Social and Economic Consequences of the Black Death
The Black Death did not stop at the cemetery wall. Within months of the first English deaths of summer 1348, the relationships on which medieval society rested — the bargain between lord and tenant, the value of a day’s labor, the legality of unfreedom, the safety of a merchant’s road — had begun to shift. Wages rose, rents were renegotiated, customary obligations were commuted, and in some places the very grammar of feudal tenure was rewritten in the chancery registers. The three articles in this section trace that transformation in three registers: the long restructuring of the labor market that made serfdom unviable in much of Western Europe, the wave of armed revolt in which that restructuring was contested, and the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in which the anxieties of a disordered world sought a scapegoat. Read together, they show the second half of the fourteenth century as a period in which the demographic shock of 1347–1351 forced, accelerated, or completed a set of changes that had been underway since the Great Famine of 1315–1317.
Land, wages, and the challenge to lordship
On the eve of the plague, the rural economy of Western Europe was a Malthusian one, stretched to its demographic ceiling and tightly bound by seigneurial power. Customary tenants owed labor services, fines, heriots, and merchet; landlords enjoyed a buyer’s market for labor; and the great open-field villages of England, northern France, the Low Countries, and northern Italy produced a thin surplus that was largely absorbed by rents, tithes, and demesne farming. The sudden loss of between a third and a half of the population between 1347 and 1351 inverts the relationship. Real wages in England roughly doubled between the 1340s and the 1420s; rents in many Italian and French regions were renegotiated downward; labor services were commuted into cash payments; and the Statute of Labourers of 1349, the French Ordonnances of 1350–1351, and the Catalan costums de remences were all attempts to legislate against a market that had decisively moved. Mark Bailey, in The English Manor c. 1200–c. 1500 (2002) and in his longer essays on the post-plague English village, has shown how the demographic shock unwound the manor over the following century. David Herlihy’s The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (1997) and Christopher Dyer’s An Age of Transition? (2005) are the indispensable broad surveys. The labour-economic story — wages, rents, demesne contraction, the commutation of services, and the legal mechanisms used to slow or reverse it — is told in detail in How the Black Death changed the labor economy.
The new economic balance produced a new politics. The Jacquerie of May–June 1358 in the Beauvaisis, the Île-de-France, and Picardy, in which peasant bands sacked the châteaux of a nobility accused of failing to protect them from plague and brigandage, was the first great rural revolt of the post-plague West; it was put down at Mello with the killing of perhaps twenty thousand insurgents. Twenty-three years later, the English Peasants’ Revolt of May–June 1381, with its march on London, its demand for the abolition of villeinage, and the famous couplet put in the mouth of John Ball — “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” — produced the most serious challenge to the English crown between the Conquest and the Civil War. Florence saw the tumulto dei ciompi of July–August 1378, in which the lowest grade of wool workers briefly took over the city government. Catalonia erupted in 1462–1486 in the remences war over the redemption of serfdom. R.H. Hilton’s work on the English peasantry and John Hatcher’s reconstruction of the demographic pressures in Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348–1530 (1977) frame the uprisings as the political underside of the labor transformation. The geography, chronology, and demands of these revolts are surveyed in Peasant uprisings after the Black Death.
Scapegoats and the crisis of community
In some regions the social crisis took a darker form, and the third article in this section takes up the most catastrophic wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Europe. The pogroms of 1348–1350 — beginning at Chillon on Lake Geneva in the autumn of 1348, sweeping through the Rhineland, the Main cities, the Moselle valley, the Lower Rhine, Brabant, Hainaut, the Dauphiné, and as far as Barcelona and the Crown of Aragon — were triggered by the well-poisoning libel, the accusation that Jews, lepers, and the Spanish conversos had conspired to poison the wells of Christendom. Thousands were killed; whole communities in the Rhineland, the Low Countries, and central Germany were destroyed and not reestablished for centuries. The destruction of the Strasbourg Jewish community on 14 February 1349, in which some two thousand Jews were burned, was the largest single massacre. The historian David Nirenberg, in Communities of Violence (1998), has set these events in the longer history of Christian–Jewish relations; Robert Chazan documented the chronicler sources in In the Wake of the Black Death (1991); the local archives of Cologne, Mainz, Erfurt, and Nuremberg preserve the names of the dead and the structure of the communities that survived. The detailed account is the subject of Jewish persecution and the spread of plague.
Articles in this section
- How the Black Death changed the labor economy
- Peasant uprisings after the Black Death
- Jewish persecution and the spread of plague