ABSTRACT
The making and marketing of cloth may have added substantially to the prosperity of a certain number of English towns in the later Middle Ages. But they sustained very few at their pre-Black Death size. Indeed the vacancies and dilapidations that are commonplaces of so many late medieval account rolls of corporate property show that towns, by then, had plenty of room to spare. In the circumstances it could hardly have been otherwise. Town populations had to be fed. But the farming community, being much smaller after the Black Death, would have found it extremely difficult to support as many townspeople as before without a revolution in farming methods or help from abroad.
