To judge by the "all-time rich lists" that occasionally surface, you'd imagine it was a vastly more unequal time. But I'd beware any such comparisons, because in the days of seigneurial economy personal wealth can be difficult to gauge because land - the greatest asset of all - wasn't owned outright and a lord did not enjoy sole use of its product, the source of perhaps 60% of all income.

To see what I mean, imagine manorialism's in full swing and the king grants me Essex - all of it. In today's terms I seem a multi-billionaire overnight: and even in late medieval terms I'm notionally worth perhaps £1½ million when the average income is about £1 annually. But there's a catch, or rather two. First, the land isn't really "mine": I "hold" it "of" the king, to administer, dispense justice, maintain order and draw upon its resources according to custom to maintain myself and to support him when called upon to do so. But I can't sell it - which means I can't actually find out its present market value as an asset (not that anyone has £1½ million in cash anyway) - and if I fall out of favour he may take it away from me. And second, the resources and product aren't available to me to use as I please, because there's the small matter of the 100,000 inhabitants I need to exploit those resources and produce an annual surplus - and they have rights too, beyond having to be fed, housed, clothed and supplied with the tools of their trade. So "ownership" of the main asset doesn't really exist unless you're a fortunate freeholder with no obligations beyond tax and perhaps military service.

We could of course add up the money, precious metal, movable goods and anything else we can identify as fully owned, but that seems only to tell a small part of the story, leaving most real wealth unclaimed. Until dependent tenure gives way fully to outright title in land, it seems safer and more consistent to think in terms of income, which is unfortunate as asset-holding is notoriously the more revealing of inequality. As luck would have it there is an estimate of income by broad classes for England at the start of the 14th century: Bruce Campbell (Past & Present 188, 1995) puts the income of seigneurial households (the top 2% by rank) at 14% of all incomes, of other rural households (78%) at 65%, and of urban households (20%, evidently including many very small localities presumably distinguished chiefly by a local market and little else) at 21%: Nicholas Mathew put the seigneurial incomes slightly higher, at 16%. But there's sharper concentration at the very top, with the richest 0.1% receiving 6½% of all income, nearly half of the share for the top 2%.

How does that compare to modern income disparity? In the last couple of decades the top 2% have received about a tenth of all taxable income, which does suggest we're rather less unequal, though the non-taxable income may alter the picture (not drastically, I suspect). That in itself surprises me, as in a poorer society with less overall disposable income over subsistence, there should be less to concentrate in more fortunate hands. But on the face of it, we're fairer now than then, though we've a long way to go.