Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

Professor Rogers’s third point is no less valid. There was undoubtedly greater mobility of labour during and directly after the Black Death and any landlord unready to make concessions to his tenants might well find that they had vanished to seek a kindlier master. The case of the tenants of the manor of Woodeaton who ‘would have departed had not Brother Nicholas of Upton, then Abbot, made an agreement with them…’ {451} has already been mentioned. At Forncett, in the generation succeeding the Black Death, over half the customers’ tenements and a quarter of the sokemen’s reverted to the lady of the manor because of the death or flight of the sitting tenants and were subsequently relet at a money rent. {452} Some of those who fled turned up a little later on neighbouring manors, others disappeared altogether, either to farms in more distant parts or, perhaps, to make a new life in the rapidly expanding cloth trade. {453} A Lincolnshire ploughman refused to serve except by the day and unless he had fresh meat instead of salt. When he could not get what he wanted, his retort was to disappear and offer his services elsewhere. {454}

It would be pointless to multiply such instances. The proof that labour was on the move is provided by the energetic efforts which the Government made to check it. The Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 and the subsequent Statute of Labourers in 1351 were, inter alia, a direct attempt to prevent workmen transferring their loyalties from one employer to another. Except for the application of the statute to freeman as well as bond there was nothing sensationally new in this. The most interesting feature, indeed, was that it had proved necessary to pass a statute at all and, incidentally, to set up complicated and expensive administrative machinery to enforce it. ‘The statue of labourers’, wrote Dr Putnam, ‘must be regarded not as having created a new system or a new set of economic relations but as affording proof that radical changes had occurred, ushering in a new era.’ {455} Perhaps the most radical of these changes was the new desire, even determination on the part of the medieval labourer to have a say in deciding his terms of employment and to seek his fortune elsewhere if such a right were denied him.

It is no more possible to dispute that these phenomena existed than it is to doubt Rogers’s contention that the landlord – unable to hire labour except at greatly increased wages, unable to get a good price for his products or to buy what he needed for the farm except at exorbitant cost; unable to enforce his manorial rights because the villeins fled when he attempted to – was sorely tempted to abandon the struggle altogether. His remedy was to let off the demesne to the tenants for a cash rent in units small enough for them to farm themselves. To take only one example; in the bailiwick of Clare, on one manor at least, all new leases made after 1349 were for money without labour, leases of the demesne lands became common from 1360 onwards and, by 1380, the greater part of the demesne had passed out of the lord’s possession. {456} The Black Death introduced a situation in which land was plentiful and labour scarce. The scales were thereby tipped against the land owner.

It is the peculiar virtue of English society that it contrives permanently to remain in a state of transition; no sooner has it crossed one bridge than it is off on its uncertain course across the next one. Sometimes, indeed, it tries to cross two at once. It would thus be hazardous to argue that England in the fourteenth century was more conspicuously in transition than at any other period but, certainly, it would be hard to find an age in which the change was more fundamental. The pattern of several centuries was breaking up; not only the pattern of society but the set of men’s minds as well.

‘Increasingly, the really significant distinction’, wrote Dr McKisack, ‘is less between free and servile than between winner and waster, between the man whose fortunes are on the upgrade, whose descendants may well swell the ranks of the yeomanry and gentry of a later age, and the man whom economic pressure or lack of enterprise are driving downwards.’ {457}

The moment, therefore, was one of great fluidity. In such circumstances even a mild contretemps can produce disproportionately sharp reactions. The consequences of any more severe shock are likely to be intensely violent. Few shocks can have been more violent than that caused by the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe.

We can thus safely agree with Rogers that the Black Death must have led to important changes in the social and economic structure of the country. We can accept too the existence of the phenomena which Rogers noted and on which he based his thesis. But now begin the qualifications. In medieval history, it seems, it is not the exception which proves the rule but the rule which generates the exception. A useful principle can be established which may, in memory of that great iconoclast, Dr A. E. Levett, be described as Levett’s law: ‘The enunciation of any authoritative statement shall immediately be countered by the accumulation of evidence leading to its contradiction.’ Once a sufficient body of such material has been compiled then, of course, a new statement is deemed to have been advanced and the work of destruction can change its target.

So, as soon as Thorold Rogers had won general acceptance for his thesis of a Black Death causing profound social changes and leading directly to the Peasants’ Revolt, evidence began to be elicited to prove him wrong. He had argued, it will be remembered, that commutation was already far advanced by 1348, and that it was above all the efforts of the landlords to reverse this process which led to social unrest. As a first stage in the demolition of his theories it was demonstrated that commutation had, in fact, made little progress before the plague.

Mr Page {458} argued that there were not enough freemen available to do the commuted labours. Even if there had been, the amount of money in circulation would not have been sufficient to pay them or to allow the former villeins to pay their rents in cash. He analysed the sources of labour on a group of eighty-one manors spread over twenty counties for the period 1325–50. On rather over half these, villeins did nearly all the work on the lord’s demesne, on twenty-two of them they did about half, on nine an insignificant amount and on only six had predial service been abolished altogether. A similar analysis for the year 1380 of a group of one hundred and twenty-six manors, of which fifty-five had been included in the earlier examination, showed that the villeins did all the work on only twenty-two, about half the work on twenty-five, an insignificant amount on thirty-nine while on the remaining forty no predial services at all survived. A dramatic transformation had clearly taken place in the intervening years, vindication of the statement made by Pollock and Maitland: ‘…it was the Black Death which, by destroying nearly half the population while leaving the available capital and the medium of exchange as great as ever, hastened the transition from a system of barter to a system of money payments.’ {459} Furthermore, on no manor did Page find evidence of any villein being held to service after the Black Death if this had not also been the case before.

Studies of this nature certainly contradicted the conclusions of Thorold Rogers but tended to increase rather than diminish the significance of the Black Death. Page’s conclusions were not for long suffered to remain uncontested. Sir Keith Feiling conducted a closer analysis of one of his selected manors and pointed out that several of the leases for money rent on which Page based his case were in fact short term only and were later replaced by leases based on the old scale of rents and services. Several categories of manorial services were definitely more onerous by 1362 than they had been before the Black Death. Two and a half opera minuta were commuted in 1341–2, 181 in 1353–4, 285½ in 1354–5, 77 in 1358–9 and none in 1362–3. {460} On this manor at least, therefore, the pattern was not one of a process of commutation initiated by the Black Death and swelling triumphantly to its near completion at the end of the fourteenth century, but rather of a false start directly after the Black Death which was soon checked and reversed by the victorious landlord.