merchants selling gold bullion for these counterfeits to gain a profit (and compensate for their higher risks and transaction costs). Such evidence also proves that the Flemish and French marcs de Troyes had to be identical in this era. Indirectly, this paper also challenges some recent publications about the nature of medieval moneys and of the operation of Gresham's Law in this era.

The Monetary Origins of the Price Revolution' Before the Influx of Spanish-American Treasure: the South German Silver-Copper Trades, Merchant-Banking, and Venetian Commerce, 1470-1540

This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-century era of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the Price Revolution'; and in particular it provides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the Price Revolution commence so early; but rather why did it commence so late? Beginning with the French philosopher Jean Bodin (1568) and culminating with Earl Hamilton and Keynes (1929, 1936), most economists and historians had attributed this sustained European inflation to the influx of Spanish-American treasure', chiefly silver from Peru- Bolivia and Mexico. But with advances in our knowledge of price history in the post-war era, economic historians pointed out that European inflation had commenced as early as the 1520s, some three decades before any substantial amounts of silver had been imported from the Americas. They therefore sought an alternative explanation: unfortunately, one that wrongly made population growth the prime mover' for inflation, with grave deficiencies in their economic theory. Most have confused a change in relative prices (e.g. a rise in wheat prices) with a change in the overall price level (CPI). Only one (Jack Goldstone) has sought to link population growth, and urbanization in particular, to monetary variables: i.e. to changes in payment structures and thus to the income velocity of money (or to changes in Cambridge k).gold, silver, bullion, mining, inflation, Price Revolution, public finance, Spanish America, South Germany, England, Venice, Antwerp.

South German Silver, European Textiles, and Venetian Trade with the Levant and Ottoman Empire, c. 1370 to c. 1720: A non-mercantilist approach

A recurrent and indeed persistent problem in European economic history – a veritable deus ex machina -- from medieval to modern times, is Europe’s supposed ‘balance of payments’ problem in trade with the ‘East’. This supposed problem has often been couched in Mercantilist overtones: namely, that export of supposedly large volumes of precious metals, especially, silver to conduct trade with, first the Levant, and then with the rest of Asia meant a serious drainage of wealth from western Europe. This seems to be particularly true in the debate about the late-medieval ‘Great Depression’ in which some contend that this balance of payments ‘deficit’ led to monetary contraction, deflation, and then economic depression. This paper, while not denying periodic problems of monetary contraction and indeed deflation, provides a non-Mercantilist perspective on not just European but global trade from the fourteenth to early eighteenth centuries. It offers the following related theses: (1) That late-medieval monetary contraction was far more related to falling outputs of mined silver and to reductions in the income-velocity of coined money and the related problem of hoarding, the roots of which were the growth of international warfare from the 1290s, significantly financed by coinage debasements; and together they provided serious barriers to the international flow of specie and bullion, and indeed to the emergence of bullionist philosophies, which are the very core of Mercantilism. (2) That, insofar as such monetary contractions did lead to deflation, that deflation, in augmenting the purchasing power of silver (gram for gram), provided the profit motive for the technological solutions to this very same problem: namely, innovations in both mechanical and chemical engineering that produced the South German silver-copper mining boom, which quintupled Europe’s silver supplies from the 1460s to the 1540s, when even cheaper supplies of silver were arriving from the Spanish Americas. (3) That South German silver-copper mining boom, controlled by German merchant bankers who also controlled the now thriving fustian-textile (linen-cotton) industry, had two related consequences: (a) it was a major factor in the revival and expansion of the European economy in general and the growth of the Antwerp market in particular, via new transcontinental trading routes from Venice through Germany to the Brabant Fairs, based on a tripod of English woollens, South German metals, and Portuguese spices. (b) at the same time, it promoted a great expansion in Venetian trade with the Levant, to acquire not only Asian spices but also large quantities of Syrian cotton to feed the booming German fustians industry. (4) While the 15th-century Venetian trade with the Levant did indeed require large amounts of silver, perhaps enough to pay for two thirds of goods acquired in the Levant, the 16th century commerce with not just the Levant but the far larger Ottoman Empire benefited from a very new trade: the exports of fine quality Venetian woollens. This paper examines the reasons for both the rise and fall of the Venetian cloth industry (5) While traditional explanations for the rapid decline of the Venetian cloth industry in the 17th century have focused on Venice’s own ‘internal faults’, this paper offers an alternative explanation: how England’s new Levant Company and the English cloth industries so successfully gained a major share of Ottoman and Persian markets, at the direct expense of Venice: through a combination of diplomacy and superior naval technology. Their success meant that even less silver was required to conduct this trade with the Ottoman Empire, than had been true for Venice. (6) A further major factor in the decline of Venice in the 17th century was the final loss of the Asian spice trades, which had involved close Venetian ties with the Ottomans, to the Dutch and the English, who succeeded where the Portugese had failed. That story in turn allows us, with much more ample data, to examine the nature of vastly larger ‘balance of payments deficits’, so that as much as 80 percent of Asian goods had to be acquired with silver. That silver came not from Europe but principally from the Spanish Americas. Thus the major thesis of the paper is that first the South German and then the Spanish American silver mining booms greatly benefited Europe by promoting a vast increase in truly global trade.Venice, Levant, Ottoman Empire, South Germany, Antwerp, Portugal, England, Asia, East Indies, balance of payments, gold, silver, international trade,

The Usury Doctrine and Urban Public Finances in Late-Medieval Flanders: Annuities, Excise Taxes, and Income Transfers from the Poor to the Rich

The objectives of this paper are three-fold. The first is to rebut Charles Kindleberger�s famous dictum that usury �belongs less to economic history than to the history of ideas�; and in particular to demonstrate that the resuscitation of the anti-usury campaign from the early 13th century led to a veritable financial revolution in late-medieval French and Flemish towns: one that became the �norm� in modern European states from the 16th century (in England, from 1693): a shift in public borrowing from interest-bearing loans to the sale of annuities, usually called rentes or renten. That anti-usury campaign had two major features: (1) the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which provided harsh punishments � excommunication -- for both unrepentant usurers and princes who failed to suppress them; and (2) the establishment of the two mendicant preaching orders: the Franciscans (1210) and the Dominicans (1216), whose monks preached hellfire and eternal damnation against all presumed usurers � including, of course, anyone who received any interest on government loans. There is much evidence that from the 1220s, many financiers in many French and Flemish towns, fearing for their immortal souls, preferred to accept far lower returns on buying rentes than the interest they would have earned on loans. These rentes, based on 8th-century Carolingian census contracts, had two basic forms: (1) life-annuities, by which a citizen purchased from the government, with a lump sum of capital, an annual income stream lasting a lifetime, or the lifetime of his wife as well; (2) perpetual annuities, by which the annual income stream was indeed perpetual, or until such time as the government chose to redeem the rentes, at par. Initially, some theologians opposed sales of rentes as subterfuges to cloak evasion of the usury doctrine. But in 1250-1, Pope Innocent IV declared them to be non-usurious contracts, essentially because they were not loans. Subsequent popes in the 15th century confirmed his views and the non-usurious character of rentes, on two conditions: (1) that the buyer of the rente could never demand redemption or repayment, and (2) that the annual annuity payments (and any ultimate redemptions) be in accordance with actual rent contracts: i.e., that the funds be derived from the products of the land. Ecclesiastical authorities soon agreed that taxes on the consumption of the products of the land (and sea) met this test: i.e., taxes on beer and wine (which always accounted for the largest share), bread, textiles, fish, meat, dairy products, etc. The second objective of this paper is to measure the importance of renten in the civic finances of Flemish towns, in terms of both revenues and expenditures: from the annual town accounts Ghent (14th century only), and Aalst (1395-1550), where they had far greater importance. The related third objective is to measure the burden of the excise taxes for master building craftsmen in Aalst, in tables that measure the values of the excise tax revenues expressed in real terms: first, in the equivalent number of �baskets of consumables� (which form of the base of the Consumer Price Index), and second their value in terms of the annual money-wage incomes of master masons (for 210 days). This provides an entirely new look at the late-medieval �standard of living� controversy � with indications that this consumption-tax burden sometimes rose from about 13,200 to almost 30,000 days� wage income, for a town of perhaps 3600 inhabitants (but obviously less dramatic on a per capita basis). That tax burden rose the most strongly when, by other indications, real wages (RWI = NWI/CPI) were also finally rising; and thus possibly these real wage gains were largely eliminated. That per capita tax burden would have been all the greater if, in the course of the 15th century, Aalst had experienced the same decline as did small towns of Brabant, to the east, on the order of 25%, and some other Flemish towns, in which the population decline varied from 9% to 28 %. In earlier publications I had challenged the widespread view that the era following the Black Death, with a radical change in the land:labour ratio, came to be a �Golden Age� of the artisan and labourer. I contended instead that frequent inflations eroded or eliminated wage gains, and thus that periodic rises in real wages were due essentially to steep deflations combined with pronounced wage-stickiness. As I also calculated, English artisans in the 1340s had earned real wages that were about 50% of the Flemish; but by the 1480s, they had narrowed that gap (with much less inflation) to about 80%. That gap was probably even smaller, until the 1640s, when England�s Parliament finally imposed similar excise taxes on consumption.Flanders, warfare, urban public finances, building craftsmen, annuities (rentes), excise taxes, consumption, living standards, income transfers