Peoples of the Kingdom
War, Plague, Slump And Recovery
The century after 1296 brought war between England and Scotland and scorched-earth tactics practised by both sides, a sharp fall in overseas trade, frequent incidence of famine and a series of plague epidemics. The 150 years before 1296 had seen recurrent trouble in both the west and south-west, but war had been avoided. The expansion of trade, the growth of a cash economy, the intensive concentration of rural settlement and a steady increase in the population were all aspects of the consolidation of a feudal but hybrid kingdom. The precise levels of overseas trade are unknown before the 1360s except for isolated customs returns of 1327-33 and 1341-3, but it is clear that the 'urban revival'65 of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave way to urban crisis and retrenchment which lasted for much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the 1370s and 1380s, there was a recovery in the export of wool and hides to levels of the late 1320s, and the last decade of the reign of James I (1406-37) saw customs revenue reach 60 per cent of the levels of a century earlier, but the period was otherwise indelibly marked by a long-term decline in trade.
This was followed by a certain expansion, still uneven, fluctuating and confined to parts of the urban economy, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century when there was some increase in trade with France and the Baltic. Yet the change in the nature of the economy was immense and it clearly sets Scotland of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries apart from the booming wool and cloth-based economy of the period of the Canmore kings. Wool exports in the 1480s were running at less than a quarter of the level of the 1320s and those of hides at less than half. The sharpness of the economic crisis caused by the Wars of Independence can, in the absence of customs records, only be guessed at but national assessments for land in the 1360s had fallen from a thirteenth-century level of £45,575 to £23,826, a drop of 48 per cent.
The new economy of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries - for such it was despite its continuing reliance on wool, hides and skins as its main exports -had profound effects on urban life. The focus of trade narrowed in the fourteenth century: fewer foreign merchants visited Scotland and the bulk of exports was sent to a new staple port of Bruges in Flanders. The trade in cloth, except for cheap, rough-woven material sent to the Baltic ports, contracted sharply; hides and untreated wool were sent to Bruges, which provided a range of manufactured goods and better-quality finished cloth. Scotland as a result conformed far more closely to the typical shape of a modem third-world economy after 1300 than it had before. There were structural changes as well within the Scottish urban economy. The long slump coincided, after the loss of Berwick, with the increasing grip taken by Edinburgh - the only major town with a port between the Tweed and the Forth - of more and more sectors of the export trade. By the 1320s it had 21 per cent of the trade in wool, 32 per cent by the 1370s and 71 per cent by the late 1450s. Former wool towns, such as Perth, Inverness and Stirling, were forced to diversify into other areas, usually leather.
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