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This new research offers a novel solution to that evidential challenge, using finds of pottery – a highly durable indicator of human presence - as a proxy for population change in a manner that is both scalable and replicable, it shows that pottery use fell by almost a half in eastern England in the centuries immediately after the Black Death. This supports the emerging consensus that the population of England remained somewhere between 35 and 55 per cent below its pre-Black Death level well into the sixteenth century.