Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

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. {427} 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. {428} 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.

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}