Wealth inequality in pre-industrial England: a long-term view (late thirteenth to sixteenth centuries)

Abstract

This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in England from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century, based on a novel database of distributions of taxable household wealth across 17 counties plus London. To account for high thresholds of fiscal exemption, a new method is introduced to reconstruct complete distributions from left-censored observations. First, we analyse inequality at the county level, finding an impressive stability across time in the relative position of the English counties, perturbed only by the tendency of the South and South-East to become relatively more inegalitarian. Then, we produce an aggregate distribution representative of England as a whole, and we detect an overall tendency for inequality to grow from medieval to early modern times due largely to North-South divergence in average household wealth. We discuss our results in the light of the recent literature on historical inequality.