After the immediate turmoil of the Black Death had subsided, the ensuing years saw relatively few further dramatic changes. In fact, many social and economic forces were working to return the world to normal. So alarmed were bishops by the multitude of vacant positions in the Church that they introduced a range of initiatives to increase the supply of priests, including substantially lowering the age at which young men were permitted to enter holy orders and drastically shortening the time permitted to progress from acolyte to priest. As a result of these measures and the expansion of schools and colleges, ordinations of new priests soared in the early 1350s and remained very high thereafter. Because there was no shortage of people seeking social advancement and the Church remained an attractive career, it proved far easier to fill vacancies in the clergy than in the ranks of laborers and small peasants massed at the base of the social and economic hierarchy. Consequently laborers retained much of the improved bargaining power that the pestilence had bestowed on them. Although wages fell back from the peaks they touched in the chaotic year of the great pestilence, they stayed high as labor remained very scarce.
Landlords and large farmers experienced some respite when grain prices rose sharply as the ruinous harvest of 1350 was followed by an even worse one in 1351, and then stayed high for the rest of the 1350s despite improving yields. High food prices increased the attraction of farming and strengthened the value of land, and so a progressive refilling of vacant holdings and recovery in rents took place, and lords were encouraged to continue cultivating their demesne farms. But, as the Walsham and High Hall records show, the severe difficulties in running their manors that lords continued to experience were not simply due to the shortage and high cost of laborers. Finding and keeping competent and honest reeves had become a major problem, as Edmund and Margery de Welles found when John Packard refused to accept election as reeve in the High Hall court of September 29, 1350, although John Wodebite did agree to serve as their hayward.
Geoffrey Rath was not chosen to continue as reeve of Walsham manor in the autumn of 1350, but we do not know whether this was the choice of Geoffrey, Lady Rose, or the community of tenants. What is clear, however, is that the election of John Spileman in his stead created even greater problems for Lady Rose and her son, Henry. In November 1350, after a few months in office, Spileman was judged responsible for losing a great part of the lady’s crops in the recent harvest and fined the huge sum of 40s. He seems not to have lasted as reeve for much longer, for we soon learn that Geoffrey Rath returned to replace him. Some of the reasons for dissatisfaction with Spileman are spelled out in the January 1351 court, when he faced a long list of charges including failing to “raise the common [sheep] fold ” on the lady’s recently harvested fields, misusing the lady’s cart and the time of her carpenter, neglecting the lady’s woodland, and stealing various small items. But Rath too was soon in trouble and also accused of failing to raise the sheepfold as well as keeping his horse at the lady’s expense. Symptomatic of the fraught relations between the lady and her local peasant officers were the fines levied on John Spileman for insulting Henry, the lady’s son, and on Geoffrey Rath for insulting John Blakey. Things did not improve, and later the same year Geoffrey Rath was again fined heavily for failing to rectify various faults on the manor, and so were the two manorial shepherds for neglecting their duties and allowing a great part of the lady’s lambs to die. Unsurprisingly, Rath was not reappointed at the end of the year.
From the records of Walsham and High Hall, which by now have become patchy, it can be seen that disputes between the lords of the two manors and their tenants continued to flare up throughout the 1350s. In autumn 1353 an unprecedentedly large, concerted action arose soon after the death of Lady Rose, when fourteen tenants refused to perform labor services at the harvest, thirty-four tenants refused to perform the winter works required soon after, and ten women refused to winnow corn for the wages they were offered. Other signs of discord include the unlicensed departure of villeins to settle in other villages or towns and refusal to return, failure to swear fealty, and continuing disputes and negotiations over conditions of tenure, work, wages, and so on. These small-scale disputes and hard bargaining were repeated between villagers and their landlords and employers in thousands of manors across England, as the survivors of the great pestilence struggled to gain some control over the dramatically changed circumstances in which they found themselves. Cumulatively they were symptoms of the genesis of a universal transformation in the most important relationship in the Middle Ages, that between lords and their tenants, between land and labor. The famous Peasants Revolt of 1381 was a milestone in this struggle, for even if it was not primarily the rising against serfdom and landlords that it was once thought to be, it was certainly a formidable demonstration of the newfound confidence and independence of the lower orders.
Such an ordered account of change can, of course, only be constructed by historians using the benefit of hindsight. But even historians find it difficult to unravel what happened in the confusion and instability that followed immediately after the Black Death, and for the survivors living through these turbulent years the task of discerning the new realities from the merely transitory, and enduring changes from short-term oscillations, must have been all but impossible. Lords and social elites longed for the world to be returned to normal, but the chances of this happening faded fast as the next decade opened with the awful news that pestilence was once again stalking the world. A second virulent epidemic erupted in England in the spring of 1361, this time choosing its victims disproportionately from the young, and it was followed by further major national outbreaks in 1369 and 1375.
The Black Death unleashed forces of immense power, and many of these forces were rendered irresistible by the long succession of deadly pestilences that punctuated the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and drove population down. The enhanced power that peasants and laborers derived from their scarcity was to prove a potent driving force behind revolutionary changes in economic and social institutions, including the decline of serfdom and feudalism, and a golden age for peasants and laborers. But it should always be remembered that the rising living standards and improved status that the ordinary folk came to enjoy were bought at the huge cost of high and unpredictable mortality.
Dance of Death from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal