5 - Rural Society

Summary

as with nearly every other aspect of fourteenth-century history, the most important event affecting the medieval countryside was the Black Death along with the plagues that succeeded it periodically in the latter half of the century. Viewed from the safe distance of 650 years, the Black Death is usually presented in agrarian history as a demographic-economic event: a sudden radical diminution of population that produced a series of dislocations in the structure of medieval society. There are two contradictory ways that scholars have come to terms with this staggering example of historical accident. The first is to relate all subsequent developments to the plague. The agricultural depression, peasant revolts and ruin of much of the aristocracy can be seen as consequences of the epidemic and its renewed visitations. To what extent long-range changes can be ascribed to the Black Death (such things as the decline of servitude in England and its strengthening in eastern Europe, or the crisis of the Church) remains unclear, particularly as one moves into the fifteenth century.

Another approach is to minimise the impact of the Black Death by pointing to other factors that independently affected society. Population decline, agricultural stagnation and widespread peasant discontent, according to this view, antedate 1348 and so the ‘crisis’ of the fourteenth century was already manifested in its early decades. The Black Death would thus confirm or forward developments already underway, as opposed to destroying violently a stable economy and social structure.