RURAL SOCIETY IN THE XIV CENTURY

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.
These two interpretive tendencies are significant because they influence how the century and its upheavals are viewed, particularly whether or not the undoubted crisis in agrarian society of the late fourteenth century has an organic connection with what transpired earlier (and if so, how much earlier). Moreover, attempts to deal with the impact of the Black Death are intertwined with differences of opinion about the causes of the agrarian and social crisis, particularly between those who emphasise demographic shifts as the fundamental origin of social change versus those who identify frictions within the economic system that operated independently of how many peasants there were to work or to be fed. Impersonal factors such as population decline, caused by forces external to the economy such as disease or climate shifts, need to be compared with factors within the medieval economic system such as inheritance customs or the relations between peasants and their landlords.

BASIC FEATURES OF THE AGRARIAN SYSTEM

The agrarian economy of the Middle Ages was more diverse than was once thought. Rather than a mass of undifferentiated peasants universally dedicated to the cultivation of wheat, the picture now seems to vary by region and time period. Within the villages themselves peasants differed considerably in status, size of holdings and what they owed in obligations to their lords. The textbook model of the medieval manor as a self-contained unit with a single lord controlling villagers governed by uniform manorial custom is even less valid for the fourteenth century than for the high Middle Ages. Residents of the same village were often tenants of different lords, and there were tremendous differences among villagers with regard to how much (if any) land they held. Moreover, the tendency was for lords to withdraw from the active supervision of their estates and for rents to be converted from labour and produce obligations to money, further distancing reality from the image of the self-sufficient seigniory.
The lives of the peasants were influenced by the nature of the family unit, customs and other solidarities inherent in the village community, and the impress of the seigneurial regime. There was considerable regional variation, but most European agriculturalists of the fourteenth century were subsistence farmers who also produced for a market and to pay a seigneurial rent. The interaction between the family’s subsistence, the market for agricultural produce, land and labour and the obligations of tenants affected the fortunes of peasants along with the obvious fundamental considerations such as the soil’s fertility and extent of their holdings. Everywhere in Europe there were words used to describe an ideal concept of a peasant holding. The mansus, hide, virgate, Hufe, did not usually have a standard size in practice but conformed to a notion of what a full peasant tenement meant. For most of Europe a figure of perhaps thirty to forty hectares seems to be what was regarded as a full holding, but a much smaller parcel (as little as four hectares) was sufficient to support a family given the average quality of the land, the tools available to peasants and their obligations to apply their surplus to a seigneurial rent. Even before the fourteenth century, a rising population, partible inheritance and the dwindling inventory of uncultivated land meant that most peasants had to make do with a less-than-standard holding and supplement their income by seasonal labour or the production of some commodity other than cereals. For the high Middle Ages as a whole, Robert Fossier believes that 40 to 50 per cent of peasants had less than the four-hectare minimum. Peasant households were generally small, essentially a conjugal family. Better-off peasants might have a larger household including poorer relatives, labourers and elderly parents no longer able to work. It was not uncommon for ageing parents to arrange lifetime maintenance contracts with their children in return for ceding to them the familial property in advance of their decease. Because of the high rate of mortality and short life expectancy, the number of households with three generations was not very great.  The degree to which husbands legally controlled the property of their wives varied. In Mediterranean regions it was more likely that peasant women might own and retain property of their own distinct from that of their husbands and not part of their dowry. In general throughout Europe, the wife was seldom recognised as economically independent in law, while at the same time her exclusive rights to dower lands was generally recognised. Husband and wife were both involved in the production of food and income. It is common to observe that peasant men tended the fields in what is called the ‘outer economy’ while women were more concerned with the immediate surroundings of the dwelling, the ‘inner economy’. Ploughing, clearing land, herding were generally male activities while the tending of dairy animals and poultry, the vegetable garden, brewing and cloth making were women’s work, along with the raising of children, providing meals and cleaning the house. In harvest time particularly, however, women were involved in the fields and certain tasks (gleaning, for example) were regarded as their peculiar responsibility. This household economy fits into a network of relations within villages in those areas of Europe in which settlement was relatively concentrated. The degree to which the village exerted a significant influence on peasant families differed with the human geography of European regions, but also with the nature of relations between lords and tenants. In south-western Germany, for example, village customs were set out in often elaborate bye-laws (Weistümer), but these were not purely spontaneous expressions of immemorial folk habits but resulted in part from the instigation of lords and for their convenience. Historians have at times been inclined to exaggerate the solidarity of the late-medieval village, seeing it as exemplifying the tyranny of rural custom and conformity, or more favourably in opposition to modern anomie.  More recently the divisions within the village have been demonstrated in cases such as that of Montaillou in Languedoc and the differentiation among different classes of villagers  has been emphasised.In England, manor court rolls reveal a select group of village leaders whose relative affluence gave them power over local enforcement.Throughout Europe rural communities regulated ploughing, common areas like pastures and forests, and the informal resolution of disputes. The fourteenth century witnessed considerable dislocation of both families and communities by reason of the tremendous mortality caused by disease and epidemic and the ensuing economic instability. One measure of a weakening of communal bonds is increased movement of peasants from familial property, an increase in mobility.7 Another is the growing market in buying and selling land. Demographic decline and economic stagnation after 1350 may have frayed the ties holding villages together, thus the accelerating land market might indicate a stronger assertion of private interest. On the other hand, such transactions may not indicate the dissolution of village and family ties but merely amount to arrangements within families or between neighbours.  An active market for land is not necessarily incompatible with the survival of communal institutions. The dichotomy between individualism and communal bonds is by no means clear for rural European societies. Long after the end of the fourteenth century, its upheavals notwithstanding, rural communal sentiment would manifest itself in continued and effective demands, especially with regard to the chief external factor affecting peasants, the seigniory.

LORDS AND PEASANTS

There were allodial farmers in fourteenth-century Europe, and many more whose connection with a landlord was vague, or based on rights of usufruct (such as the medieval Mediterranean adaptation of the Roman law of emphyteusis) that gave the nominal tenant effective possession. There were even a few areas, usually in difficult terrain such as mountains or marshes, that were able to form independent peasant republics (such as the Swiss Forest Cantons or Dithmarschen in Holstein). The overwhelming majority of European agriculturalists in the fourteenth century, however, did not own their properties in the modern sense of ownership. They worked land for which they had to pay a substantial rent to a lord. This rent took three fundamental forms that could be combined: monetary amounts, service in the form of labour and a portion of what the peasant tenant harvested.
By the fourteenth century, payment in money was much more common than had been the case when the economy was too primitive to support any very extensive coinage system. Labour service could take various forms, from taking messages to carting provisions to working on construction projects but the most important aspect of peasant work obligations from the lord’s point of view was performed on those parts of the estate he kept as a seigneurial reserve (the demesne) rather than renting out. Portions of the harvest varied but could amount to as much as half. Lords collected revenues from their tenants on the basis of more than a merely economic relationship. They held jurisdictional power in many cases that allowed them to act as judges and tax collectors. They might impose monopolies so that villagers would, for example, be forced to have their grain ground for a fee in the mill belonging to the lord. Such constraints existed even when the peasants were formally free although they were clearest when the peasants were serfs. While France by 1300 had very few serfs, servitude was common in much of England where about one third of all households consisted of unfree persons in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Serfdom was weak in Languedoc, rare in Castile, increasingly common in Catalonia (affecting one quarter of the rural population). In Catalonia it was uncommon in the south (New Catalonia) and all but universal among the peasantry of the regions around Girona in the north of the Principality. Such regional and even local variation makes it hard to generalise about serfdom. While it was thought to be a grave indignity, depriving peasants of the ability to appear before public courts or enter the priesthood, its legal disabilities did not always translate into economic inferiority. It has been argued, especially for England, that villeins were often economically better off and more effectively sheltered by custom than the free but marginal labourers. Servitude created a bond but also a degree of certainty over permanent and hereditarily transmissible occupation of land.
What servile status effectively symbolised was a degree of arbitrary control by the lord. It was the emblem of his extra-economic power, but this could extend to both free and unfree. The peasant rebellions of the late Middle Ages centred on arbitrary power, including servitude, but also such things as use of the forest or seigneurial encroachments on common lands, rights and customs that affected free as well as unfree tenants. Servitude not only created formal liability to arbitrary and coercive power, it epitomised what was increasingly resented in the years after the Black Death: the perpetuation and intensification of seigneurial power, including but not limited to attempts to impose serfdom. For parts of northern Europe, notably England, the thirteenth century had been the heyday of demesne farming. Motivated by high agricultural prices and the ready availability of labour, lords directly exploited their demesne. Peasants worked these lands as part of their obligations or lords hired landless labourers or those who had sub-standard holdings. In the densely populated environment of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the majority of peasants had inadequate holdings for their self-sufficiency. There was a tremendous difference between those who held land to support a family (a minority), and those who either held no land at all or too little to avoid desperation unless they were able to find work as day-labourers or could acquire income from a craft, brewing or other activity. High prices and the existence of a conveniently large impoverished group of potential labourers encouraged lords to exploit their demesne lands, relying on customary services supplemented by hired labour. Elsewhere, as in Germany, the fourteenth century witnessed the continuation of an earlier tendency to replace a system of exploitation based on the seigneurial demesne (Villikation or Fronhof system) by leasing out the manor entirely to tenants in return for rent. In the Mediterranean lands, agricultural exploitations had always been more dispersed and lords never had large reserves exploited by tenants’ labour services. Even major landowners, such as the great Cistercian monasteries of the Iberian peninsula, held lands for which they received substantial rents and services but not for the purpose of directly cultivating a demesne. In much of the Mediterranean, payments in kind remained far more important than labour or a purely monetary rent. The overall effect of the dislocations brought about by the demographic and economic collapse of the fourteenth century would be to remove lords further from direct administration of their estates. At the same time, however, they could no longer maintain themselves in the style they required by means of the relatively benign supervision exerted in the era of labour surplus. With pressure on wages to rise (as a result of the shortage of labour) and falling agricultural prices (the result of a radical decline in demand), lords attempted to recoup their losses by using their coercive power to squeeze more from their tenants. This could take the form of a renewed attention to servile status and an extension and deepening of serfdom, both intended to assert a more arbitrary seigneurial control and to enforce regulations against movement away from tenements that had not been worth bothering about when the supply of labourers exceeded demand. There were other possible strategies for landlords coping with radically shifting conditions (such as converting lands from arable to pasturage or from wheat to less labour-intensive crops), but the contradiction between seigneurial power and peasant expectations was clearly the background to one of the most striking phenomena of the late Middle Ages: the frequency and violence of peasant uprisings.
No longer capable of profiting from their demesnes and experiencing only limited success in degrading the condition of their tenants, lords would be forced to become absentee rentiers, but even in regions where there had never been extensive demesnes this withdrawal from direct exploitation coincided with a desperate attempt to wrest as much as possible from peasant tenants, an attempt whose success varied considerably depending on geography and circumstance. In general, the preferences and obligations of the aristocracy and the method of organising their exploitation of agriculture required lords to allow peasants a high degree of self-administration. A substantial class of bailiffs, stewards and other functionaries was charged with enforcing the lords’ rights and assuring the extraction of revenues. The complexity and diversity of these revenues, however, and the built-in imperfections of a system of indirect exploitation afforded peasants a certain space for resistance or at least petty subversion of what were often in theory a crushing set of obligations. Although the tenants exerted considerable effective control over their properties, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that this was a seigneurial regime, one in which lords managed to extract a considerable amount of what their peasants produced and exerted an extra-economic power over them. This power might be more potential than actual in good times. Many serfs, technically prohibited from moving off the land, migrated to nearby towns, but during the late fourteenth century, such unauthorised circulation was less likely to be tolerated and from Hungary to Germany to England lords put into effect what had previously been regarded as theoretical rights of coercion. Moreover, where bonds between lord and peasant were loosened, this could work to the advantage of the former, as when fixed rent with security of tenure was replaced by limited-term leases that permitted the lord to eject tenants or renegotiate their obligations.

BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

The first part of the fourteenth century witnessed a number of man-made as well as natural disasters that adversely affected the rural economy. The most shocking and severe of these was the Great Famine that affected almost all of northern Europe beginning in 1315. It lasted for at least two years and persisted as late as 1322. The immediate cause was a series of extremely rainy summers and unusually cold winters that caused harvest failures whose cumulative effect was catastrophic. The damage inflicted by the weather was exacerbated in many regions by warfare (notably in Flanders and the British Isles) and by epidemics of livestock diseases. Laments about the disastrous rains and prolonged freezes appear in chronicles written in all parts of northern Europe and this literary evidence is confirmed by tree-ring measurements (dendrochronology). There is some possibility that these conditions reflected a long-term change in the European meteorological conditions and it is conceptually appealing to regard the end of medieval agricultural and demographic expansion as caused by a fundamental change towards a wetter, colder climate. There is little solid evidence for this, however, and more likely that the rain and cold were more random and anomalous fluctuations. The Mediterranean regions escaped this particular terrible event, but they were not permanently spared. In Catalonia, for example, the year 1333 would be referred to in later sources as ‘the first bad year’, ushering in a series of poor harvests. Densely populated rural areas were more severely affected than thinly settled ones, but this is a rule with many exceptions. In England, as many as 10 or even 15 per cent of the population may have perished in the south, although in even more densely populated East Anglia, there was relatively little mortality. Recovery from the famine was quick, but the event serves both as an early indication of the ‘calamitous fourteenth century’ and provokes questions about how much was due to an external event that could not be avoided or planned for as opposed to an indication of over-population, of having reached beyond the demographic limits of what the land, technology and economy could support. After centuries of strong growth, the population of Europe seems to have levelled off in the late thirteenth century and may have declined substantially in the fourteenth century even before the staggering losses inflicted by the Black Death. It was the accomplishment of M. M. Postan to have devised a theory of this demographic change based on the internal shortcomings of the medieval agrarian economy. Rather than blaming the population loss on purely external factors such as poor harvests or climate change, Postan approached the relationship between agricultural production and population as an essentially Malthusian problem. In the absence of technological improvement or investment in agriculture, the countryside could not support continued population growth. Postan, in collaboration with J.Z. Titow, assembled indirect evidence for an increase in mortality rates after 1300 based on death duties paid by tenants of the bishop of Winchester. This increase took place not merely because of shocks and catastrophes but was a long-term demographic shift. Having reached extraordinarily high levels of population after several centuries of virtually uninterrupted growth, England surpassed the point of maximum density that its agricultural system could sustain. Expansion of arable land reached the point of diminishing returns.
As clearances moved from fertile lands to less favourable soils and climates, the population could no longer expand on the basis of simply increasing the amount of territory being cultivated. Settlements and farms were already being abandoned before the Black Death caused, according to Postan, something in the nature of an ecological crisis of overpopulation, soil depletion and impractical cultivation of marginal land. The population losses of the early fourteenth century were thus ‘Malthusian checks’, a rising death rate that brutally but necessarily tended to re-establish an equilibrium between population and production. Recently more direct means of measuring population change have in large measure confirmed the Postan thesis of a structural decline of population for England although with more sudden than gradual changes. England numbered at least 5 million inhabitants at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a figure that would not be reached again until well into the seventeenth century. Similarly high figures have been posited for France, Germany and Scandinavia. Some of the reduction antedates the Black Death. In his study of the countryside around Pistoia, for example, David Herlihy found that population began to decline as early as the mid-thirteenth century. In rural Essex, on the other hand, there was little change in population until the Great Famine which resulted in a 15 per cent loss. From 1317 to 1347, however, the population appears to have been reduced by a further 30 per cent. Studies of manors in Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire confirm a significant decline of population over the first half of the fourteenth century, although the manor of Halesowen in Worcestershire presents a somewhat different picture. There a decline in the rate of growth took place between 1300 and 1348, but there was an overall modest increase of 4 per cent in actual population despite a 15 per cent loss due to the Great Famine. Some parts of Europe experienced only minor setbacks during the early fourteenth century. In central Silesia, for example, after some relatively small difficulties, the agricultural economy renewed its expansion until well after 1350 (the region also managed to escape the Black Death). In many areas, however (Provence, Normandy, Tuscany, for example), there was a reduction of rural population similar to what took place in England. In Brunswick, on the estates of the cathedral chapter of Sankt Blasien, a substantial number of farms were abandoned after 1320, but this was due more to a succession of bad harvests and war than to the agrarian economy’s internal tensions or ecological limits. The case of Brunswick points to a central problem of the Postan approach: the tenuous evidence for a Malthusian crisis despite a widespread (but not universal) population loss. There is little support for his largely inferential positing of an increasingly unproductive expansion into marginal lands. The fact that areas went out of cultivation does not prove the exhaustion of the soil but rather a more dynamic landscape throughout the medieval period. The clearest example is Spain, more particularly Old Castile, where population loss began in the mid-thirteenth century without any indication that density limits had been previously approached. In this instance we can point to migration of cultivators to the newly opened lands of Andalusia, the result of the rapid Christian expansion after 1212, but in Germany as well, if not as dramatically, the desertion of villages was due to factors other than Malthusian checks. For England, examination of the history of the landscape and patterns of settlement calls into question the crucial role of marginal land as supposed by Postan. It is hard to deny the overwhelming significance of demography, but its radical fluctuations interact with the society in which they take place rather than supplanting, overriding or rendering irrelevant social forces. The seigneurial regime was already under stress before the Black Death and it is likely that an agrarian ‘crisis’ would have existed without the epidemic. Nevertheless, the epidemic, by virtue of destroying an immense number of lives without touching the fields (thus unlike war), created new stresses and a number of new opportunities. The death of perhaps as much as 40 per cent of the population of Europe between 1348 and 1350 had immediate effects on the structure of agrarian society. Everywhere, with the exception of a few regions that the Black Death for some reason missed (such as Béarn and parts of Silesia and Poland), the sudden demographic decline affected prices and wages and thus the value of land and relations between lords and peasants. On the other hand, the effects of the Black Death and economic or social reactions to it differed among Europe’s various regions, implying that conditions before the epidemic were not uniform and that regional legal and institutional structures affected the fortunes of labourers and landowners as much as impersonal demographic facts. The Black Death may have accentuated an already existing crisis manifested by famine and a stagnating or declining population, or it may be regarded as a brutal but not completely surprising Malthusian check to restore equilibrium to an overpopulated and economically overextended society. A certain historiographic consensus, especially but not exclusively in Britain, has tended to minimise the effects of the Black Death in part because of a reluctance to credit randomly generated external events with staggering historical effects. One minimalising approach is, as stated, to focus on antecedent trends that anticipated what would happen in the second half of the century. The other is to emphasise how quickly things returned to normal. These are related to the extent that if a reordering of the demographic equilibrium was already underway before 1348, the shock of rapid population loss would confirm rather than abruptly reverse existing trends. Where there is widespread agreement is that rural population loss continued after 1348 and created long-term radical economic and social dislocation. By 1400 there had been a continuing loss of population, worse in rural areas than in cities. In 1377, the population of England amounted to little more than it had at the time of Domesday Book,much of that loss due to the Black Death but also to the successive plagues of 1360–2, 1369 and 1375. In the rural surroundings of Pistoia there were only about 9,000 inhabitants in 1401, compared with a population of 31,000 in 1244, an astonishing loss of over 70 per cent. The number of rural communes was reduced to 44 from 124 over the same period. It has been estimated that over 3,000 villages have at various times been abandoned in England. Later enclosures for pasturage and creation of parkland were certainly most important and the largest number of English villages were voluntarily or forcibly abandoned between 1450 and 1550, but the Black Death itself constitutes ‘the pre-history of enclosure’ because the conversion of land to pasturage was motivated by the plunging demand and prices for cereal crops due ultimately to the series of epidemics begun so dramatically in the mid-fourteenth century. In Germany regions such as Thuringia, the mountainous areas of Swabia along the Danube and the northern Mark of Brandenburg saw a rate of village abandonment of over 40 per cent. The Rhineland, on the other hand, equally hard hit by the Black Death, experienced scarcely any loss in the number of inhabited places. Overall Germany lost 25 per cent of its villages between 1300 and 1500. As Werner Rösener points out, however, it is important to distinguish between places that were entirely abandoned, fields and all, and those where cultivation continued even if the residents had moved nearby. Despite the desertion of villages and migration to the cities, the overall fall of population did not mean a proportionate abandonment of fields. To the extent that the early fourteenth century had been characterised by a Malthusian saturation, the demographic decline relieved pressure on less fertile terrain while the reduction of density of settlement did not effect a proportionate loss in the productivity of the land. Agricultural prices and the value of land contracted due to reduced demand while wages were under upward pressure due to reduced supply. The aftermath of the Black Death would seem to have benefited those members of the lower orders with the good fortune to survive, and in many cases previously landless labourers now found themselves in unwonted demand and could significantly improve their conditions. In the long term (that is, by the end of the century), the agrarian economy had collapsed into a depression that affected other sectors as well. The changes in prices and wages as well as the later sharpening of economic crisis are sometimes related to the Black Death specifically (as long- versus short-term effects), but more often to the series of successive epidemics that continued to afflict Europe. Thus for the lands of Sankt Blasien in Brunswick there was a significant reduction in the number of farms being cultivated between 1320 and 1340. The population declined with the Black Death and by the departure of many of the surviving tenants lured by better opportunities elsewhere. The immediate impact on the agrarian economy, however, was not so severe, perhaps because despite the early fourteenth-century decline, the region was still overpopulated in relation to its agricultural possibilities of exploitation before the plague struck. By 1400, however, the rural economy hence the monastery’s revenues had collapsed. One fourth of the farms were deserted and the monastery could no longer cultivate its demesne except by expensive casual labour. These conditions were due more to the cumulative effects of epidemics after 1350 than to the Black Death itself. In a study of late-medieval Normandy, Guy Bois identified several stages of crisis affected by the demographic catastrophe of 1348 (amounting to a 50 per cent mortality) but also by the intrinsic problems of the feudal economy. After an initial period of stagnation between 1314 and 1347, the Black Death brought about a demographic collapse but not an immediate radical reduction in prices or dramatic increase in wages. The period between 1380 and 1413 witnessed a 25 per cent decline in agricultural prices but also a significant recuperation of at least part of the population. The real economic disaster took place between 1415 and 1450 but implicated in this was not only disease but other external factors such as war and the internal tensions of an economy based on small scale production and seigneurial extraction. The absence of an immediate radical effect of the Black Death is confirmed by Postan’s findings for England. In the area of Brignole in southern France, where most tenants held lands on favourable terms (emphyteutic leases), there seems to have been little change after 1348. Few properties were abandoned, the price of good land remained high and the payment of the annual census remained stable both in absolute terms and as a ratio of the price of the land being cultivated. There are, however, other indications that show that the Black Death did have a direct impact on wages and the attitudes of peasants. While prices did not begin their rapid decline in England until the late 1370s, tenants and labourers demanded improvement in their leases and wages. The earlier Ordinance of Labourers of 1349, confirmed by parliament as the Statute of Labourers in 1351, responded to upward pressure on wages and was vigorously enforced. Manorial records suggest that wages were stable after the Black Death, but they may disguise evasion of the wage control legislation by means of cash payments and other off the record inducements. The English wage legislation is the clearest evidence of the short-term economic influence of the Black Death, but there is considerable variation of opinion as to how effective it was. R. H. Hilton has found that it was initially successful in restraining agricultural wages until 1360 and that the upward trend accelerated after 1380. The punitive wage legislation was part of a seigneurial reaction that attempted to preserve or even strengthen the lords’ position after the Black Death. Labour services and fines were increased and prohibitions on movement became more strictly enforced. Even before the English Rising of 1381, however, and certainly by the end of the century, such efforts had failed. The bishops of Durham, who held unusual political and jurisdictional power in their palatinate, were forced to abandon attempts to collect labour services.
The gradual decline of English villeinage was greatly encouraged, if not caused, by the untenable position of the lords with regard to enforcing the bondage of their tenants in the demographic aftermath of the repeated plagues. The seigneurial reaction was not everywhere unsuccessful, and even in England was not resisted simply by invoking demographic inevitability as the Rising of 1381 indicates. In Catalonia lords would enforce an even harsher form of servitude than what had obtained before the epidemic and it would require a full-scale peasant war in the late fifteenth century to procure the abolition of servitude. In much of eastern Europe, the aftermath of the Black Death marks the beginning of a process of degradation of a once-free peasantry into servile status that would endure well into the modern era.

PEASANT REVOLTS

There had been many local uprisings in European rural communities before the thirteenth century, but the scale and nature of peasant movements changed after 1300 and especially after the Black Death. Unrest spread across a wide area and was no longer provoked by disagreements over particular village or manorial customs but by social demands and expectations. The most dramatic of these conflicts were the French Jacquerie of 1358 and the English Rising of 1381 which convulsed the two kingdoms and had a short-lived but (from the point of view of the upper orders of society) frightening success. The revolts are to be understood as at least substantially related to the social and economic crisis that characterised the fourteenth century. In some cases (notably the Jacquerie) they reflect the desperate conditions of violence, disorder and oppression. They are also in certain respects the outgrowth of a more favourable situation in which peasants felt more powerfully situated to put forward their demands. The English Rising of 1381 is often seen as an example of that favourite historical notion, the ‘revolution of rising expectations’ in which the failure to secure anticipated improvements in wages, tenurial conditions and status leads to more strident demands than in circumstances of greater oppression with less perceived opportunity.
There are various typologies of peasant revolts that try to account for the difference between small isolated manifestations of discontent and larger movements of the sort that developed in the late Middle Ages. The Russian historian B. F. Porchnev identified three forms of peasant resistance: flight, partial resistance and open revolt. Recent studies of both modern and earlier peasant societies have shown the importance of indirect, everyday forms of resistance that could undermine the claims of the dominant elite without open confrontation. Günther Franz, the historian of the German Peasants’ War of 1525, distinguished between ‘Old Law’ rebellions that invoked custom and were prompted by a lord violating local practices and ‘Godly Law’ uprisings based on principles of general application. For Franz the former were by nature specific to one lordship or jurisdiction while the scope of the 1525 war is explained by the arguments over freedom and Christian equality made possible by the teachings of Martin Luther. Similarly Peter Burke posited a dichotomy between traditionalist movements seeking a restoration of an earlier just order, and radical rebellions that envisioned a transformation of society without reference to an idealised past. Here the radical visions are not as tied to religious discourse as in Franz. Another taxonomy is one that distinguishes Messianic rebellions motivated by a fervid climate of religious expectation (as in early fifteenth-century Bohemia) from more practical uprisings motivated by a desire for social mobility. Guy Fourquin adds a third category in which an exceptional political or fiscal crisis precipitated uprisings (as with both the Jacquerie and the English Rising). These and other classification schemes have in common a desire to distinguish between ‘serious’ movements that encompassed a large geographical area or that seem to represent a radical alternative and the normal discontents characteristic of peasant society which has usually been regarded as conservative and resistant to change.While there is clearly a difference between an uprising limited to one or two manors and a widespread revolt on the scale of England in 1381, the typologies based on putative motivation tend to disguise the degree to which local issues could be framed in radical ideological terms and linked to questions that transcended parish boundaries. In the large-scale revolts of the fourteenth century political matters provoked long-standing social and economic grievances. The impact of famine, war and maladministration in Flanders brought about a rebellion between 1323 and 1328 that was provoked by onerous taxes but joined to an attack against exploitative lordship. The Jacquerie was, as Fourquin argued, the result of a crisis in the French state provoked by the battle of Poitiers, the tightened fiscal demands of the crown and the depredations of lawless troops. The English Rising was precipitated by the infamous poll tax and the unpopularity of John of Gaunt and the royal ministers. The involvement of peasants in protesting against taxation or corrupt administration is surprising only if it is assumed that they were normally helpless or unaware of anything beyond their localities. Certainly one of the characteristics of peasant revolts after 1300 is that they were framed in terms larger than local grievances. The fiscal demands of the French and English monarchs should not be regarded as the sole cause of these revolts which had as their target the conditions of tenure, the arbitrary exercise of seigneurial power and other local matters. The first large-scale medieval peasant revolt took place in maritime Flanders against a corrupt comital administration and its pro-French policies. From 1323 until they were crushed at the battle of Cassel by a French army in the summer of 1328, peasants burned castles, drove out the count’s officials, administered their own territories and established an army. The districts of Bruges, Ypres and Courtrai formed the centre of a virtual peasant republic stretching along the coast from Bourbourg to the Scheldt river. At issue in the Flemish Revolt were political and fiscal questions concerning the administration of Flanders as a whole. It was not exclusively a peasant revolt as elements of the population of Bruges and Ypres also participated. In its last two years the Flemish uprising became more radical and tended more forcefully to present itself as directed against the richer landowners and the Church rather than against the corrupt fiscality of the comital government. This rebellion thus combined an articulate political programme and the stimulus of what might seem traditional grievances.
The French Jacquerie of 1358 was relatively short-lived but made a greater impression on contemporaries than the Flemish Revolt, in part because it took place in the centre of France but also because it was perceived from the start as essentially a revolt against the nobility. The Jacquerie began in response to the depredations of French as well as English and Navarrese troops who pillaged the countryside in the aftermath of the defeat at Poitiers (1356). The royal government was ineffective except in attempting to squeeze money for the ransom of King John II and the nobility failed to protect tenants and was discredited by its poor showing in battle with the English. The peasants began to resist marauding knights in the Beauvaisis late in May 1358 but this turned very quickly into a general uprising against the nobility and spread quickly to the region around Paris, Picardy and had a certain echo in Champagne and Normandy. The contemporary chronicler Jean le Bel believed that the peasants were led by ‘Jacques Bonhomme’ and the name ‘Jacquerie’ was soon given to the revolt (the name occurs in the later histories of Froissart and the Chronique Normande). A certain Guillaume Calle was identified as the leader of the insurgents but the peasants also elected local captains and the revolt was in large measure spontaneous. It was suppressed quickly by the nobility aided by Charles II the Bad, king of Navarre. In a sanguinary counter-Jacquerie, the town of Meaux which had allied with the peasants was burned and Guillaume Calle was captured and executed by a mock coronation in which he was placed in a red-hot iron ‘throne’ and ‘crowned’ with a heated iron circlet. The motives for the Jacquerie remain the subject of considerable disagreement. The nineteenth-century historian Siméon Luce attributed the revolt to an excess of misery due to the combination of plague, war, taxation and seigneurial oppression. Guy Fourquin minimised its social basis, seeing the uprising as the result of a specific short-term crisis of the legitimacy of royal and noble authority. The peasants who were active in the uprising, according to Fourquin, were well-off, formed a small minority and were encouraged by outside forces, particularly the urban elites opposed to the rapacity of the royal government and angered by the prevailing disorder inflicted by the unemployed men-at-arms. In her discussion of contemporary accounts of the Jacquerie, Marie-Thérèse de Medeiros also doubts that the Jacquerie was essentially an anti-noble uprising, but acknowledges that the nobles had failed to protect their tenants and had lost the aura of legitimacy. Her work demonstrates the unanimity of the chroniclers in believing that the target was indeed the noble class. The Jacquerie, despite the fact that it lasted only a matter of weeks, would endure as a symbol of peasant rage and of the vulnerability of the upper classes. The English Rising of 1381 would also be long remembered as an explosion of rustic fury against the landed classes. A secular clerk in early fifteenth century Oxford wrote a poem in the margins of a cartulary:
‘Man beware and be no fool
think upon the ax and of the stool.
The stool was hard, the ax was sharp
the fourth year of King Richard’.
Certainly the appearance of the peasant armies in London and their intimidation of the young king was recalled as a horrendous instance of the world turned upside down. John Gower depicted the events in a nightmare vision in which previously useful animals escaped their bonds to bring ruin and disorder to the land. Here too, however, the rebellion can be seen clearly to emanate from something more than spasmodic anger or Messianic egalitarianism. The revolt began in response to government efforts to collect the third poll tax in four years voted by parliament in 1380. Insurrection spread from south-west Essex where it began in late May or early June until it included Kent, all of East Anglia, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and at least partially Sussex, Surrey and Middlesex. Two peasant armies converged on London, the men of Kent led by Wat Tyler and the Essex rebels. The Kentish forces arrived across the Thames in Blackheath, Southwark and Lambeth by 12 June and burned the palace of the bishop of London. The men of Essex, coming from the north, were allowed into London and now joined by the Kentish army they burned the palace of John of Gaunt and sacked the Temple whose prior was the royal treasurer, Robert Hales. The king and his entourage sought refuge in the Tower of London. A parley at Mile End on 14 June represents the high tide of the rebels’ fortunes. They forced the fourteen-year-old king to agree to the abolition of serfdom and to have charters recognising the liberty of specific tenants drawn up. They also won royal consent to a uniform rate of rental payment linked to acreage, the removal of restrictions on trade and a general amnesty.
Whether the rebels had more radical plans, such as monarchy depending not on parliament but a ‘true commons’ of ordinary people, remains debatable. Wat Tyler and his followers did take the matter sufficiently into their own hands as to leave Mile End and enter the Tower where they summarily beheaded Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Hales. The next day, 15 June, saw another meeting between the king and the insurgents at Smithfield where Wat Tyler is reported by the Anonimalle Chronicle to have presented new demands, including the end of all lordship except the king’s, the distribution of Church property and the abolition of all bishops except one. Tyler may not have wanted to reach an agreement with the king and is reported to have behaved in an aggressively familiar manner, shaking the king’s hand and drinking beer in his presence. The mayor of London, William Walworth, attacked Tyler and killed him while the king managed to calm the peasants by claiming to lead them. The rebels were dispersed relatively peacefully. Later the machinery of judgement was brought to bear against individual rebels, but the rising and its suppression proved to be considerably less bloody than its French counterpart. To what extent the demands presented in London represent the grievances of the countryside at large is uncertain. Wat Tyler’s demands and the sermon preached at Blackheath by John Ball (which cited the couplet ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’) put forward a theory of equality and an attack on lordship. Rather than emphasising the radical demands presented at Smithfield, historians examining particular localities have shown connections between earlier disturbances and the events of 1381. Peasants attempted to use legal means against what they regarded as arbitrary treatment by their lords rather than attacking lordship as such. Many of the regions that participated most enthusiastically in the Rising of 1381 had a history of suits over servile status and attendant obligations. Tenants at Elmham in Suffolk and Leighs in Essex had attempted to prove their free status. Forty villages in the south of England in 1377 were swept by a movement called the ‘Great Rumour’ in which seigneurial demands for labour services were opposed by claims of free tenancy based on Domesday Book. At the monastery of St Albans, rebels in 1381 dug up from the cloister the pieces of hand-mills that had been confiscated and used for paving stones in an earlier confrontation between peasants and the monastery over the seigneurial monopoly on mills. St Albans forbade its tenants to grind their own grain and the memory of the forcible suppression was alive in 1381 so that at the festive occasion when the peasants broke into the cloister, they dug up the stones and divided them into pieces giving some to each other in a ceremony resembling the distribution of communion bread. Events at St Albans also demonstrate the respect for what was believed to be old custom rather than a remaking of society according to the programme presented at Smithfield. The tenants of St Albans burned documents recording their obligations but at the same time insisted that the abbot present a charter, supposedly issued by King Offa, ‘with capital letters, one of gold, one of azure’, that contained the fundamental provisions of their free status. The abbot protested that he knew of no such document, promised he would look for it, and eventually was compelled to write another charter granting the rather limited concessions that the peasants claimed.
Given the variety of local demands and the difficulty of reconstructing a peasant programme out of the hostile accounts of the chroniclers, one cannot ascribe a single or principal cause to the English Rising. Most clearly among fourteenth-century revolts, however, the English example must be seen in relation to the conditions arising as a consequence of the Black Death and subsequent epidemics. Earlier local conflicts over tenurial obligations were joined together by common grievances over arbitrary seigneurial and governmental levies, themselves the result of a crisis in land values and royal financing.

The desire of the lords to resist increasing wages and to take advantage of the unfree status of many of their tenants to increase their failing revenues ran into peasant expectations of improved conditions, and resentment against serfdom and its indignities. Suppression of the revolt in 1381 did not mean an end to peasant resistance in England. There would be five regional revolts between 1381 and 1405, especially in Kent, Cheshire and Yorkshire.58 More importantly, the last decade of the fourteenth century saw an acceleration in the leasing out of seigneurial lands and the consequent abandonment of demesne farming. Peasants in this period were able to use the threat to leave their tenements in order to negotiate better terms for themselves in spite of the renewal of punitive legislation regarding mobility and agricultural wages. The era saw an unusual degree of movement and it is a reasonable conjecture that what the peasants had not been able to win by direct means in 1381, they were at least partially successful in obtaining by taking advantage of what remained their greatest weapon: the decline in the labour force. While it is impossible to set a date for the end of serfdom in England, there is little doubt that 1381 marked the critical moment in its fading away, a process that the fifteenth century would complete.

By Paul Freedman in the 'New Cambridge Medieval History', volume 6, p.82-101, Syndicate of the University Press of Cambridge, UK, 2000. Adaptado e ilustrado para ser postado por Leopoldo Costa.