The Black Death (34 page)

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 …’
23
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.
24
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.
25
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.
26

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.’
27
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
.
28
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.’
29

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
30
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.’
31
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.
32
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 bythe victorious landlord.

The next salvo came from Dr H. L. Gray
33
whose techniques
have been much criticized but whose signally useful if modest contribution was to rationalize and codify the doctrine that any generalization was futile if it professed to apply to the whole of England. Based on his study of inquisitions post-mortem he claimed that, in the North and West of England, services had nearly always been commuted before the Black Death; in the South and East full or, at least, a large number of services were still exacted in about half the manors while in Kent, serfdom had died out at a much earlier date. It is hardly necessary to point out how quickly examples were forthcoming to show that
generalizations
were hardly more valid when applied to areas such as the North or the South, than to the country as a whole. But as a rough and ready rule, the value of Gray’s analysis remains
considerable.

Dr Levett has provided the weightiest evidence against the presentation of the Black Death as a watershed in English social history. She has shown that, on many of the manors of the Bishop of Winchester, commutation was hardly known before the Black Death and that there was remarkably little change
introduced
in the years immediately afterwards. When William of Wykeham did begin to indulge in substantial commutation of services against money payments it was more to raise money for his projects at New College and Winchester than because of pressures generated by the Black Death.
34
Her statistics are impressive but against them it can be contended that the
experience
of manors belonging to rich, powerful and conservative churchmen need not necessarily be applicable even to other manors in the same neighbourhood, let alone to the country as a whole.

Nor did her findings apply even to all the manors of the Bishop. A companion study of the Manor of Witney reaches remarkably different conclusions.
35
In that manor, two thirds of the
population
died, much land was thrown on to the lord’s hands and had to be let on new terms and for a money rent, the landlord
gradually
abandoned the struggle to farm the demesne and, having no further use for labour services, willingly commuted them for cash. The number of villeins employed at harvest-time dwindled from one hundred and twenty-one in 1348 to twenty-eight in
1350,
rose again to forty-two in 1352, but by 1354 had only reached forty-eight. All new tenants were excused tenurial labour and the whole system quickly withered away. Similarly, on the estates of Ramsey Abbey, the Black Death heralded the
introduction
of a new style of rent involving a larger cash payment, but the disappearance of all, or virtually all villein services.
36

To take another example in which the landlord similarly
enjoyed
enough wealth and influence to ride almost any economic storm; at Cuxham, a manor of the College of Merton, prior to the Black Death well over half the work on the demesne was done by the
famuli
,
labour attached to the manor and living within its compound. Two thirds of the rest was done by
customary
labour and only a third by hired labour. The proportion of work done by the wage-earner actually dropped in the seventy years between 1276 and 1347 – the period during which,
according
to Thorold Rogers, commutation was rapidly gaining ground all over England. After the Black Death labour services
virtually
ceased and work done by the
famuli
was halved. Total work done on the demesne was reduced but the cost of hired labour nevertheless trebled. In 1361, Merton College decided to lease the manor rather than continue to run it at a loss.
37

In some parts of England, therefore, the Black Death was a sharp stimulus towards rapid and lasting commutation of
manorial
services, in others it gave rise to much commutation but the landlords were able to check the process and more or less restore the
status
quo
ante
,
in yet others it had little perceptible effect on the manorial structure and, finally, in a few it impelled the landlords into a reaction which sought to resurrect labour
services
that had long been suffered to fall into disuse. The more prosperous and stable manors were the least affected; where the land was poor, the landlord ineffective, or the disease raged with especial violence, then the consequence was likely to be a rapid growth in commutation. It would be impossible to estimate in how many cases this development was something entirely new and in how many the process was already under way. Professor Postan has argued in favour of a rapid move towards commutation in the twelfth century which slackened or even went into reverse in the course of the thirteenth.
38
However that may be, it
is reasonable to contend that commutation was well known in most parts of England before 1348, and that the Black Death did no more than accelerate, though often violently accelerate, an established and, in the long run, inevitable progress.

*

What of the other economic and social effects of the Black Death which Thorold Rogers maintained did so much radically to change the manorial system and lead towards the Peasants’ Revolt? Wages and prices of manufactured goods certainly rose sharply after the Black Death but this rise was not maintained. Nor was the fall in the value of agricultural products. Almost all the examples cited earlier to illustrate the dramatic effects of the plague can also be used to show how quickly the effects passed. But for the most part they did not pass altogether. Particularly in the case of wages a very real advantage was won and retained by the labourer in almost every part of England. The ploughman of Cuxham whose pay had risen from 2s. to 10s. 6d. was still
earning
6s. 3d. in 1351–2 and 7s. 6d. over the period 1353–9. In
Teddington
and Paddington, wages fell back sharply in 1351–2 but remained well above the figure for before the plague.
39
Thorold Rogers’s thresher, whose wage averaged 3⅛d. in the first half of the century, earned 4⅛d. in the second half while the carpenter’s wages rose from 3⅛d. to 4⅝d.
40
The rise in the cost of living took away some of the wage earner’s advantage but his rent, probably the most important item in his budget, if it increased at all, certainly did not do so as substantially as his income. His net advantage was almost always considerable.
Post
hoc
is not
necessarily
propter
hoc
,
but it would be ultra-cautious not to admit that the Black Death was a major factor in the process.