218 Chapter 12
cheap firewood and building material. A larger percent-
age of the grain crop was devoted to the brewing of
beer, and, in the south, vineyards spread over hillsides
upon which in earlier times people had sought to grow
food. If the prosperity of Europeans may be measured
by their consumption of meat and alcohol, these were
comfortable years. Some historians have referred to
the period after the Black Death as the golden age of
European peasantry. It did not last long.
For most people, calorie and protein consumption
undoubtedly improved. Wages, too, increased, because
the plague created a labor shortage of unprecedented
severity. In Italy, employers tried to compensate by pur-
chasing slaves from the Balkans or from dealers in the
region of the Black Sea. This expedient was temporary
and not successful. Before 1450 Turkish expansion
brought an end to the trade, and although the Por-
tuguese imported African slaves throughout the fif-
teenth century, they for the most part remained in
Portugal. The handful of Africans who served the
households of the very rich made no impact on the la-
bor market. Wages remained high, and many people
were able for the first time to leave their ancestral
homes in search of better land or higher pay. Hundreds
of communities were abandoned completely. Such
movements cannot be accurately traced, but the cen-
tury after 1350 appears to have been a time of extraor-
dinary mobility in which the traditional isolation of
village life diminished greatly.
These developments provoked a reaction from the
propertied classes. Caught between rising wages and
declining rents they faced a catastrophic reduction in
their incomes. With the passage of time, some eased the
situation by turning to such cash crops as wool or wine.
Their initial response was to seek legislation that would
freeze wages and restrict the movement of peasants. Be-
tween 1349 and 1351, virtually every European govern-
ment tried to fix wages and prices (see document 12.3).
For the most part, their efforts produced only resistance.
The failure of such measures led to strategies based
upon the selective modification of feudal agreements.
New restrictions were developed and long-forgotten
obligations were revived. Southwest Germany provides
some instructive examples. Peasants subject to one lord
were often forbidden to marry the subject of another. If
they did so, their tenures would revert to the husband’s
lord after the couple’s death. As population movements
had created a situation in which few subjects of the
same lord inhabited the same village, this practically
guaranteed the wholesale confiscation of peasant es-
tates. At the same time, peasants were denied access to
the forests, whose game, wood, nuts, and berries were
reserved for the landholders. These forest laws created
enormous hardships and were similar in their effects to
the enclosure of common lands by the English gentry a
century later. Peasants who depended upon these re-
sources for firewood and for a supplement to their diet
might be driven from the land.
When such measures failed to raise enough money,
landholders were often forced to sell part of their hold-
ings to investors. If the land in question was held in fief,DOCUMENT 12.3
The Statute of Laborers
Issued by Edward III of England in 1351, this is a typical
example of legislation designed to restrict the increase in labor
costs created by the Black Death.The King to the sheriff of Kent, greetings; Because
a great part of the people, and especially of work-
ing men and servants, have lately died of the pesti-
lence, many seeing the necessity of masters and
great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they
may receive excessive wages, and others preferring
to beg in idleness rather than by labor to get their
living; we, considering the grievous incommodities
which of the lack especially of ploughmen and
such laborers may hereafter become, have upon
deliberation and treaty with the prelates and the
nobles and the learned men assisting us, with their
unanimous counsel ordained:
That every man and woman of our realm of
England, of what condition he be, free or bond,
able in body, and within the age of sixty years, not
living in merchandise, nor exercising any craft, nor
having of his own whereof he may live, nor land of
his own about whose tillage he may occupy him-
self, and not serving any other; if he be required to
serve in suitable service, his estate considered, he
shall be bound to serve him which shall so require
him; and take only the wages, livery, meed, or
salary which were accustomed to be given in the
places where he oweth to serve, the twentieth year
of our reign of England [that is, in 1347], or five or
six other common years next before.
The Statute of Laborers. From Pennsylvania Translations and
Reprints,vol. 2, no. 5, trans. Edward P. Cheyney. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1897.