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.
In defence of the statutes it can be said that, though loaded heavily against the peasant, they were not conceived solely as instruments for his repression. Certainly, in part, they were inspired by the fear that labour would get out of control but also they reflected a genuine wish to prevent the wealthy land-owner or industrialist drawing away labour from his weaker rival.{474} They can, therefore, be presented as seeking to protect, if not the poor, at least the not-so-rich. But any legislation which imposes a maximum but no minimum wage and which expects the baker – whose interest it is to see prices rise – and the farmer – whose interest it is to see wages fall – to respond in the same way to legislation suggesting that both prices and wages should remain as they were, must inevitably discriminate against the poorer classes. The laws may not have been intended to repress but they were administered largely by the land-owners in their own interests. Inevitably it was the labourer who lost. For the most part the statutes did not operate so as to make the labourer worse off than he had been before, but they cut off a line of advance towards a new prosperity which had been opened by the plague. The fact that they were largely successful was an important factor in the compound of national issues and local grievances which was eventually to give rise to the Peasants’ Revolt.
* * *
Can it be said therefore, in schoolboy phrase, that the Black Death ‘caused’ the Peasants’ Revolt? The classic thesis that it was the reversal of a far-advanced trend towards commutation which provoked resistance among the peasants must in part at least be rejected. If, on manors as numerous and as scattered as those of the Bishop of Winchester, Dr Levett can find ‘absolutely no sound evidence for retrogression or greater severity in exacting services after 1349’,{475} then no generalization which assumes the existence of such retrogression can be wholly valid. Certainly the same is not true in every part of England: there were cases in which peasants were forced back into a servile status from which they had previously escaped. Such cases were undoubtedly resented. But in sum there is no reason to think that these constituted a major, let alone the major, factor in instigating the uprising.
What then did cause a rebellion as determined and as wide-spread as that of 1381? Petit-Dutaillis, who may be said to have spear-headed the attack on the established point of view, considered that it was a compound of irritating feudal burdens, mainly in the form of financial exactions, and the clumsy tax policy of the royal advisers. ‘The contradiction which existed between their legal state and their economic advancement was evidently a source of daily exasperation.’{476} Professor Hilton, who saw the genesis of the Peasants’ Revolt at the very beginning of the thirteenth century, has analysed the factors which led to unrest.{477} Many of them, it will be obvio
us, were active irritants long before 1348. The undue conservatism of the landlord who sought to preserve the irritating frills as well as the essential spirit of the manorial system, the denial to the peasant of the right to dispose of his chattels, the fact that prices rose faster than wages, the resentment of the villein who saw his free neighbour exploiting the new circumstances to the full, the inequity and uneven incidence of the poll taxes, the abduction of peasants by labour-hungry landlords, the curbs on liberty of action imposed by the new legislation: these were the elements which finally provoked explosion.
But because the Black Death was not an immediate cause it does not follow that it should not bear a large share of the responsibility. If there had been no plague it is arguable that the circumstances which so disturbed society in 1381 would eventually have arisen. The break-down of the structure of a society can never be painless and, by the second half of the fourteenth century, the disintegration of the manorial system was inevitable and already well advanced. But the Black Death immeasurably aided the process; exacerbated existing grievances, heightened contradictions, made economic nonsense of what previously had been a situation difficult but still viable.
‘The Black Death did not, in any strictly economic sense, cause the Peasants’ Revolt or the break-down of villeinage, but it gave birth, in many cases, to a smouldering feeling of discontent, an inarticulate desire for change, which found its outlet in the rising of 1381.’{478} Dr Levett’s cautious judgement may be termed the lowest statement of the Black Death’s claim to have inspired the social unrest of the later fourteenth century. It cannot be said, in short, that the Black Death directly caused the Peasants’ Revolt, nor can it be said with certainty that, but for the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt would never have taken place. But what can be asserted with some confidence is that, if there had been no Black Death, tension and bitterness would never have risen by 1381 to the level that it did.
* * *
‘We must really not raise the plague to the dignity of a constant, economic force.’{479} Vinogradoff’s magisterial warning should be written in scarlet above the desk of every historian dealing with the fourteenth century. But we must really not lower the plague to the level of an isolated phenomenon having no significant influence on the development of the country. The more extravagant claims of its champions may be discounted but so also may the excessive denigration of those who sought to cut it down to size. The extent to which the Black Death can be said to have initiated rather than accelerated or modified any major social or economic trend is the subject of endless academic debate. There is at the moment a sentiment in favour of reinstating the Black Death as a major originating factor in its own right.{480} Such a counter-reaction is desirable and, indeed, overdue. It should not be taken too far but it will not have been taken far enough until it is generally accepted that the Black Death was a catalytic element of the first order, profoundly modifying the economic and social forces on which it operated. Without it the history of England and of Europe in the second half of the fourteenth century would have been very different.
16. EDUCATION, AGRICULTURE AND ARCHITECTURE
SUCH modifications of the social structure of the country were bound to find their reflection in almost every sphere of human activity. There can have been very little in English life which survived the Black Death wholly unchanged, though in some fields the changes were at first almost imperceptible and only gradually revealed their true significance.
The world of education, through its dependence on a comparatively small group of learned men of whom the most powerful and distinguished were often also among the oldest, was peculiarly sensitive to the impact of the plague. Mortality among men of learning had been calamitously high. Four of Europe’s thirty universities vanished in the middle of the fourteenth century: no one can be sure that the Black Death was responsible but it would be over-cautious to deny that it must have played a part.{481} Arezzo ceased to exist a few years later; Siena closed for several years. The chancellor of Oxford petitioned the King ‘showing that the university is ruined and enfeebled by the pestilence and other causes, so that its estate can hardly be maintained or protected’. The students of Avignon addressed the Pope: ‘…at a time when the university body of your Studium… is deprived of all lectures, since the whole number has been left desolate by the death from pestilence of doctors, licentiates, bachelors and students…’
Into this vacuum there was ample scope for new ideas and doctrines to infiltrate. In England one important by-product, caused in part at least by the shortage of people qualified to teach in French after the Black Death, was the growth of education in the vernacular and of translation from Latin direct to English:{482} John Trevisa said of the old system – the translation of Latin to French:
Thys manere was moche y-used tofore the furste moreyn, and ys sethe somdel ychanged. For Johan Cornwall, a mayster of gramere, chayngede the lore in gramer-scole, and construccion of Freynsch into Englysch; and Richard Pencrych lurnede that manere teching of hym, and other men of Pencrych, so that now, the yere of our Lord a thousand, three hundred foure score and fyve… in all the grammer-scoles of England children leaveth Frensch and construeth and lurneth ye Englysch and habbeth thereby avauntage in on syde and desvauntage yn another. Their avauntage ys that they lurneth gramer in lesse tyme than children were i-woned to doo; desavauntage ys that now childern of gramer-scole canneth na more Frensche then can thir lift heale, and that is harme for them an they schulle passe the see and travaille in straunge landes…
Viewing the history of the English language and its literature over the last six hundred years there are few who would deny that John Cornwall, mayster of gramere, deserved well of his country. The disadvantage to which Trevisa refers still exists to trouble us but the fruits of Cornwall’s reform outweigh immeasurably the gulf which it placed between this island and mainland Europe. It would, of course, be absurd to attribute to any individual or to the Black Death itself the full responsibility for a change which had already started even before 1348 and, in the end, would inevitably have carried all before it. But it would also be a mistake to discount unduly the importance of the Black Death in removing so many of those who would have been a barrier to reform and in making it, in purely practical terms, far more difficult to carry on along the old path.
John Cornwall’s innovation was more fundamental than is suggested in Trevisa’s chronicle. For the growth of a literature in the vernacular was bound, in the end, to mean the disappearance of Latin as a medium of communication. It took an unconscionably long time a-dying; vestigial relics are, indeed, still said to linger on in England today in certain of the more antique seats of learning. But its monopoly was broken. English arose; the symbol of a new nationalism, to take its place in the law courts as the instrument for the transaction of business and for the conduct of relationships even in the most polite society. It was nationalism that dictated the use of English rather than the use of English which created nationalism, but the two fostered each other and grew side by side. Neither the growth of a national language nor of a national spirit can be said to be a uniquely English phenomenon. The sort of generalization with which we are dealing here could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to what we now mean by France, Italy or Germany. But nowhere else was the evolution so pronounced or the relevance of the Black Death so clearly marked.
‘We must not think’, wrote Dr Pantin,{483} ‘that “nationalism” was something invented at the Renaissance or even in the later middle ages… since the eleventh century there had been highly organized “national” states and deep political and racial divisions and rivalries and antipathies…’ One must not give the Black Death too much prominence in an evolution which has edged forward fitfully over many centuries, yet it would be quite as foolish to ignore its role and it is surely permissible, too, to see its by-products in the field of learning as one of the more decisive catalytic factors. In England too, it was more immediately apparent that the weakening of
the international language was a blow to the universal Church. It would be a grotesque over-statement to claim that, if the English had continued to speak French and write Latin, there would have been no Reformation, but, like most over-statements, it would contain some elements of truth.
In the long run the English Universities had no cause to regret the temporary havoc which the plague caused in their workings. The shortage of clergy and lay clerks was so conspicuous that the provision of replacements became an urgent need. At Cambridge the reaction was swift. Trinity Hall, Gonville Hall and Corpus Christi were all founded as a consequence, Corpus Christi, at least, as a direct consequence of the Black Death. In the deed of 6 February 1350 by which Bishop Bateman established Trinity Hall it was specifically laid down that the purpose of the new college was to make good the appalling losses which the clergy in England and, in particular, East Anglia had suffered. The motives for founding Corpus Christi were slightly less altruistic. The members of the trade guilds found that, with the shortage of clergy after the plague, it cost them too much to have masses said for their departed members. By establishing a college they calculated that they would acquire a plentiful supply of cheap labour among the students. So deep a scar did the plague leave that even in 1441, at the foundation of King’s, the statutes, though in general terms, reiterated a reference to the need to repair the ravages of a century before.{484}
The Black Death Page 29