The evidence for the timing and pace of recovery is actually very sparse for all concerned, even for relatively well-documented England where there's nothing much to go on between the 1377-81 poll taxes and the lay subsidy and muster rolls of the 1520s, which have been taken to indicate little change between the two periods (2.2m and 2.3m respectively), with the nadir somewhere in between, though there's great uncertainty around the numbers, the low and its date.

Fot the Continent there's even less to go on, with little solid quantitative evidence for the 15th-16th centuries beyond scattered local or provincial returns: not until the latter half of the 17th century or even the 18th have we anything approaching reliable national totals, and even where there's good evidence for 1600 there's ususally nothing equivalent for 1500, 1400 or 1300 with which to compare it. So a good part of any disparity may be illusory, depending on the assumptions of compilers or the data available to them. Add to that the very ferocity and persistence of plague and other epidemic disease from the 14th century to the 17th or 18th, which makes it difficult to retrieve a desired population-size underlying "signal" from the impacts of recurrent mortality-crisis "noise", `

That said, there seems persuasive support for the proposition that English population growth was at best sluggish until perhaps c.1520, when me might expect a prior generation or so of marked increase - with the proviso that we can't be certain that other comparable regions weren't behaving similarly. In the absence of vital statistics data before the requirement for parish registers of baptisms and burials in 1538, it is impossible to say with certainty whether this was down to a continued heavy mortality or a dearth of births.

What we can conclude is that plague had been severe in 1500 and 1513, even if the contemporary "sweating sickness" appears to have been more an upper-class affair, at least in its 1529 incarnation. Influenza struck in 1497, syphilis shortly afterward, while smallpox was first mentioned in the 1510s, though it would not be a major killor until later. Even deaths in the tens of thousands per major outbreak would - against a broader unfavourable disease background - have been enough to delay visible recovery for decades in the absence of a population structure conducive to an exceptionally high birth rate.

In sum, the evidence is inconclusive and is likely to remain so. One feature of the scholarship of the past half-century has been to tend to shift the demographic turning-point to a later date - from Russell's 1430 to Wrigley's 1470s or 1480s or Hatcher's 1510s - but we can't be sure that this was even an exceptional phenomenon, such are the data limitations. Disease was to continue decimating local populations across Europe into the 18th century even as plague receded, with some western and southern lands yet to regain their 14th-century peak as late as 1600 (in places, indeed, even until after 1800): if England found itself more exposed than remoter regions, its experience was not altogether extraordinary.

Wrigley & Schofield's classic Population history of England starts in 1541, but discusses earlier estimates. The 1522-25 returns are discussed in Julian Cornwall, Economic History Review n.s. 23:1 (Apr 1970), while John Hatcher addresses the persistence of lethal epidemics in Past & Present 180 (Aug 2003) as well as in earlier articles and his Plague, population and the English economy. Creighton's History of epidemics in Britain remains an invaluable survey of the long-run disease context.