Growth and recession in the fifteenth‐century economy: the Wiltshire textile industry and the countryside

This study explores regional and chronological variations within the later medieval economy. In the later fourteenth century, the cloth industry grew rapidly in Salisbury and neighbouring Somerset, where it was beginning to break out from an urban core. In the first half of the fifteenth century it grew rapidly in west Wiltshire, until hit by the great slump from c.1450, and revived in the later part of the century. Industrial growth and recession affected the agricultural hinterland, where farming and the demand for land became dependent on the demands of a flourishing industry.