The Black Death (35 page)

Prices of agricultural produce seem on the whole to have more than regained their level within a year or two of the end of the plague, though they lagged behind the index for wages. Taking the two ten-year periods of 1341 to 1350 and 1351 to 1360, wheat, barley and other grains rose by up to 30 per cent, but the price of wool dropped slightly and live-stock varied so wildly as to make any deduction virtually impossible. Oxen fetched about 15 per cent more but cows about 3 per cent less; sheep substantially more, pigs and cart-horses slightly less; pullets and ducks
more but hens, geese and cocks less. The price of manufactured goods, on the other hand, dropped back a little from the
abnormally
high level of the years of the Black Death and immediately after but still remained well above the pre-plague average. Salt, which cost 6¼d
.
the bushel the decade before the plague, cost 10½d. between 1351 and 1360. Iron varied according to type but all types cost more and some increased threefold. Clouts almost doubled in price while canvas leapt from 2s. 5d. for the dozen ells to 6s. 5d.

In so far then as it can be assumed that the Black Death was primarily responsible for the altogether exceptional trend of wages and prices between 1340 and 1360 – and such an
assumption
can surely be safely made – then it is clear that it did the landlord little good and much harm. Even if he managed to
maintain
agricultural production at its previous level, he could expect to receive little more 2nd perhaps even less for his produce while having to pay substantially more for his labour and his imported articles. Wool, by far the most important crop produced for sale rather than consumption, actually brought the farmer a smaller return in the decades after the plague than before 1349. The blow was not economically devastating except, perhaps, in 1350 and 1351 and, during these years there was usually extra income from other sources to sustain the landlord. But it was certainly painful enough to provide a powerful disincentive to anyone wondering whether or not to carry on the farming of his demesne.

*

Thorold Rogers’s argument rested above all on the hypothesis that the Black Death so far reduced the population that those who remained were placed in an immeasurably stronger position when it came to bargaining with an employer. In the short term – that is to say in 1349, 1350 and 1351 – this was of course true. If a third of the peasants of a given area disappeared within a few months then, whatever the reserves in labour, there was bound to be serious dislocation. But provided the labour reserve was great enough – and it has already been argued that it was substantial
41
– then an adjustment of resources to needs was bound, in time, to put the matter right. In some areas the process of adjustment would be relatively simple; in others, where
the Black Death did its worst damage, it would be painful and protracted. But in the end it would be done.

Again and again in the patchwork of horror stories which
composes
our knowledge of the Black Death one of the most striking features has been the speed of recovery shown by the medieval community. In all the manors of the Bishop of Winchester which she studied, Dr Levett found only a very few where tenements remained vacant for more than a few years. On the estates of Crowland Abbey, where eighty-eight holdings were left empty, all but nine of these were quickly taken up; not by peasants from other villages who might have deserted land elsewhere and so left another gap to fill but by people with names already known on the manor who, one must presume, were landless
residents
before the plague. The estate of the Abbey, in fact, had sufficient surplus of man-power to fill even the huge vacuum left by the plague. At Cuxham, nine out of thirteen half-virgates were still vacant by March 1352 and in this case recourse was had to importing tenants from outside the manor. Within another three years all the vacancies were filled. Yet it would be a mistake to suggest that this was an easy or painless process, or that all areas recovered so completely. At Standon, for instance, one of the worst affected manors of the Earls of March, many tenements stood unoccupied until 1370. Even in the less depopulated areas the balance between work to be done and labour
available
was bound to be more precarious than in the past. England had consumed her fat and it was going to be far more difficult for it to recover a second time if any fresh strain were imposed.

Such a strain was to be imposed with the second epidemic of bubonic plague in 1361. In the meantime, however, the relatively light incidence of the Black Death among the generations most likely to bear children coupled with the new wealth and economic opportunities released by the great mortality, had produced an unusually high birth rate in the intervening years. A monk of Malmesbury, it is true, remarked that, ‘the women who
survived
remained for the most part barren during several years’,
42
but the evidence for the statement is obscure. At the most it can be taken as applying only to the period at the end of and immediately
after the epidemic when the sense of shock was still in the forefront of men’s minds and they might have deemed
procreation
offensive to the Almighty. Obviously by 1361 the
children
of the post-plague years were not yet competent to
undertake
the work done by their deceased uncles and cousins, but numerically at least the recovery had begun. It was only after 1360, and still more in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, that depopulation began substantially to change the face of England.

*

Another point to which Thorold Rogers attached particular importance was the ease with which the peasant could escape from his manor in the chaotic conditions of the English countryside in 1349 and 1350. This ever-present if unvoiced threat must have made the landlord far more amenable to the peasants’ pleas for better conditions of work. It is only fair to say, however, that on most manors there was little to stop a villein escaping even before 1349. He probably had only to step over a brook or cross some invisible demarcation line to put himself beyond the reach of his master except through complicated and usually expensive legal processes. Given that the landlord was likely to have had more than enough labour on his estate already, it was unlikely that he would pursue his recreant villein with any vigour. ‘It cannot be urged too often’, wrote Vinogradoff,
43
‘that the real guarantee against a dispersion of the peasantry lay in the
general
fairness of the conditions in which it was placed.’

After the Black Death many villeins, viewing enviously the high wages earned by those no longer bound to render predial services, began to think that the conditions in which they were placed were no longer generally fair. Rogers is therefore surely justified in his belief that the Black Death was a stimulus
towards
greater mobility of labour and hence towards the disintegration of the manorial system. But the legislation which this new mobility provoked to counter it went far towards nullifying this result. For a long time it was accepted doctrine that the
Ordinance
of Labourers and the subsequent Statute of Labourers were dead letters from the start; ignored by the labourers and
treated with indifference or contempt even by the employers themselves. Knighton, with his categoric statement: ‘Labourers were so elated and contentious that they did not pay attention to the command of the King’,
44
was perhaps the father of this thesis, but the vision of the sturdy British peasant standing up stoutly to any interference with his liberties by wicked barons or cold-hearted bureaucrats was calculated to appeal irresistibly to any Whiggish historian. The laws should have failed and
therefore
they did fail.

It is hard to reconcile this sympathetic doctrine with the facts. The object of the statutes was to pin wages and prices as closely as possible to a pre-plague figure and thus to check the inflation that existed in the England of 1349–51. The Government realized that this could never be achieved so long as labourers were free to move from one employer to another in search of higher wages and so long as employers were free to woo away labourers from their neighbours with advantageous offers. By restricting the right of an employee to leave his place of work, by compelling him to accept work when it was offered him, by forbidding the employer to offer wages greater than those paid three years
before
, by making illegal the gift of alms to the able-bodied
unemployed
and, finally, by fixing the prices which butchers, bakers and fishmongers could charge their customers, they hoped to
recreate
the conditions that pertained before the plague and maintain them for ever. The statute of 1351 took this one stage farther by codifying the wages of labourers and artisans.

This was, of course, a hopeless quest. But, though any analogy to the twentieth century would be ridiculous, it must be admitted that, as prices and incomes policies go, the
fourteenth-century
freeze was remarkably successful. Between 1349 and 1359 six hundred and seventy-one men were appointed to enforce the statutes. Though the bulk of the prosecutions were inevitably of offending peasants, the employer did not escape entirely. Dr Putnam records cases of one employer prosecuted for ‘eloigning’ the servant of another with an offer of high wages, a rector prosecuted for paying his household servants too much and a reeve for hiring reapers in a public place at an illegal rate.
45
On the whole the statutes were not imposed with seventy,
whether against employer or employed. Imprisonment was extremely rare and fines for the most part moderate. The result is self-evident. Within a few years wages and prices had fallen back; not indeed to the pre-plague level, but at least to a point well
below
their maximum. Governmental action cannot be given all the credit for this; it is probable that there would anyhow have been a reaction once the immediate shock of the Black Death had worn off. But equally it seems unreasonable to dismiss as a total failure legislation which, in fact, achieved most of what it set out to do.

In defence of the statutes it can be said that, though loaded heavily against the peasant, they were not conceived solely as instruments for his repression. Certainly, in part, they were inspired by the fear that labour would get out of control but also they reflected a genuine wish to prevent the wealthy land-owner or industrialist drawing away labour from his weaker rival.
46
They can, therefore, be presented as seeking to protect, if not the poor, at least the not-so-rich. But any legislation which imposes a maximum but no minimum wage and which expects the baker – whose interest it is to see prices rise – and the farmer – whose interest it is to see wages fall – to respond in the same way to legislation suggesting that both prices and wages should remain as they were, must inevitably discriminate against the poorer classes. The laws may not have been intended to repress but they were administered largely by the land-owners in their own interests. Inevitably it was the labourer who lost. For the most part the statutes did not operate so as to make the labourer worse off than he had been before, but they cut off a line of
advance
towards a new prosperity which had been opened by the plague. The fact that they were largely successful was an important factor in the compound of national issues and local grievances which was eventually to give rise to the Peasants’ Revolt.

*

Can it be said therefore, in schoolboy phrase, that the Black Death ‘caused’ the Peasants’ Revolt? The classic thesis that it was the reversal of a far-advanced trend towards commutation which provoked resistance among the peasants must in part at least be rejected. If, on manors as numerous and as scattered as
those of the Bishop of Winchester, Dr Levett can find ‘absolutely no sound evidence for retrogression or greater severity in
exacting
services after 1349’,
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then no generalization which assumes the existence of such retrogression can be wholly valid. Certainly the same is not true in every part of England: there were cases in which peasants were forced back into a servile status from which they had previously escaped. Such cases were
undoubtedly
resented. But in sum there is no reason to think that these constituted a major, let alone the major, factor in instigating the uprising.

What then did cause a rebellion as determined and as
wide-spread
as that of 1381? Petit-Dutaillis, who may be said to have spear-headed the attack on the established point of view,
considered
that it was a compound of irritating feudal burdens, mainly in the form of financial exactions, and the clumsy tax policy of the royal advisers. ‘The contradiction which existed between their legal state and their economic advancement was evidently a source of daily exasperation.’
48
Professor Hilton, who saw the genesis of the Peasants’ Revolt at the very beginning of the thirteenth century, has analysed the factors which led to
unrest
.
49
Many of them, it will be obvious, were active irritants long before 1348. The undue conservatism of the landlord who sought to preserve the irritating frills as well as the essential spirit of the manorial system, the denial to the peasant of the right to dispose of his chattels, the fact that prices rose faster than wages, the resentment of the villein who saw his free neighbour exploiting the new circumstances to the full, the inequity and uneven incidence of the poll taxes, the abduction of peasants by labour-hungry landlords, the curbs on liberty of action imposed by the new legislation: these were the elements which finally provoked explosion.

But because the Black Death was not an immediate cause it does not follow that it should not bear a large share of the responsibility. If there had been no plague it is arguable that the circumstances which so disturbed society in 1381 would
eventually
have arisen. The break-down of the structure of a society can never be painless and, by the second half of the fourteenth century, the disintegration of the manorial system was inevitable
and already well advanced. But the Black Death immeasurably aided the process; exacerbated existing grievances, heightened contradictions, made economic nonsense of what previously had been a situation difficult but still viable.