The Black Death (33 page)

It will be obvious from all this that to draw any conclusion must be hazardous. Little more than an informed guess is
possible
. It can safely be assumed that a figure of 45 per cent, equivalent to the figure of mortality among the clergy, would be the highest point of any possible bracket.
Pace
Russell, it seems incredible that the figure could be less than the 23 per cent which he suggested as the adjusted total derived from inquisitions post-mortem. A half-way point between these two poles would
suggest
a death rate of roughly a third. This would accord reasonably well with the evidence of the ecclesiastical registers. It is
conspicuously
lower than the figure derived from the payment of frankpledge dues or than most of the manors for which precise statistics happen to be available but these latter totals are not adjusted to take account of natural death. It is anyhow not
unreasonable
to expect that dramatically bad news would be recorded more enthusiastically than the humdrum figures of the luckier manors.

As a rough and ready rule-of-thumb, therefore, the statement that a third of the population died of the Black Death should not be too misleading. The figure might quite easily be as high as 40 per cent or as low as 30 per cent; it could conceivably be as high as 45 per cent or as low as 23 per cent. But these are surely the outside limits. On this basis the approximate total for the dead in England would be 1.4 million. No figure above one
million
and below 1.8 million would be astonishing but the nearer
that the actual figure approached the median, the more it would seem to accord with the existing evidence.

*

Finally there is the question whether more or less the same proportion holds good for continental Europe. Probably the most useful observation which one can make on this is that there is no obvious reason why it should not. The regional variations which are so evident in England must be, of course, immeasurably greater in a continent with its wide range of climate, landscape and racial types. There are certain areas, for instance Tuscany, where the joint efforts of contemporary chroniclers and modern scholars make it almost certain that the death rate was higher than in England. There are others, for instance Bohemia, where the incidence of the plague was clearly lower. For most of the Continent even the inadequate medieval records which exist in England are lacking or have not yet been exploited – the material for a serious comparison does not exist. But it can still be said that there are few grounds for drawing distinctions between England and the rest of Europe.

Such calculations as have been made for individual countries are not at variance with this somewhat negative assertion. In his careful study of the effects of the Black Death in France, Renouard concluded that the only rule which could safely be put forward was that the overall death rate varied between one-eighth and two-thirds according to the region.
26
Doren has estimated that between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of city dwellers in Italy died but that, in the countryside, the proportion was considerably lower.
27
Neither of these estimates can be translated into a death rate valid for the whole country, a form of
calculation
which these leading authorities prudently eschewed. In so far as they point in any direction it is towards a figure greater than a third. Certainly they are hard to reconcile with anything substantially lower. But such speculation is unprofitable. To maintain that one European in three died during the period of the Black Death can never be proved but, equally, cannot be wildly far from the truth. Further than that, in the present state of knowledge, one cannot go.

O
NE
third of a country’s population cannot be eliminated over a period of some two and a half years without considerable
dislocation
to its economy and its social structure. The historian must expect to find conspicuous changes in the life of the English community in the years immediately following the Black Death. At least some trace of the scars will survive into the succeeding decades or even centuries. But exactly what these changes were and how great was their significance has been the subject of bitter and protracted debate. The subject is far from being closed today.

The great eighteenth and nineteenth-century historians paid little attention to the Black Death as a force in English history. Hume, in his eight volumes covering the period from the Roman Conquest to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, devoted to the plague one paragraph of sixteen lines.
1
Henry, in twelve volumes, could manage only fourteen lines.
2
Green at least gave it a page and a half and admitted that it had some social consequences but even his treatment was somewhat cursory and he obscurely secreted the passage in a chapter entitled ‘The Peasants’ Revolt’.
3
Given such conspicuous omissions, it was natural that later historians should celebrate with some exuberance their
rediscovery
of the Black Death. ‘The year of the conception of modern man was the year 1348, the year of the Black Death,’ wrote
Friedell
.
4
It was as significant a phenomenon as the Industrial
Revolution
, claimed G. M. Trevelyan, though the latter was less striking in its effects since it was not, like the plague, ‘a
fortuitous
obstruction fallen across the river of life and temporarily diverting it.’
5

The classic exposition of the Black Death’s role in England as a social force of the first importance comes from that great
medievalist
, Thorold Rogers.
6
Many of his conclusions have now been
challenged, and challenged with justification, but for breadth of learning, originality of mind and happiness of phrasing he stands far above most of those who have corrected him. ‘The effect of the Plague’, he wrote, ‘was to introduce a complete revolution in the occupation of the land.’ His contention, in grossly over-simplified form, was that commutation, that is to say the
substitution
of wages and rent in monetary terms for the labour services owed by the villein to the lord, was already well
advanced
by the time of the Black Death. The sudden disappearance of so high a proportion of the labour force meant that those who already worked for wages were able to demand an increase while those who had not yet achieved this status agitated to commute their services and share in the benefits enjoyed by freemen. If the landlord refused, conditions were peculiarly propitious for the villein to slip away and seek a more amenable master
elsewhere.

The landlord was thus in a weak position. Finding himself forced to pay higher wages and obtaining lower prices for his produce because of the reduced demand, he increasingly tended to break up his demesne and let it off for a cash rent to the
freemen
or villeins of his manor. But he did not succumb without a fight and Parliament came to his rescue with legislation designed to check increased wages and the free movement of labour. The landlords sought to put back the clock and not only to hold on to the relatively few feudal services which still existed but to exact others which had been waived in the period before the Black Death while labour was cheap and plentiful. The result was resentment on the part of the serfs which simmered angrily for thirty years and finally erupted in 1381 in the shape of the
Peasants’
Revolt.

This sequence of events is plausible and convincing. On the basis of the information available to Thorold Rogers it is, indeed, easy to accept that no more satisfactory pattern of development could have been constructed to bridge the gap between the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt. His information, however, proved to be far from complete. Subsequent research has
demonstrated
conclusively that things did not happen according to his tidy scheme. But when it comes to deciding what actually did
happen, the impressive unanimity of the historian is significantly less evident. And, within the framework of this problem, the importance to be attached to the Black Death as a factor in the system’s disintegration, is far from being definitively established.

Before outlining the counter-arguments which the critics of Thorold Rogers have put forward it would be useful to restate three general considerations, illustrations of which have already been cited at many points but which must constantly be borne in mind if the effects of the Black Death are to be seen in proper perspective. The first of these is that the damage done by the epidemics of bubonic plague in the fourteenth century was cumulative. The epidemic of 1348 was certainly the most
devastating
and, being the first, by far the best remembered, but
further
outbreaks occurred in 1361, 1368–9, 1371, 1375, 1390 and 1405.
7

On the whole these were progressively less violent but the second epidemic of 1361, by any standards other than those of the Black Death, was catastrophic in its dimensions. The
progressive
depopulation of England which resulted from this
sequence
of epidemics, as each new generation was attacked before it had made good the losses of the last, was economically and psychologically a depressive quite as dangerous as the holocaust of the Black Death itself. One authority, indeed, has gone so far as to say that the ‘most important consequence of the Black Death in fact was simply that the disease was firmly established in England’.
8

Whenever, therefore, the question arises of the responsibility of the Black Death for any marked change in England – as in the evolution of some new social form or a decline in wealth or population – unless the comparison is strictly between the period before 1348 and the period between 1351 and 1361, then two and not one epidemics have got to be taken into account. If the comparison is made with the state of affairs at some date near the end of the fourteenth century then the problem of
responsibilities
becomes still more difficult to resolve since three or four epidemics had, by then, taken their toll, as well, of course, as all the other factors which may have contributed to the
transformation
. It is not uncommon to find that a certain village had, say,
fifty-five land holders in 1310 and only thirty in 1377 and for the deduction to be drawn that the Black Death must therefore have been responsible for almost halving the population. It may have been. Almost certainly it was the most important single factor. But in the absence of evidence which will show exactly when and why the drop in numbers took place the contention must remain unproven. Reservations of this kind are still more
important
when the problem relates not to a fall in population but to a switch from one kind of land-holding to another or to some other social problem.

The second point to remember is that some signs of the decline of the economy were already evident before 1348. No graph could be charted to show the point which the process had by then reached nor was there any consistency between one area and another. But for at least twenty-five years before the Black Death exports, agricultural production, the area of cultivated land and possibly also the population had all been shrinking. In assessing the
baleful
effects of the Black Death these earlier difficulties must never be forgotten. Continued deterioration in the state of England – and, indeed, of Europe – would have been likely, even if it had never occurred.

Thirdly and finally, the economic impact of the Black Death was to some extent blunted by the fact that England, even though by 1348 there may already have been some decline, was still grossly over-populated. By this it is not meant that the population was greater than the land could support, though this can and has been argued,
9
but merely that the working
population
had expanded far beyond the work available. In the economic conditions of the fourteenth century this led to chronic under-employment rather than unemployment. Vinogradoff has pointed out that each virgate often had as many as five men working or living on it so that the villein’s land could be tended, the service rendered to the lord and a comfortable surplus of labouring capacity still be left unconsumed.
10
Maitland’s
contention
that the landlord was exacting only about half the labour services owed to him, amply confirmed by Miss Levett in her study of the manors of the Bishop of Winchester,
11
is another illustration of this point. It was not through any generosity on
the part of the landlord that these services were remitted but nther because there were by so far too many villeins available to do the work that the landlord would have found it quite
impossible
to employ them all.

This surplus of labour was not confined to the peasants. The lowest computation of the number of priests then available to serve the 8,670 parishes of England is fifteen thousand. For a
population
of 4.2 million this would give an allowance of one priest for every two hundred and eighty parishioners or more or less every sixty-seven families. Dr Coulton estimates
12
that, even in January 1349, there must have been three priests surviving to fill every two priestly vacancies. Unless so generous a margin existed it would be impossible to explain how, throughout the plague, almost every vacant benefice was filled within a few weeks.

Bearing these factors in mind, it remains to consider whether the Black Death did indeed bring about as fundamental a
revolution
in land tenure and social organization as has been
suggested
. There is, of course, much that is incontestably true in the thesis. Among the phenomena which Thorold Rogers noted as being particularly relevant were the rise in the level of wages and of prices and the greatly increased mobility of labour. Though regional variations existed, these were variations of degree and duration rather than kind. In every part of England for which evidence exists the tendencies were to be seen.

‘The immediate effect of the Plague,’ wrote Rogers, ‘was to double the wages of labour; in some districts to raise the rate even beyond this.’
13
In Cuxham, a ploughman paid 2s. per annum before the plague earned 7s. in 1349–50 and as much as 10s. 6d. in 1350–51.
14
(These figures are, in fact, not so conspicuously out of line with those of Rogers as at first appears since they ignore certain variations of payment in kind which, if they could be expressed in monetary terms, would certainly go a long way towards reducing the real figures for 1350–51 to about half the apparent total. Two shillings per annum was, of course, an inconsiderable element in the ploughman’s total remuneration.) In Teddington and Paddington wages were doubled in the first year.
15
Rogers’s own figures show that a thresher who had been paid 2½d. a day in 1348 earned 6d. in 1349 and 4½d. in 1350,
while a mower received 5d. an acre in 1348 but increased this to 9d. in 1349 and 1350.
16

All this supports the thesis that wages more or less doubled. But not all evidence points to so sharp an increase. In her
examination
of the manors of the Bishop of Winchester, Professor Levett found that in some, though by no means all cases, wages rose by between a quarter and a third
17
while Lord Beveridge was able to detect only minor increases in another group of the Bishop’s manors
18
but a jump of more than 75 per cent in the wages paid on the estate of the Abbot of Westminster
19
But even though Rogers’s estimate may be on the generous side as an average for the whole of England, it is clear that wages rose rapidly and
substantially
and imposed a heavy burden on any landlord who depended largely on paid labour to farm his demesne.

Professor Rogers and the other proponents of his theories are also undoubtedly right in saying that prices of agricultural products fell steeply during and directly after the Black Death; thus making still more troublesome the life of the landlord. Lack of demand was, of course, the prime cause. Knighton’s complaint that ‘a man could buy for half a mark a horse which formerly had been worth forty shillings’,
20
has already been mentioned. Rogers has shown that oxen which fetched 13s. 7d. in 1347 and 10s. 6d. in 1348, were sold for only 6s. 8d. in 1349. A cow fell in value from 9s. to 6s. 6d. and a sheep from 2s. 2d. in 1347 to 1s. 5d. in 1348, is. 4d. in 1349 and 1s. 3d. in 1350. Poultry seem more or less to have maintained their prices and corn did reasonably well because of a poor harvest in 1349, but the price of wool was lower than at any other time in the fourteenth century. Against this, the cost of manufactured products, many of which the
landlord
would have had to buy, tended to rise steeply because of difficulties of transport and of the death rate among the skilled artisans who, unlike the agricultural workers, had no pool of surplus labour ready to fill the gaps. Every one knew how to cut hay but few indeed were competent to make a nail. The price of canvas rose from 2s. 3½d. in 1347 to 2s. 9d. in 1349 and 4s. 3d. in 1350; a bushel of salt which cost 4⅝d. in 1347 could not be bought for less than is. 2d. in 1350; iron jumped from 8s. 6d. to over a pound for twenty-five pieces.
21

The landlord was to some extent sheltered against these
difficulties
by the extra income which accrued in 1349 and 1350 from the entry fines levied on the estates of the dead before the heir was allowed to take them over and the cattle which were
collected
as heriots, a form of death duty paid in kind. But this was a once-and-for-all increment and, anyway, often had to be waived in cases where no heir survived or the survivor could not afford to pay the fine. Heriots, indeed, could be an embarrassment. In Farnham where fines rose from under
£
20 to over
£
100, the reeve was forced to take on extra meadows and engage more labour because it was impossible to dispose of the influx of cattle at a reasonable price.
22