15. THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES
ONE 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.{429} Henry, in twelve volumes, could manage only fourteen lines.{430} 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’.{431} 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.{432} 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.’{433}
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.{434} 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.{435}
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’.{436}
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.