Plague, War, and Social Change in the “Long”Fourteenth Century 219the permission of the liege lord was usually required
and could be secured by a cash payment or in return for
political favors. Some of the buyers were merchants,
lawyers, or servants of the crown who wanted the status
provided by a country estate. Others were simply land-
holders who sought to consolidate their holdings at
bargain rates. In either case the purchase of land tended
to eliminate feudal obligations in fact and sometimes in
law. The new owners had no personal ties to the peas-
ants on their newly acquired estates and felt free to ex-
ploit their property as efficiently as possible. The net
effect was to accelerate the shift toward private owner-
ship of land that had begun with the commutation of
feudal dues in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Princes, too, were affected by the drop in land val-
ues. Medieval rulers drew the bulk of their ordinary rev-
enues from exploiting their domains. Domain revenue
came from a variety of dues, rights, and privileges, as
well as from rents, which were an important part of the
whole. Most princes were happy to make common
cause with the other great landholders or to compen-
sate for their losses by levying new taxes.
Social Disorder from the Jacqueries
to the Bundschuh Revolts
Attempts to reverse the economic trends set in motion
by the plague created widespread discontent. In 1358,
much of northern France rose in a bloody revolt called
the Jacquerie (Jacques Bonhomme being more-or-less
the French equivalent of John Doe). Peasants attacked
the castles of their lords in one of the worst outbreaks
of social violence in centuries. There was no program,
no plan—only violence born of sheer desperation. In
this case peasant distress was greatly aggravated by that
portion of the Hundred Years’ War that had ended with
the French defeat at Poitiers in 1356. The countryside
was devastated, and the peasants were taxed to pay the
ransoms of the king and his aristocratic followers who
had been captured by the English on the battlefield.
Other revolts grew less from poverty than from the
frustration of rising expectations. The English revolt of
1381, known as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in memory of
one of its leaders, was triggered by the imposition of a
poll or head tax on every individual. The rebels saw it
as regressive, meaning it fell heavier on the poor than
on the rich, and as a threat to the economic gains
achieved since the plague. In Germany the exactions of
princes and landholders, including the clergy, provoked
a series of rebellions that flared periodically throughout
the fifteenth century and culminated in the great Peas-
ant Revolt of 1524–25. These are generally referred to
as the bundschuhrevolts after the laced boots that served
as a symbol of peasant unity.
Much urban unrest also was in evidence, but its re-
lationship to the plague and its aftermath is unclear.
The overall volume of European trade declined after
1350, which was offset to some extent by continuing
strength in the market for manufactured and luxury
items. A more equitable distribution of wealth broad-
ened the demand for clothing, leather goods, and vari-
ous furnishings, while the rich, in an apparent effort to
maintain their status in the face of economic threats, in-
dulged in luxuries on an unprecedented scale. The trade
in manufactured articles, though smaller in total than it
had been in the thirteenth century, was therefore larger
in proportion to the trade in bulk agricultural com-
modities. It was also more profitable. Towns, now con-
siderably smaller, seem to have enjoyed a certain
measure of prosperity throughout the period.
Their political balance, however, was changed by
the new importance of manufacturing. Craft guilds and
the artisans they represented were generally strength-
ened at the expense of the urban patriciate, whose rents
were greatly reduced in value. The process was not en-
tirely new. The Flemish cloth towns of Ghent, Bruges,
and Ypres had been the scene of periodic revolts for a
century before 1350, and outbreaks continued for years
thereafter. By 1345 the guilds had triumphed, at least in
Flanders, but this in itself failed to create tranquility.
The patriciate refused to accept exclusion from the
government, and various factions among the guilds
fought among themselves to achieve supremacy. Given
the chronic discontent among the mass of laborers,
most of whom were not guild members and therefore
disenfranchised, riots were easy to incite almost regard-
less of the cause. The disturbances in the German
towns of Braunschweig (1374) and Lübeck (1408) were
apparently of similar origin. Political factions were able
to mobilize popular discontent in the service of their
own, decidedly nonpopular, interests.
The revolts of 1382 in Paris and Rouen appear to
have been more spontaneous and closer in spirit to the
rural uprisings of the same period, but the seizure of
Rome by Cola di Rienzi in May 1347 was unique. De-
manding a return to the ancient Roman form of govern-
ment, he raised a great mob and held the city for seven
months under the title of Tribune. The whole episode
remains the subject of historical controversy. It was re-
lated to the absence of the pope at Avignon (see chap-
ter 14). The departure of the papal court in 1305 had
wrecked the Roman economy and placed the city’s