[Sca-cooks] Was Medieval England more Merrie than thought?

[Johnna Holloway]

Maybe being a serf wasn't so bad after all! Medieval Britons were  
twice as rich as the poor in the Third World today

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336143/Medieval-Britons-twice-rich-poor-Third-World-today.html#ixzz17RUOWcMt

"In a paper entitled British Economic Growth 1270-1870 published by  
the University of Warwick’s Centre on Competitive Advantage in the  
Global Economy (CAGE) the researchers find that living standards in  
medieval England were far above the “bare bones subsistence”  
experience of people in many of today’s poor countries.

This new figure of $1,000 is not only significantly higher than  
previous estimates for that period in England – it also indicates that  
on average medieval England was better off than some of the world’s  
poorest nations today

The research shows that the path to the Industrial Revolution began  
far earlier than commonly has been understood. A widely held view of  
economic history suggests that the Industrial Revolution of 1800  
suddenly took off, in the wake of centuries without sustained economic  
growth or appreciable improvements in living standards in England from  
the days of the hunter-gatherer. By contrast, we find that the  
Industrial Revolution did not come out of the blue. Rather, it was the  
culmination of a long period of economic development stretching back  
as far as the late medieval period"

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/medieval-england-had-1000-per-capita.html

Johnnae, playing librarian