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{469} – 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’,{470} 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,{471} ‘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’,{472} 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.{473} 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.