Research on the history of agriculture in Western Europa and Scandinavia during the period from around 1350 to 1500 has uncovered a number of characteristic economic traits: a longterm decline in grain prices relative to the price of other commodities; a rise in the real wages of artisans and rural workers, especially in terms of purchasing power as measured in grain prices; and a migration from rural areas to urban centres that left a trail of deserted farms and agricultural problems. 

Rising wage costs in grain farming, declining manorial dues as the result of deserted farms, and decreasing sales profits following from depressed grain prices - all these factors have left an impression of rural crisis, particularly acute for the manorial landowners. 

Scholars are less certain about developments in urbanisation and commerce. The present study excursively challenges some elements in the explanatory pattern expounded by Wilhelm Abel and Michael Postan in these areas. 

While there is no denying the general significance of the demographic factor in the development of the price of grain, by itself it can hardly explain why grain prices remained depressed in Western Europe throughout the Late Middle Ages in spite of the fact that the area devoted to the cultivation of grain was reduced to make way for other crops and that farm land was converted to sheep and cattle grazing. 

In the fifteenth century the Low Lands and the western parts of Germany were permanently dependent on grain shipments from the Baltic area, although a century to a century and a half earlier they were self-sufficient except for emergency supplies in times of crop failure. The cheaper East European grain had gained a stable market in Western Europe. In the long term, the crisis was not due to a drop in demand, but a drop in the profitability of raising grain in Western Europe in the face of competition from Eastern Europe. Distribution had become the determining factor of the crisis. 

The figures in Abel's table show an uneven development in grain prices in the various parts of Germany. His own figures, therefore, lend no support to his claim that a universal European crisis followed in the wake of demographic decline. When Abel tries to synchronise the drop in grain prices in East Prussia with the crisis in Western Europe, he has to manipulate grain prices in Königsberg in a way that demonstrably discords with the data of his own tables. The East Prussian crisis was due not to demographic decline, but to competition with cheaper Polish grain. In other words, it was defined by distribution, not demand. 

Abel's study of the general population decline in the northern German towns is based on adventitious and incommensurable source data, which is arbitrarily added up and averaged out as though there were question of an even, long-term development. Quite to the contrary, the figures on urban population show abrupt fluctuations caused by epidemics of the plague and subsequent increases in urban migration. There is no reasonable justification for the way the figures are used by Abel. Because of the plague epidemics the only way of increasing urban population was migration, and this, in turn, depended on economic opportunities in the towns. Some towns regressed, others boomed. 

Postan considers the Late Middle Ages as a period of general decline in Northern Europe - not only agriculturally, but also with regard to manufacturing, mining and trade. Just as population growth from the twelfth to the fourteenth century had evoked an economic expansion, the population decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, according to Postan, resulted in an economic "contraction". Postan, however, can find only a few instances of figures that document a commercial decline. There was, indeed, a sharp decline in English wool exports, but there are no figures on exports of Spanish wool. English imports of wine from western France fell off because of the Hundred Years War and tell us nothing about the trade as a whole, while no figures are available for the wine trade from the Rhine, Alsace, Moselle, and Burgundy, nor for wines from Greece, Spain and Portugal. Postan's bold presumptions that the declining wool trade caused a decline in cloth production and trade, and that a decline in herring fishing caused a drop in demand for salt, and therewith a decline in the salt trade, amount only to loose speculation. On the contrary, the salt trade must have been on the rise, since increasing amounts of French and then Portuguese sea salt were shipped to the Northern Countries simultaneously with an increase in the production of Lüneburg salt. As eating habits changed, cattle were slaughtered in the autumn, and huge amounts of beef were salted to keep through the winter. Salt became an essential commodity in the working of the economy. There are numerous commodities of which Postan has no way of determining the volume. There is simply no basis at all in the known sources for determining the extent of trade in the Late Middle Ages. 

What is particularly characteristic of the Late Middle Ages is the growth of the transportation sector, which provided for an increase in the distribution of bulk commodities, chiefly foodstuffs such as grain and lard. The division of European agriculture into grain and livestock zones, which delivered goods over long distances to rich consumer centres in Western Europe, gained prevalence in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The grain route from the Baltic to Western Europe and the long, overland cattle trails were characteristic. Northern and Eastern Europe became "underdeveloped countries" exporting raw materials and foodstuffs to the "developed" manufacturing countries of Western Europe. 

Considering the scale of these structural changes in production and distribution, it seems highly questionable that they should have had no impact on Danish trade, which hitherto has been viewed in a purely Danish-Hanseatic context. It is characteristic that the Danish historian Erik Arup tried to explain West European traffic through the Sound at the entrance to the Baltic as the result of the unwise and restrictive policy of Lübeck towards West Europeans' access to the Scania market. At best, this can be only a secondary circumstance, while the direct background is to be found in the changed structure of agricultural production. 

The purchase of foodstuffs in the Baltic area by the Dutch is no doubt what lies behind the increased purchase of these commodities from Danish agricultural producers by the Hansa - at the expense of market activity in the Danish towns; and it was this, it may be added, that lay behind the more restrictive "guest laws" in Denmark in the fifteenth century. It was not the decline of the Scania market as an ordinary market that brought the Hansa to the Danish market towns, as Erslev and Arup contended. It was not really a question of seeking out town markets, but of establishing trade with the town hinterland; and it was not merely a question of foreign trade, but also one of competition with the domestic landowners. It therefore became a matter of crucial importance to the burgher merchants to consolidate their monopoly on commercial trade, while the land-owning nobility's trade rights were restricted to the sale of their own produce (and that derived from their tenants) and to purchase for domestic consumption ("needs of board and farm"). 

Population growth in the sixteenth century once again spurred a rising demand for grain. Top prices for grain and cattle pulled Danish agriculture towards an economic upswing. The nobility devoted itself to production and left trade to the merchants, who now found their way to the rich Dutch import markets. Yet the origins of this development towards production of foodstuffs for distant markets, which was to prove so important for Danish agriculture, are already to be found in the fifteenth century. The trend emerged from the structural changes in European agriculture resulting from differences in economic conditions between Europe's more developed western parts and its more backward northern and eastern parts at a time when the plague and a population crisis created a need for new methods of economic activity. 

Translated by Michael Wolfe