Europe’s population halved in most villages by 1470 from the fourteenth century

Evidence

The result of prolonged scarcity, endemic and pandemic plague, the intermittent but catastrophic invasions of ruthless armies, and the constant threat in many areas from well-organized robber bands, was seen not only in a dwindling population but in roads abandoned to brambles and briars, in arable land out of cultivation and in deserted villages. Contraction in the area of cultivation in its turn made dearth the more likely. There was in every sense a vicious circle. A sober estimate suggests that “in 1470 the number of households was halved in most European villages compared with the start of the fourteenth century”; the reconquest of forest and waste of the arable is “an episode equal in importance to the drama of the earlier clearings.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 163