Black Death: Political and Social Changes

Social change

Life in Britain in the fourteenth century was 'nasty, brutish and short', and it had been that way for the peasantry since long before the Black Death. Britain in the early fourteenth century was horrendously overpopulated. This was very good for the land-owning classes, since it meant that they had a vast reserve of inexpensive manpower upon which they could draw. In fact, there was such a surplus on manpower, that most landlords found it convenient to relax the old feudal labour dues owed to them on the grounds that men could always be found to perform them.

This changed after 1348.

We can see in the example of Farnham the immediate consequence of the plague: a slash in the cost of livestock and inflation in the cost of labour. This pattern was repeated up and down the country. The immediate reaction of the elite was to legislate against this. The Ordinance of Labourers was published on 18th June 1349, limiting the freedom of peasants to move around in search of the most lucrative work. This was promulgated through Parliament as the Statute of Labourers in 1351:

Statute of Labourers, 1351.

Age of the yeomen?

Up and coming yeomen  © It failed. Skilled manpower was so short that no landlord could afford to ignore the strictures of the market. In Farnham, a carpenter who had been paid 3d. in 1346 was being paid 5d. by 1367, his mate had shot up from 1½d. to 4d., and most other workmen had added at least a penny to their wages.

In fact, to those with the opportunity and ability to seize it, the Black Death presented a golden opportunity for advancement. John Ronewyk might have had to force several of his tenants to take over neighbouring land, but others like Robert Heningt were only too willing to step into dead men's shoes. Ronewyk himself took over the 5 acres of his neighbour, Richard atte fforde of Runwick, for the knock-down bargain price of 18d. Other peasants, like Walter Dolle and his fellow survivor at archbishop Edendon's manor of Upton, were able to renegotiate favourable labour dues.

With the de facto (if not de jure) freedom to move around and sell their labour, and the horrendously deflated prices of goods and land, those with the enterprise to do so were able to lift themselves out of the bonds of villeinage and make something of themselves. It is at this point that we see the emergence of the yeoman farmer: a peasant smallholder with up to 100 acres of land.

These yeoman farmers were always a tiny minority. They were outnumbered hugely both by the gentry classes above them, and by the general peasantry below. Yet the weakening of lordship and the cheapness of land had provided conditions which the 'yeomen' and gentry were best positioned to exploit. They were the movers and shakers of their locality, enclosing land for sheep, establishing weaving mills and spending their new-found wealth on architectural memorials, both for this life and the next.

Questioning the elites?

A peasant house after the Black Death.  © In 1371, an academic Oxford cleric called John Wycliffe was promoted into the government service of King Edward III. Desperate for cash to pursue the never-ending war with France, Edward's chief advisor, John of Gaunt, hoped to use Wycliffe's radical preaching as a means of coercing the clergy into paying higher taxes to the state.

Wycliffe was a reformist clergyman who had evolved a theory that the bible was the only truly religious authority, rejecting the teachings of the Pope and the Catholic Church. He believed that it was impossible to know whose souls would ultimately be saved, and that it was entirely possible for those of the clergy and the Pope not to be among them. His teachings were vilified by the Church, and he was tried for heresy in 1377. However, John of Gaunt literally stood by him in court, causing the trial to break up in confusion.

Yet Wycliffe's teachings had struck a dangerous chord amongst the populace. During the chaotic end to the trial of 1377, the London congregation had rioted (albeit in defence of their bishop against Gaunt). Thanks to the new social freedoms released by the Black Death, the Commoners had become more confident in demanding their rights.

The followers of Wycliffe's ideas, known as Lollards, were vociferous in support of such demands. Among these was an itinerant preacher called John Ball, whose sermons to the men of Kent verged on the revolutionary socialist:

Froissart, Chronicles.

Yeomen Revolt

A reconstruction of Richard II riding to Smithfield during the Peasant's Revolt.  © Such words struck a deep chord among the men of Kent; more so than in other places like Durham, where feudal lordship still held strong sway. This was because the Kentish peasantry had been able to improve their lot considerably in the wake of the Black Death. Fired up by John Ball's strong words, and outraged by the demands of the new boy-king Richard II's government for a poll tax of 1 shilling from every man in the land. Kent rose up under the leadership of Wat Tyler and marched on London in 1381.

This was the outcome of simmering resentments and the surprising social shifts, in part caused in part by the Black Death. The Peasants Revolt is the only truly popular uprising in English medieval history. For, even the most fundamental attempts at social change, like the rebellion of Simon de Montfort in 1265, had previously been initiated and led by the English barony. The Peasants' Revolt was the first ever mass uprising of the common man in England. However, it was not led by the peasantry either. The Peasants' Revolt was, in fact, a revolt of the yeoman gentry. If their interests had not been threatened, it would never have occurred.

Of the three named ringleaders, Wat Tyler, John Ball and Jack Straw, little to nothing is known. It is more than likely that 'Jack Straw' was a nickname for Wat Tyler himself. Rebels and outlaws often took on such sobriquets in the wake of the popularisation of the Robin Hood legend. It is significant that this popularisation occurs at precisely this time, the first literary reference to Robin Hood actually occurs in Piers Plowman. Wat Tyler was probably a yeoman craftsman, as his name implies. John Ball, on the other hand, was probably the most lowly of the ringleaders; but as an itinerant heretic preacher, he can hardly be classed as a typical peasant.

A brief look at the escheator's inquisitions in the wake of the revolt add substance to this assessment. Out of c.180 inquiries, only 65 of the named people had goods valued at less than 20 shillings. 15 of them had goods valued at over £5, and the most well-to-do yeoman named in the rolls was the Suffolk rebel, Thomas Sampson whose assets were valued at some £65, without taking into account the price of his land.

It was people such as this who led the Peasants' Revolt. Sampson had co-ordinated the disparate rebel bands across several counties. To find the cause we must go back to the reign of Edward III and the Hundred Years War. In his desperate quest for money to fund this ruinously expensive war, John of Gaunt had turned to John Wycliffe and given the yeoman gentry the lever with which to mobilise the peasantry. Yet it was also this quest for money, and the taxation it induced which had so outraged them in the first place.

Taxation without Power

A medieval image of death, Hexham Abbey  © Taxation was levied through Parliament. As the cost of wars increased during the Middle Ages, the king increasingly needed to draw the money to fight them from the general populace, and Parliament was the mechanism through which this was done. In principle, the King agreed to hear the Commons' grievances in return for which they ratified his request for money. By 1376, serious cracks were showing in this system. Parliament was being used by the king and the richer landed gentry as a means of keeping the common people under control.

In 1334, it had slashed the property qualifications exempting the poorer gentry (and yeomen) from taxation; and after the Black Death, it had enforced reactionary labour laws designed to keep the cost of lordship down. Measures such as these alienated poor gentleman, yeoman and peasant alike: those whose livelihoods relied on hiring out their labour and who had no margins with which to cushion the increased tax burden.

By 1376, the Commons had had enough. In the famous 'Good Parliament' of that year, they elected Sir Peter de la Mere as the first ever Speaker of the House of Commons, and through him presented their grievances to the Lords. They refused to ratify any further taxation until the king's Inner Council was replaced and their economic grievances were heard. John of Gaunt had no choice but to give in.

Yet, for the lesser gentry in the Commons, this was not the victory that it seemed. In the very next year, John of Gaunt used the last Parliament of Edward III's reign to institute the most regressive tax ever witnessed in later medieval England. In response to a threatened French/Spanish armada menacing the realm, Parliament levied a one-off poll tax of 4 pence on every adult over the age of 14. This was followed up in 1379 by another poll tax, and then in 1380, a third poll tax was levied which sparked the Peasants' Revolt.

In fact, the third poll tax, despite being one shilling on every adult over the age of 15, was actually less burdensome than the 1377 tax, because of the way in which it was levied. Instead of extracting a shilling from every man in the land, the total assessment was calculated in every village by multiplying the number of eligible persons by 12d. and apportioning that total to individuals based on their ability to pay. The calculation was made by a group of commissioners appointed from among the county gentry and court officials; but it was precisely for this reason that it aroused such anger amongst those who instigated the revolt.

King and Government: Conclusion

The new king: Richard II, Westminster Abbey.  © The yeomen and lesser gentry, who formed the local village élites, found themselves both excluded from the administrative process which they saw to be their right, and hit with a graduated tax bill based on their relative wealth compared with the general peasantry; and their resentment boiled into open revolt. They were joined by a peasantry made militant by the collapse of villeinage and the rousing rhetoric of Lollard preachers such as John Ball.

Yet the Peasants' Revolt failed. In the end, it was just a flash in the pan; a brief conflagration which threw stark light on the shifting social attitudes of the general populace in the years following the Black Death. These changes had been occurring throughout the fourteenth century: Ambion was not the first medieval village to be deserted, nor was it the last, and like many others its abandonment had begun long before the Black Death, due to high rents, enclosure, lack of work and bad land.

The Black Death was never a cause, it was always a catalyst. All the things we have been talking about - labour problems, architectural change, the rise of the gentry and the growth of the English language - all had been developing throughout the century. What the Black Death did was throw them together into an unstable brew to which the king and his wars added the last spark of resentment.

Ironically, it was precisely the traditional lordship against which they had rebelled that ended the Peasants' Revolt. Wat Tyler was murdered whilst speaking to the young king at Blackheath, and his rag-tag army dispersed on that young king's promise to address their grievances. The ultimate result of the Peasants' Revolt was to elevate the personal importance of kingship to new heights, raising huge expectations which the new king, Richard II, was temperamentally incapable of fulfilling.

Vernacular Literature

In 1362, Parliament passed a statute decreeing that all pleas should hereafter be heard in English. This was undoubtedly an attempt to maintain some semblance of order in a system which had been severely dislocated by the death of so many of its educated clerks. From this time on, English replaced French as the official language of the country and many works were translated from Latin and French into the vernacular. At the same time, two great poets were writing in the vernacular: Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were written during the 1380s. William Langland, a priest from London, produced the first version of his great, alliterative poem The Vision of Piers Plowman, at the same time as the English declaration of Parliament in 1362.

About the author

Dr Mike Ibeji is a Roman military historian who was an associate producer on Simon Schama's A History of Britain.