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Home The Black Death and the Peasant Revolt The Black Death and the Peasant Revolt; Part 2 |
The Black Death and the Peasant Revolt; Part 2It was in these rural districts that the effect was most felt. It is plain that labour would become very hard to get; and, further, since at the height of the plague men were so terrified that they left the harvest to rot ungathered in the fields, corn became scarce. This caused a rise in prices; and as prices rose, and labourers were few, we should be prepared to find a rise in wages also. In fact, this is what happened. Wages rose sharply.This all hit the landowners hard. To begin with, many of their tenants were dead, some without leaving heirs; and so they lost the payments for commuted service which these had owed. Further, they lost in another way. They had commuted services at the old rate of wages. They accepted, say 2d. a day, since for 2d. they could hire a labourer who would do the serf's work. But if wages doubled, the 2d. which represented a day's labour would only hire half a day's labour. And the rise was more than double. It was a common complaint that whereas a woman's labour had cost ½d. day, now it cost 2d. or 3d. Hence ruin stared the lord in the face if he had to receive at the old rates and pay at the new ones. Something clearly had to be done; and as the landowners were strong in Parliament, we shall find their policy in tracing what Parliament did. The first idea was to check this rise in wages which seemed to them ruinous. No injustice was intended, because Parliament meant to check the rise in prices also; if prices remained the same, it was argued, there was no need for wages to rise. We are not used to seeing Parliament meddle in the matter of prices at all (The Labour Party at times advocate that Parliament should fix a minimum wage: and something of this kind is done in many industries by their trades' unions. But no attempt to regulate prices is advocated.). Nowadays these are left to be adjusted by the conditions of supply and demand. Men of the fourteenth century took an entirely different view. Regulations about prices and wages did not seem in their day impossible or absurd as they may seem to us, because as a matter of fact almost all trades were under such rules. Every trade had its craft guild, which fixed the price at which its wares should be sold - a price that was supposed to be "fair" both to the buyer and the seller. Parliament was only attempting to do for the country what the craft guilds did for the towns. |
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