Barbara Harvey

"It is now widely agreed that the economy of western Europe contracted in the later Middle Ages, but the causes of this depression and its time-limits are still disputed. Professor Postan argues that the depression was intimately connected with a decline in population beginning early in the fourteenth century and brought about by the operation of Malthusian checks and soil exhaustion."

"Much work that is absolutely essential for the continuance and progress of an ordered society has a severely limited attraction for those who perform it. How, nevertheless, men and women were persuaded to work regularly or at all in the Middle Ages has provided one of the central themes in the study of the period, for this is what we study in the institutions of slavery, serfdom and villeinage—all three were ways and means of persuading reluctant workers to work."

"Between the early fifteenth century and the late, the expectation of life of a monk at age 20 fell by eight years, and at age 25 by more than six."

"In his Rule, St. Benedict entrusted all the material concerns of the monastery to a single official. The cellarer, as he was called, was to follow the abbot's instructions in all things, but with this proviso it was to give the monks their due allowance of food at the appointed time, take care of the sick, the children who were then part of the monastic community, and the poor, and look after the monster's utensils and property as though these were the sacred vessels of the altar."