Late Middle Ages

How the Black Death changed the labor economy

The Black Death produced one of the most dramatic transformations of the labour market in pre-modern history. The medieval economy, which had been built on a surplus of labour, suddenly found itself with a shortage. Wages rose. Working conditions improved. The institution of serfdom, the unfree labour system that had organised the medieval countryside for centuries, began to crumble. The change was uneven — rapid in England, slower in France, dramatic in the Italian cities, and partially reversed in eastern Europe — but in every part of Europe the surviving labourers and peasants found themselves in a market that had been fundamentally, and irrevocably, restructured.

The wider context of the pandemic is set out in the overview of the Black Death. The wave of peasant revolts that the labour crisis provoked is examined in Peasant uprisings after the Black Death. The persecution of minorities in the same period is treated in Jewish persecution and the spread of plague. The longer-term transformation of land use and the rise of the wool economy is examined in The wool trade and medieval England’s economy.

The World the Plague Took Apart

On the eve of the Black Death, the European labour market was a buyer’s market. Population growth over the previous two centuries had produced a large pool of landless labourers, and lords and employers had been able to set wages and conditions at low levels. Real wages in the early fourteenth century were, on most measures, below the level of the early thirteenth. The peasants of the heavy soils of the English Midlands, of the Beauvaisis in northern France, of the contado of Florence, and of the Silesian plains of eastern Germany were bound to the land by various forms of serfdom, obligated to work on the lord’s demesne for two or three days a week, to pay a range of customary dues, and to seek the lord’s permission before leaving the manor.

The Malthusian character of the pre-plague economy is one of the central points of the standard demographic account. Population growth in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries had pushed peasants onto marginal land, had put pressure on the food supply, and had made the rural poor particularly vulnerable to harvest failure. The Great Famine of 1315–1317, and the outbreaks of disease that followed it in the 1320s, had already shown that the system was at the limit of its capacity. The Black Death was, in this sense, a much greater and longer-lasting bad harvest, the demographic moment at which a stretched system broke.

The plague changed this almost overnight. With perhaps half the population dead in the worst-affected regions, and perhaps a third in the least affected, the surviving workers suddenly had bargaining power that they had never had before. Wages in agriculture rose by 30% to 50% in real terms within a decade of the first outbreak. Wages in skilled trades rose even faster. The English chronicler Henry Knighton, in his Chronicon, recorded the complaints of the lords: “the labourers and servants are so elated and wanton that they will not work except for very high wages.” The Italian chronicler Matteo Villani, brother of the more famous Giovanni, recorded the same phenomenon in Florence. The complaint was, in effect, a recognition that the labour market had been turned upside down.

The Statutes of Labourers and the Ordonnances

The response of the lordly class to the new labour market was to attempt to legislate it back to its old shape. In England, the Statute of Labourers was issued on 18 June 1349, less than a year after the first outbreak of plague, and a second, more elaborate Statute of Labourers was issued in 1351. The statute of 1349 ordered that “every man and woman of our realm of England, of whatever condition, free or servile, able in body and within the age of sixty years… shall be bound to serve him who shall so require them” and offered wages “as they were accustomed to take in the said twentieth year of our reign [1346].” The statute of 1351 added a long list of regulations about apprenticeship, about the wages of carters, ploughmen, shepherds, and other trades, and about the food allowances of servants.

In France, similar legislation was issued in the form of the Ordonnances of King John II, beginning in 1351. The French ordonnances attempted to fix wages at their pre-plague levels, to forbid workers from leaving their lord’s estate, and to require the consent of the lord before a peasant could take up residence in a town. In Castile, the Cortes of Valladolid of 1351 issued a similar set of regulations. In the Italian cities, the Arte and the guild authorities attempted to enforce similar restrictions through the guild statutes.

The legislation was, in the end, almost impossible to enforce. The English statute, for example, was a dead letter from the start. The Ordinance Book of the royal household, in the 1350s, recorded a long series of attempts to enforce the statute in particular cases, and the cases on the plea rolls of the common law courts show a steady stream of prosecutions of workers for taking higher wages, of lords for paying higher wages, and of peasants for leaving their lord’s estate. The crown attempted to enforce the statute through the Justices of Labourers, who were appointed in every county in the 1350s, and through the Justices of the Peace, who were given responsibility for the enforcement of the statute in the 1360s. The gap between the law on the books and the practice on the ground widened rapidly, and the Statute of Labourers, as the historian R. H. Hilton argued in The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (1975), became a symbol of the failure of the medieval state to control the labour market.

The historians Robert Allen and Christopher Dyer have, in different ways, shown the same effect. Allen, in Enclosure and the Yeoman (1992) and in his contribution to the Cambridge Economic History of Britain, used the data of manorial accounts and of the Calendar of Close Rolls to show that real wages in England roughly doubled between 1350 and 1500, before falling back as population growth resumed in the sixteenth century. Dyer, in Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (1989) and in Making a Living in the Middle Ages (2002), used the data of peasant consumption and of household budgets to show that the standard of living of the English peasant rose in the wake of the Black Death, and that the rise was sustained over the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The Commutation of Servile Tenure

The most significant long-term consequence of the labour shortage was the decline of serfdom. Serfdom, in the sense in which it existed in England, France, and the Low Countries on the eve of the Black Death, was a system of unfree labour in which peasants were bound to the land of a particular lord, obligated to perform a range of customary services (the opera of the corvée), and forbidden to leave without the lord’s permission. The system had been established in the early Middle Ages, and it had served as the foundation of the medieval manor.

The Black Death made serfdom uneconomical. With labour in short supply, lords found it impossible to compel the remaining peasants to perform the full range of customary services, and they were forced to commute labour services into money payments, which the peasants preferred. The commutation of labour services, in turn, transformed the peasant from a serf who was bound to perform labour into a tenant who paid rent for the use of land. The transformation was not, of course, instantaneous: in many manors the process of commutation took a generation or more, and in some regions it was not complete until the sixteenth century. But the direction of the change was clear, and the change was irreversible.

In England, the process was largely complete by 1400. The last major legal action against a villein in the English common law courts — the villenage cases of the early fifteenth century — was unsuccessful, and the few surviving forms of villeinage were abolished in the reign of Henry VII. In France, serfdom lingered in a few regions, particularly in the south, but it was effectively extinct by 1500. In the Low Countries, the process was complete by the late fifteenth century. In northern Italy, the surviving forms of serfdom were abolished in the course of the fifteenth century. In eastern Germany, by contrast, serfdom actually intensified in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the rising price of grain made it profitable for landlords to bind their peasants more tightly to the land.

Wages, Prices, and the Allen Thesis

The rise in real wages after the Black Death is one of the best-documented economic facts of the late Middle Ages, and the standard data set is the one assembled by the economic historian Robert Allen and his colleagues at the Global Price and Income History Group. The data show that real wages in England, France, and the Low Countries roughly doubled between 1350 and 1500, before falling back as population growth resumed in the sixteenth century. Wages in skilled trades, such as building and metalwork, rose faster than wages in agriculture. The wages of women, which had been low in the pre-plague economy, rose particularly fast, especially in occupations such as spinning and weaving, which were in short supply.

The standard account of the rise in real wages is the Allen thesis, named after Robert Allen and developed in collaboration with Christopher Dyer, John Hatcher, and others. The thesis is essentially a Malthusian one. Real wages were, in the pre-plague economy, low because the population was high and the marginal productivity of labour was low. The Black Death reduced the population, and the marginal productivity of labour rose. The rise in real wages was, in this sense, a direct consequence of the demographic shock. The same mechanism explains the long-run decline in real wages in the sixteenth century, as the population began to grow again and the marginal productivity of labour fell.

The Allen thesis has been challenged, in different ways, by a number of historians. John Hatcher, in Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348–1530 (1977), argued that the demographic account needs to be supplemented by an account of the institutional and political changes that affected the labour market. Mark Bailey, in his work on the English economy in the period after the Black Death, has shown that the rise in real wages was not uniform across the country, and that it was affected by local conditions. Christopher Dyer, in his work on the standard of living of the English peasant, has shown that the rise in real wages needs to be set against the decline in the number of working days, and that the net effect on the peasant household was smaller than the data on wages alone would suggest. The debate continues, but the broad outline of the demographic account is now widely accepted.

A West–East Contrast

The transformation of the labour economy was not uniform across Europe, and the contrast between the western and the eastern European experience is one of the great themes of late medieval and early modern economic history. In the West — in England, France, the Low Countries, northern Italy, and the Mediterranean — the labour crisis produced a rise in wages, a decline in serfdom, and a transformation of the labour market. In the East — in eastern Germany, in Bohemia, in Poland, and in the lands east of the Elbe — the labour crisis produced the opposite: a tightening of the bonds of serfdom, the imposition of new labour obligations, and the construction of a new and more oppressive form of unfree labour.

The contrast has been the subject of a long historiographical debate, and it is now best understood as the result of a combination of demographic, economic, and political factors. The eastern European estates were, on the eve of the Black Death, in the process of being colonised by German settlers who were being invited to take up land in return for labour services to the lord. The Black Death reduced the supply of settlers, and the lords were forced to bind the existing settlers more tightly to the land. The rising price of grain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries made it profitable for the lords to compel the peasants to work the demesne, and the result was a second serfdom that was, in some ways, more oppressive than the first. The contrast is sometimes called the “great divergence” of European history, and it is one of the most important economic facts of the early modern period.

The historian John Hatcher, in his various works on the late medieval English economy, has been particularly concerned to set the English experience in its European context. In The Black Death: A Personal History (2008), Hatcher followed the experience of a single English village, Walsham le Willows in Suffolk, through the years of the plague, and showed how the local labour market was transformed by the demographic shock. In his more recent work, Hatcher has developed a comparative account of the English and the eastern European experiences, and has argued that the difference was the result of the institutional inheritance of the two regions: in the West, the institutional inheritance favoured free labour, in the East, the institutional inheritance favoured servile labour. The argument is not uncontested, but it has the merit of explaining the west–east contrast in terms of the long-run development of European institutions.

A Foundation for the Modern Labour Market

The Black Death transformed the medieval labour economy from a buyer’s market to a seller’s market, and in doing so it laid the foundations for the free labour system that would dominate early modern Europe. The rise in real wages, the decline of serfdom, the improvement in working conditions, and the wave of social conflict that followed in the wake of the plague are all part of a single, connected story. The medieval labour system, which had been designed for a world of labour surplus, was broken by the plague, and the survivors had to invent a new one. The result was a profound shift in the balance of power between lord and peasant, and the first step toward the modern labour market.

References

  • Hatcher, John. Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348–1530. Macmillan, 1977.
  • Allen, Robert C. Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands 1450–1850. Clarendon Press, 1992.
  • Dyer, Christopher. Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
  • Hilton, R. H. The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages. Clarendon Press, 1975.
  • Brenner, Robert. “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism.” Past & Present 97 (1982): 16–113.