Every plague has a rebound. "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." The things going on today is nothing new. That light comes on sometime. Peasants were the first ones to die in a plague so it's best to not be a peasant. "Peasants were the poorest people in the medieval era and lived primarily in the country or small villages. Serfs were the poorest of the peasant class, and were a type of slave. Lords owned the serfs who lived on their lands." Time to get brought up!
~~~~Plagues Precede Rebirths: Chaos Precedes Order (and Chaos again)
The bubonic plague or “The Black Death” of 1347 to 1351 was one of the deadliest epidemics in human history. The disease killed an estimated 75 million people, including up to 50% of the European populations affected. It was called the Black Death because of the black spots the bubonic form of the plague caused on the skin.
The plague, which was almost always fatal, spread most rapidly in cities, where people were in close contact with each other. To avoid the disease, those wealthy enough to leave the city fled to the country. Due to the sudden shortage of labour, innovations in production methods and farming took place. This is reminiscent of the current pandemic, in the absence of physical presence, innovations and acceleration of digitisation has swept through numerous industries. Digital connectivity (Zoom), online shopping (Amazon) and logistics (drone delivery: Manna Aero) have all benefited from the shift in the tectonic plates of disruption.
Of course, the Black Death, like Covid-19 was only part of the chaos of that period. The crisis of the late Middle Ages was a series of disasters in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries beginning with the great famine, including climactic upheavals of warm periods and mini ice ages and war and political instabilities and religious upheavals.
If the Black Death was a symbol of the chaos of that period, it was followed by one of the most magnificent times in human history. The Renaissance marked a transition from the Middle Ages to a time of great social change. The word Renaissance is a French word that means Rebirth. Sometimes, the systems that prevailed needed to self destruct to be reborn and this is what appeared to have happened then and perhaps now. As Picasso said, “Every act of creation begins with an act of destruction.” This creative destruction must be accompanies by a shift in consciousness, from one of competition to one of collaboration. This is what happened during the Renaissance, what our guest on the Innovation show, John Rogers, the author of “The Renaissance Campaign” calls mixed tables. https://theinnovationshow.io/plagues-precede-rebirths-chaos-precedes-order-and-chaos-again
~~~~How the Black Death made life better
In its entry on the Black Death, the 1347–50 outbreak of bubonic plague that killed at least a third of Europe’s population, this chronicle from the English city of Rochester includes among its harrowing details a seemingly trivial lament: Aristocrats and high clergymen not only had to pay triple wages to those toiling in their fields, but, even worse, they themselves had to perform manual labor. Curiously, the documentary record, which provides ample evidence that workers did demand and receive higher wages (on which more below), contains in contrast scant evidence that “worthies” ever dirtied their hands with fieldwork. Even if (or especially as) phantasms, however, these sickle-wielding lords reveal the importance of imagined possibilities in shaping pandemic responses.
The eminent refused to take on menial roles, not because they could not perform these “unskilled” tasks, but because to do so would be unworthy of their social rank, and it was unthinkable to abandon that social and labor hierarchy. Farm work was peasant work, whether performed by serfs bound to a particular manor, tenant farmers or wage laborers hired by the year or the season. But the staggering mortality of the Black Death reduced this previously sufficient peasant population sharply enough to create a severe labor shortage.
What happened next has been the subject of an enormous amount of scholarship, particularly in the case of England, where the large extant body of sources such as chronicles, legislation, court cases and manorial account books provides rich material for studying the social and economic changes in the wake of the Black Death. Scholars disagree about how and how much things changed, but they share a tendency to describe these changes in oddly passive terms: wages rose, inequality decreased, feudalism ended.
Yet there was a great deal of deliberate (in)action behind these developments. Rather than supply some of the needed labor themselves, landowners turned to solutions that might produce the kind of world they were capable of imagining. In England they created first the Ordinance (1349) and then the Statute (1351) of Labourers, which froze wages at pre-plague levels, compelled workers not otherwise engaged in fixed, long-term employment into year-long contracts with the first employer who demanded it, and established penalties to ensure compliance. As Jane Whittle has noted, in putting their efforts behind the control of waged labor rather than the retrenchment of (already declining) serfdom, rural landowners sought a “thinkable” resolution to this impasse: They would use the existing market for labor, but control the terms of exchange.
Many peasants, however, refused to play their assigned role of deferential wage earner. Court records from 1352, for example, show that “Edward le Taillour of Wootton, employee of the prior and convent of Bradenstoke … left his employment before the feast of St Nicholas [6 December] without permission or reasonable cause, contrary to statute,” and that John Death of Wroughton demanded an “excess” of six shillings eightpence for reaping John Lovel’s corn. Recalcitrant laborers remained a problem in 1374, when “John Fisshere, William Theker, William Furnes, John Dyker, Gilbert Chyld, Alan Tasker, Stephen Lang, John Hardlad, Cecilia Ka, Joan daughter of Henry Couper, Matillis de Ely, Alice wife of Simon Souter, all of Bardney, labourers, refused to work [for the Abbot of Bardney at the stipulated wages], and on the same day they left the town to get higher wages elsewhere, in contempt of the king and contrary to statute.” https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better
