In the Wake of the Plague

by Norman F. Cantor

  The abbot also complained to the bishop that the abbey was getting the wrong kind of visitors. The costs of hospitality to travelers and wayfarers (monasteries were the prime motels of the Middle Ages) were a heavy burden. The latter complaint was likely a trope, a literary formality. But it does seem that the monastery was suffering diminished income.

  Halesowen kept precious (alleged) relics of St. Barbara and St. Kelem encased in silver and gilt reliquaries (saints’ relic boxes). Not only were saints’ relics intended to draw paying pilgrims to the abbey, but they were trotted out publicly in critical times. And there could not be anything more critical than the Black Death of 1349, when 40 percent of the monastery’s tenants died, threatening to devastate the abbey’s income and deprive the monks of their accustomed daily feasts. Processions of saints’ relics through the streets and along the roads were the most immediate communal responses to crisis (they still are in some Mediterranean countries and Latin America).

  As word of the biomedical catastrophe spread and his agents reported uniform mortality from distant villages belonging to the abbey, Abbot Thomas sat in his chapel in the gloom of a late afternoon and wondered why St. Barbara and St. Kelem had not interceded for Halesowen. He did not know that St. Barbara was a fake, nor would he have believed it if someone had told him so.

  Religious expression not being effective against the plague, Abbot Thomas had to exercise his managerial skills to deal with its impact on the abbey’s income.

  How a great estate worked by thousands of peasants responded to the Black Death reflected prevailing conditions before the plague. Peasant holdings that remained deserted after 1349 reflected the quality of the land. If the peasant landholding was marginal in the first place, having been brought under the plow during the population boom and real estate inflation of the late thirteenth century, now that 40 percent of the village population had died in the plague, there would be no rush to take up these hardscrabble marginal lands.

  They would remain vacant and become the “lost villages” of medieval England, disappearing from written records and only rediscovered in the twentieth century by air photographs.

  Abbot Thomas was fortunate compared to some other lords in that Halesowen lands were mostly of high quality. This meant that there were surplus laborers in the peasant population eager to step into the breach and take up these vacant lands, which thereby would continue to generate revenue to the abbot’s treasury. Zvi Razi concluded that the great majority—82 percent—of the vacant farms on the abbey’s estates were quickly taken up by new farmers drawn from the surplus population or were added to existing family holdings.

  There is no evidence of peasant flight from Halesowen to other estates. On the contrary, if some Halesowen land vacancies were somewhat difficult to fill, immigration from elsewhere boosted the rent rolls over time. Abbot Thomas benefited from an important concession that his predecessor as head of the abbey had made in 1327 after almost a half century of litigation and agitation by Halesowen’s peasants.

  They wanted to remove the last vestiges of serfdom, abolishing the mandatory servile labor on the lord’s demesne or personal estates, and commute these services into money rents. Not without some turmoil and punishment of one of the peasant ringleaders, this concession had been granted. Now in 1349 Abbot Thomas benefited from this legal and economic change, because it made peasant holdings on the abbey’s estates along with the intrinsic high quality of the vacant farms more attractive than other great manors where bothersome incidents of serf labor lingered.

  That 18 percent of Halesowen’s tenant farms remained vacant was not very burdensome to the abbot as, like most other great monasteries, Halesowen did not, in any case, rent out all its lands for peasants’ rents. It kept some land as demesne, for direct cultivation under the abbey’s management. These lands contributed to the food that filled the monks’ stomachs in their high-consumption lifestyle. Surplus agricultural products from the demesne were sold at local markets and fairs—in 1369 this surplus returned almost eighty-five pounds to the abbey’s treasury (three hundred thousand dollars in today’s money). Most of it was used to repair farm buildings on the monks’ estates, keeping up those barns and storage sheds that today have become desirable country homes colorfully advertised in the real estate sections of the London Sunday newspapers.

  The iron law of supply and demand, however, worked against Halesowen, as it did for many other landlords in the three decades after the Black Death. The economic historian John Hatcher showed the squeeze in labor costs for the landlords did not come immediately after the catastrophe of 1349, but a generation later, in the 1370s. By then the surplus laborers who had eagerly and gratefully taken up rent-paying farms were all gone.

  The population level did not recover from the plague, did not resume the skyrocketing demographic curve of the late thirteenth century. Population growth was halted by the great famine of the second decade of the fourteenth century, and population level was calamitously driven downwards in the late 1340s from infectious disease.

  The climatic and biomedical shocks of the fourteenth century induced caution in the peasant population just as the Great Depression affected the Great Generation of penny-pinching Americans who went heroically to fight World War II.

  The more conservative behavior pattern, changed from the boom days of the thirteenth century, meant that by 1370 marriages among the common people, perhaps even the middle-class gentry, were occurring significantly later or not at all. A historical sociologist has estimated that in mid-fifteenth-century England one-quarter of the population never married. Late marriages or long periods of bachelorhood and spinsterhood between marriages were the main social factors in the fifteenth century that kept the population from bouncing back.

  Modern economists regard a 5 percent unemployment rate as the lowest a society can experience before labor shortage, workers’ discontentment, and inflation in wages occur. Another crunch came from the fall in grain prices in the 1370s as the population leveled off at 40 percent below its peak in the early fourteenth century, reducing demand for foodstuffs on the market.

  By the late 1370s Abbot Thomas’s successor was caught in a price squeeze—declining grain prices and push of labor for higher wages and benefits at a time of virtual full employment. Having gained their release from serf labor dues on the lord’s demesne in 1327, Halesowen peasants were now resisting the customary “boon labor” of haymaking and harvesting that were outside servile status, but were ancient community services that freemen as well as the old serfs engaged in. There is a charming picture of boon service harvesting in Thomas Hardy’s novel of rural life in the 1860s, Far from the Madding Crowd, and the film made from it.

  England at the end of the 1370s was slipping into a revolutionary situation—landlords under pressure of price squeeze resisting demands for higher wages and lower rents and elimination of all communal labor, and turning to Parliament for legislation to withstand the tide of working-class demands. The peasants were trying to improve their position in a labor market favorable to themselves. Radical clerics recently graduated from Oxford moved about the countryside sharpening the class consciousness of the peasants. The result was the greatest medieval working-class rebellion, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It inflamed much of the eastern third of the country, came close to bringing down the royal government, and led to the killing of both lay and ecclesiastical lords by peasant crowds and the burning of manorial records that testified to the peasants’ obligations.

  Halesowen was too far westward in central England to become immersed in the Peasants’ Revolt. But echoes of the great uprising and the preaching of Oxford radicals reverberated even there. The peasants in one large Halesowen village unilaterally declared their complete freedom.

  In the aftermath of the uprising of 1381 in eastern England, special judicial commissions were dispatched to restore law and order. One such commission reached Halesowen and consigned the leader of the democratic-minded peasants to pri
son, where he died.

  The loosening of the bonds and bounds of rural society caused by the Black Death and resulting in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 could have led to a working-class takeover of the government and a socialist state. The peasants in 1381, building on the rumbles spreading through all of rural society, including Halesowen, had that possibility within their grasp. The royal government cowered fearfully in the Tower of London while a crowd of many thousands of militant peasants from eastern England gathered in a field in the London suburbs. But the peasants were naïve and the disgruntled graduate students from Oxford who had helped to articulate the peasants’ grievances and demands into a vision of a Christian commonwealth were too bookish and inexperienced to be capable of directing the rebellion toward a Leninist or Maoist denouement.

  The young King Richard II came riding out to meet the peasants. He assured them that he loved them and if they would go home their demands would be met and justice fulfilled. The most militant of the peasant leaders was struck down by a Plantagenet courtier accompanying the pallid young monarch. The peasants dispersed and the power of the government, using the instrument of class-biased common law, came down on them hard and hung most of those identified as proletarian leaders.

  The main social consequence of the Black Death was not the advancement of a workers’ protocommunist paradise but further progress along the road to class polarization in an early capitalist economy. The gap between rich and poor in each village widened. The wealthiest peasants took advantage of the social dislocations caused by the plague and the poorer peasants sank further into dependency and misery. Class polarization, capital accumulation, social mobility into the yeoman class: These were the tangible outcomes of the Black Death in Halesowen as elsewhere.

  A handful of Halesowen peasants are more than statistics. William Thedrich served as juryman thirty-five times in his life, reflecting his wealth and influence on the manor and among the villagers. He was a legalistic man, suing seven villagers for debt. He was also violent and was fined in court eight times for assault. In fourteenth-century England—as in the late-nineteenth-century United States—litigation and violence were alternative instruments of capital accumulation and social mobility.

  William’s son Thomas moved swiftly to take advantage of the plague. He was married to a daughter of another rich peasant family, the Thomkyns. When the three top men in the Thomkyns’ clan died of the plague, Thomas Thedrich was in a position to claim their lands. He made arrangements with Abbot Thomas, paying him off so that he could lease half of the Thomkyns’ lands. He ended up as guardian of the young sons of the Thomkyns family, giving him additional instruments for land accumulation, with the bribed abbot’s compliance.

  The Moulawes were another rich peasant family who benefited from the plague. They were known for the large size of their cattle herd at a time when many poorer peasant families had none at all. John Moulawe succeeded his father William, who died in the plague. He continued the family’s skillful management and bold real estate transactions. John Moulawe married the heiress of another rich peasant who bought him fifteen acres as her dowry. Then in 1355 he bought out his sister-in-law’s share and now had enough land to form the basis of a yeoman farm.

  The manorial records show how difficult it was for those who started out with little to accumulate more. The court records list those whose holdings were so small that when they died in the plague their heirs were not required to pay heriot, a nominal inheritance tax, because they were deemed too poor. Other entries in the court record illuminate the pitiful lives of servant girls whose desperation led them to steal from their employers and who were expelled from the village, to die as beggars on the highways.

  After expulsion from the village, these peasant servant girls’ best prospect was to get to London and work as prostitutes. Most of them would not have made it. They died dressed in rags from hunger and disease along the way. They would beg for food and shelter at the doors of cathedrals and the gates of monasteries and nunneries. Sometimes they would get a handout. Most of the time they would be turned away.

  Late medieval England was not a welfare society. That did not begin to happen until the application of the Elizabethan poor laws in the 1580s which, however, treated the able-bodied poor as prisoners in workhouses and gave the rest starvation-level aid. By a broader and more humane definition the English welfare state did not begin until the Labor government of 1945–51, and Margaret Thatcher would have loved late-fourteenth-century and fifteenth-century England.

  It is known from legal and economic records what peasants as a group did. Getting at thoughts and sensibilities of the peasants is another matter. There is no surviving peasant writing. Perhaps as much as 5 percent of the peasant population in 1350 was minimally literate. Possibly they wrote down their personal reactions to the great pestilence but thus far these writings have not yet been discovered. Even what we know about the greatest working-class event of the fourteenth century, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, comes in large part from a graphic and detailed account written by a London courtier or cleric, possibly a merchant, from a class level way above peasantry.

  Historians have argued that you can penetrate the consciousness of the fourteenth-century peasantry by examining the motifs in paintings and sculpture found in churches of the times. Art is held to have been the poor man’s Bible: It was put there, it is assumed, so that the illiterate peasantry could visually look upon the essentials of Christianity.

  There is some truth to this. But the decisions on the motif to be presented to the populace were made by the bishops, abbots, and cathedral clergy and the monks who hired the painters and sculptors (unless, as was the case perhaps a third of the time, the ecclesiastics were doing the artwork themselves). The motifs, or what art historians call the iconology, had to be meaningful and inspiring if the ideas were to be communicated to the peasants. But it was still an ecclesiastical thought projection. It did not come from the peasants.

  From the thirteenth century on Mother Mary and infant Jesus became steadily more central in church culture. The mature Jesus was now a young man suffering on the Cross, not the majestic Emperor-Christ of earlier centuries. Presumably this feminization and personalization of Christ struck home with the peasants, but we cannot be sure. A late-twelfth-century writer shocks us by saying there were a lot of skeptics and unbelievers running around. But even if we are sure that this art faithfully represents peasant consciousness, it was only part of their lives and thought, perhaps a small part.

  The peasants were in 1350 not even required to attend church and take the sacrament of the Mass more than once a year. When they did, it would nearly always be at a humble parish church with little or no artwork, not at an imposing cathedral or abbey church.

  In the fourteenth century Franciscan friars moved about the countryside delivering sermons in English to peasants, preaching in front of churches, at crossroads, or in market squares. Some of these sermons were written down and have survived. Since the Franciscans were engaged in direct communications with peasants, the latter’s mentality can be presumed to be reflected in these vernacular sermons.

  It was a world of struggling to get food, and a fearful world in which the forces of nature were a constant threat to bring about devastation and death. Jesus and Mary were beseeched to help and sometimes they did. Violence, drunkenness, and physical accidents were prevalent.

  Once in a while in the court rolls, especially in criminal cases, the peasant’s personal response to an indictment is heard. He is choking with fear; he is begging the court to show mercy and not hang him or her, or in the case of some women not to burn her as a witch. There is constant dispute—over boundary markers between plots of land and over rights of pasturage. The structure of Catholic theology seems as lacking in the legal rolls as the courtly intonations of Chaucer’s romantic poetry.

  The peasants in the judicial records have vague identity. Most have no set surnames. They are often called by the name of the vil
lage or manor they came from. A surprising number of them are known by nicknames: “Hugh Hop over Humber.” Yet this vagueness in nomenclature was still true of many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe entering the United States at Ellis Island around 1900: The immigration officials gave them surnames, just as the judicial officials of fourteenth-century England did. Clear identity by surnames and given names is a mark of modern society and the bureaucratic state. These rural workers had not yet arrived.

  There is one work of literature written a couple of decades or so after the Black Death—Piers Plowman—that helps us understand the peasant world. This longwinded but at times gripping religious epic was written by a London clergyman under the name of William Langland, which may have been a pseudonym. It is a good hunch, but not more than that, that Langland had previously served in a rural parish and had come to know the peasants well. He may not have come from peasant stock himself, as were the majority of parish priests, but from the incipient yeoman class, which explains his literacy. That he wrote in English rather than the upper-class languages of Latin or French does not indicate Langland’s background. Geoffrey Chaucer, his contemporary, wrote his most famous work in English and he was a courtier and government official.

  What Piers Plowman tells us about the behavior and mentality of the English peasantry shortly after the Black Death is what you would find among the farmers in very rural areas today. There was a sharp dividing line between the landholding wealthier peasants, who experienced a cyclic boom and bust in their lifetime—sometimes eating well on something approaching a gentry diet and at other times struggling to fill their stomachs with just about any cereal or scraps of cheap meat they could find.

  The pressures of farming life produced a lot of tension within families. There was wife abuse and there was “a wicked wife who will not be corrected; her husband flees from her in fear of her tongue.” Many times growing up in farm country in Manitoba I noticed shriveled-up, bitter women like that—and they had a lot to be bitter about.