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Home The Black Death and the Peasant Revolt The Black Death and the Peasant Revolt; Part 5 |
The Black Death and the Peasant Revolt; Part 5Thus injustice had led to violence, as it often does, and neither party had gained. In few cases were the lords able to force their serfs to pay services again; on the other hand, many rioters were hanged, and the rebels did not get the abolition of serfdom which they had demanded.Since labour could not be obtained at the old rates, nor services re-exacted without danger of violence and murder, it was necessary to pay the new rates, or to do with less labour. Some lords granted land on lease to tenants for a rent, giving them stock as well as land. Thus the tenant had to find the labour; the lord was free of the difficulty. Here we have the beginnings of the modern farmer, a person who stands between the labourer and the landowner. Others, however, met the difficulty in another way. There was a great demand at the time for wool, and English wool was then the best that could be had. So, many lords started sheep-farming instead of arable farming. It paid better, because less labour was needed. Many labourers were required for a large arable farm; but when it was laid down in grass one or two shepherds could tend all the sheep on it. Thus sheep-farming led to many men being out of employment; and as under the old system the serfs' small patches of land were often mixed up with the wide holdings of the landowner, now the latter came to wish to evict the serfs and take their land for sheep-farms. He enclosed also the "waste" or common land on which the serfs had pastured their cattle, and this, too, made it hard for the serfs to keep their holdings. Thus the landowners who had at first struggled to keep their serfs, ended by trying to drive them off altogether. No doubt great misery was often caused by this depopulation. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Parliament tried to stop this process of enclosure for sheep-farms, but without much result. So in the end the effects of the Black Death were extraordinarily wide. It changed the face of rural England. It broke up the old "manorial system": it prepared the way for modern conditions, under which land is let at a money rent: it did much to consolidate properties, and gave thereby the chance for the trying of better methods of farming: and in the end it caused serfdom to disappear. It was not that the peasants won freedom immediately by their revolt, for in some cases the revolt made their chains tighter. Yet this was only for the time. By degrees the labour of serfs came to be no longer required; and the lords granted freedom easily since serfdom was no longer worth keeping. The boon to the peasants, however, was an inestimable one. Their prayer had been granted - "Lord, Thou hast heard the desire of the poor: that the man of the earth be no more exalted against them". |
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