Social mobility, demographic change, and landed society in late medieval England.

The article presents a paper which aims to document the impact of the plague-induced demographic crisis of the second half of the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries on the succession patterns of the English landed aristocracy. The figures suggest that there was a high rate of failure of families in the direct male line even in stable demographic conditions and thus, assuming common-law rules of inheritance, a significant degree of land transmission through heiresses. This expansion in the percentage of common-law heiresses must, however, be viewed against the background of the control that landowners could exert over the descent of their inheritances. In the use and the entail they had a potential solution to the problem of natural wastage of male lines. The later medieval period was one of developed and developing avenues of wealth acquisition outside land. The ready convertibility of new money into land was given added significance in the period of demographic crisis and beyond by the connection between the acquisition of land by purchase and its acquisition by marriage.