Being paid in cash, rather than in kind (in the granting of privileges such as the right to collect firewood), meant that peasants had more money to spend in towns. Their descendants benefited from a continued concentration of capital into a smaller and smaller number of hands.Īt the same time, the decline of feudalism and the rise of a wage-based economy following peasant demands for better labour conditions benefited urban elites. Wills became highly specific and wealthy businessmen, in particular, went to great lengths to ensure that their patrimony was no longer divided up after death, replacing the previous tendency to leave a third of all their resources to charity. In the longer term, however, people responded to the devastation by keeping money within the family. The sudden loss of at least a third of Europe’s population led to a redistribution of wealth for everyone else. But we can certainly see parallels with the way that the Black Death strengthened the power of the state and accelerated the domination of key markets by a handful of large companies.
The mid-14th Century economy is too removed from the size, speed, and interconnectedness of the modern market to give exact comparisons. While small companies rely upon government support to prevent them collapsing, many others – mainly the much larger ones involved in home delivery – are profiting handsomely from the new trading conditions. This has strong parallels with the current situation in many countries across the world. Although the Black Death caused short-term losses for Europe’s largest companies, in the long term, they concentrated their assets and gained a greater share of the market and influence with governments. These lines could almost have been written today.īut another less often remarked consequence of the Black Death was the rise of wealthy entrepreneurs and business-government links. It generated such horror that children did not dare to visit their dying parents, nor parents their children, but fled for fear of contagion as if from leprosy or a serpent. This sickness befell people everywhere, but especially the middling and lower classes, rarely the great. In Aberdeen, John of Fordun, a Scottish chronicler, recorded that: The traumatic experience of the Black Death, which killed perhaps 80% of those who caught it, drove many people to write in an attempt to make sense of what they had lived through.
If you ever see a church or chapel all alone in a field, you are probably looking at the last remains of one of Europe’s lost villages. Houses fell into the ground and were covered by grass and earth, leaving only the church behind. One in ten villages in England (and in Tuscany and other regions) were lost and never re-founded. With a third of the workforce dead, the crops could not be harvested and communities fell apart. This huge number of deaths was accompanied by general economic devastation. The Black Death killed between a third and a half of the population of Europe and the Near East. The highly commercialised world of the Mediterranean ensured the plague’s swift transfer on merchant ships to Italy, and then across Europe. Originating in Central Asia, soldiers and caravans had brought bubonic plague – Yersina pestis, a bacterium carried on fleas that lived on rats – to ports on the Black Sea.
The last stage was a high fever, and then death. This was followed by painful black lumps, or buboes, growing in the armpits and groin, which gave the disease its name: bubonic plague. They started off as mild and vague: headaches, aches, and nausea. In June 1348, people in England began reporting mysterious symptoms. This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.
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