Black Death: trade routes, city life, and the struggle over wages
The Black Death disrupted work as well as trade and family life. After plague reduced England's population, surviving laborers could demand higher wages from employers short of hands. The Statute of Laborers of 1351 tried to force pay back toward earlier levels and regulate how workers were hired. It named farm servants, building trades, transport workers, and craftspeople. The confrontation over wages followed an epidemic that had traveled through the commercial networks connecting Central Asia, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean.
The pandemic was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Research published in 2022 connected its ancestry to an epidemic in a trading community near Lake Issyk Kul, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, in 1338 and 1339. Inscriptions in Syriac recorded a sudden outbreak there. Genetic analysis identified plague and placed the recovered strains at the branching point associated with the later pandemic. The closest related modern strains occur in reservoirs around the Tian Shan mountains. This evidence points toward Central Asia rather than establishing a definite starting place in China.
In 1347, merchant ships carried plague from Golden Horde territories around the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. The Black Death spread through Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Sicily was among the early Mediterranean destinations. From Italy and other ports, outbreaks followed trade routes into France, Spain, Britain, and Ireland. Northern and eastern regions were affected as the epidemic continued. This first great wave formed the opening of the Second Plague Pandemic, during which further outbreaks continued for centuries.
Florence faced the epidemic in 1348. Officials appointed to clean the city removed accumulated waste, and authorities refused entry to sick visitors. Religious responses accompanied these civic measures: people held public processions and offered prayers. Some residents withdrew into small groups, limiting company and attempting to live temperately. Others responded by gathering socially and moving between houses and taverns. Still others left the city for country estates. Attempts to preserve ordinary routines existed alongside flight, seclusion, and the weakening of public authority.
Households and employment changed rapidly. Domestic servants became difficult to obtain, and those available demanded much higher pay. People with few previous resources could gain employment in households that had lost their normal support. Fields outside the city were left without enough labor to maintain them. The crisis also interrupted customary patterns of visiting, care, and communal obligation. These upheavals affected the countryside as well as the streets, workshops, and homes of towns. Population loss altered who was available to do essential work and what employers had to offer.
England's government attempted to contain the new bargaining power of laborers. An earlier ordinance had required servants to accept customary wages, but employers complained that people continued demanding twice or three times previous rates. The 1351 statute applied wage controls to carters, ploughmen, shepherds, swineherds, dairy workers, and other servants. It preferred hiring for a year or another customary term over hiring by the day. Agricultural workers seeking employment in market towns were to bring their tools openly and be hired in a public place.
The statute also regulated seasonal movement. A worker with employment available locally at the prescribed rate was not to leave the town in winter to seek summer work elsewhere. Exceptions recognized established harvest migration from places including Lancashire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and the border regions. Workers had to swear twice yearly that they would observe the rules. The legislation set rates for mowing, reaping, and threshing, as well as payments to carpenters, masons, tilers, and their assistants. Employers were implicated too: the law sought to restrict what could be paid as well as what could be demanded.
Enforcement depended on local officers and visiting justices. Stewards, bailiffs, and constables were instructed to identify offenders and report them. Justices could investigate officers who concealed violations or failed to perform their duties. People who had paid excessive wages could seek repayment through proceedings against workers. The law thus joined wage regulation to a system of oaths, inquiries, and financial penalties. Its detailed provisions reveal the government's effort to preserve earlier employment arrangements after the Black Death had changed the supply of labor.
The economic consequences varied across Europe. Fewer people meant fewer purchasers for manufactured goods as well as fewer workers to produce them. Survivors sometimes gained access to more land, while landlords absorbed holdings left vacant. Recurring epidemics and later food shortages complicated recovery. Laborers did not gain every concession they sought, and changes in landholding and service developed unevenly. The Black Death accelerated existing pressures within medieval society, while statutes such as England's attempted to restrain some of the changes it had made possible.
- Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Statute of Laborers (1351) — sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu
- Max Planck Society, Origins of the Black Death identified — www.mpg.de
- World History Encyclopedia, Black Death, by Mark Cartwright — www.worldhistory.org
- Fordham University, Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron introduction: The Black Death — sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu