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manage a “field-trip” to England in 1485, the natural feature which would probably strike us most forcefully, especially in comparison to England over five centuries later, would be the forests. Early modern England was covered with trees. The Crown owned most forests; indeed, what defined a forest to contemporaries was not so much trees but forest law jurisdiction. In theory, this law preserved the forests for the purposes of providing the king with the pleasures of the hunt and the game it yielded for his table. In reality, these laws were not everywhere strictly enforced. As a result, people who lived in the forest developed a distinct culture and economic system: living in small hamlets, surviving by dairy farming, mining, and poaching the king’s game. Trees were, in fact, the most important natural resource in England, for a great deal that we make with steel or plastic or rubber today was made of wood in 1485. Ships, houses, wagons, furniture – all were fashioned out of England’s forests. As the population grew during the early modern period, and with it demand for timber as building material and fuel, the forests thinned out dramatically.
    Iron and the raw materials necessary to make it, such as tin and coal, also abounded in England in 1485. But they were too expensive to mine and too difficult to fashion at the start of our period to create more than isolated pockets of local economic significance. Far more important was the wood noted above – and sheep. Sheep provided wool, which was, in 1485, virtually the only commodity made in England that was in high demand abroad, in Europe. Nearly every part of the country engaged in sheep farming, but it was especially important in the hillier and remoter areas such as the West Country, the western portion (or West Riding) of Yorkshire, and East Anglia.
    Finally, before leaving the question of England’s physical environment, we must address its climate. A standing joke, in England and elsewhere, is that English weather is awful. But weather is really a matter of perspective. If one is used to the weather of Spain or California, English weather is very disappointing. But if one comes from Murmansk or Chicago, the English climate is really quite mild. Thanks to the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream, England rarely gets very hot or cold. 7 This mildness, combined with frequent, but not torrential, rainfall, means that England is highly suitable for certain crops, especially heavy grains like wheat or barley. This advantage was of the utmost importance, for on the weather depended the harvest and on the harvest depended everything else. Too much sun and the crops withered. Too much rain and they rotted. Too good a harvest and prices fell, and so did the incomes and purchasing power of farmers. Too poor a harvest and food prices rose, possibly out of the range of the poorest members of society. Too little food and multitudes sickened or starved. The land and its produce do indeed mold the people, for good or for ill.
    It is now time to examine the people who were shaped by, and who in turn shaped, the land we have been describing. What were the people of England like in 1485? What mattered to them? How did they explain their world and organize their society? How did they make a living? How would these things change after 1485?
    This Happy Breed
    If, somehow, we were transported back to England in the year 1485, the first thing that would strike us about its inhabitants would probably be how few there were (which would also be the most obvious explanation for our earlier observation regarding the forests). England (including Wales) in 1485 had only about 2.2 million people (as compared to about 53 million today). In fact, its population had once been much larger, at least 4 to 5 and perhaps as many as 6 million people at the end of the thirteenth century. But in 1348–9 the Black Death – almost certainly bubonic plague – had swept into England, probably