If an occupation census had been taken in the eleventh century it would probably have revealed that quite 90 percent of the people were country inhabitants who drew their livelihood from farming, herding, fishing or the forest. (46){{U}}An air photograph taken at that time would have revealed spotted villages, linked together by unsurfaced roads and separated by expanses of forest or swamp. {{/U}}There were some towns, but few of them housed more than 10,000 persons. (47){{U}}A second picture, taken in the mid-fourteenth century would show that the villages had grown more numerous and also more widespread, for Europeans had pushed their frontier outward by settling new areas.{{/U}} There would be more people on the roads, rivers and seas, carrying food or raw materials to towns which had increased in number, size and importance. But a photograph taken about 1450 would reyeal that little further expansion had taken place during the preceding hundred years.
Any attempt to describe the countryside during those centuries is prevented by two difficulties. In the first place, we have to examine the greater part of Europe’s 3,750,000 square miles, and not merely the Mediterranean lands. In the second place, the inhabitants of that wide expanse refuse to fit into our standard pattern or to stand still.
(48){{U}}In 1450, most Europeans probably lived in villages, but some regions were so hilly, lacking in good soil, or heavily timbered that villages could not keep going, and settlement was that of solitary herdsmen or shepherds.{{/U}} Some areas had better access to market than others and were therefore more involved in commercial agriculture than in farming: (49){{U}}Large landowners were more likely than small landlords to run their estates and especially their domains more systematically — and also to keep those records from which we learn most of what we know about the subject.{{/U}} Some areas had never been quite feudalized; their farmers were more free from lordship and even from landlordship. Some regions had been recently settled, and their tenants had been offered liberal terms of tenure in order to lure them into the wilderness. (50){{U}}Finally, there was a time element; the expansion and prosperity that characterized the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century produced or maintained conditions which were unsuitable to the stormier days preceding or the lean ones following it.{{/U}}