Did the Black Death Make Workers Richer?

Between 1347 and 1351 a plague carried by fleas, rats and humans swept across Europe. Estimates vary, but a third or more of the population may have died. A catastrophe of that scale is usually told as pure tragedy. Economic historians have asked a colder question: what happened to the people who survived?

A shortage of hands

With so many dead, land lay untilled and harvests went unreaped. The workers who remained were suddenly scarce. In England, the evidence of manor records and tax rolls suggests that wages rose sharply in the decades afterwards, and that peasants could demand better terms or leave one lord for another who paid more.

The elite strikes back

Landowners and the Crown did not welcome this. In 1349 an ordinance, followed by the Statute of Labourers in 1351, tried to force wages back to pre-plague levels and bind workers to their employers. Enforcement was uneven, and many were fined, but it could not hold the market in place. Resentment over such controls, combined with the poll taxes of the 1380s, helped fuel the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

Different places, different outcomes

The result was not uniform. In western Europe, serfdom declined and tenant farming and wage labour spread. In parts of eastern Europe, landowners were strong enough to tighten their grip, and a “second serfdom” grew in later centuries. The same demographic shock produced freedom in one place and bondage in another, depending on who held power when it arrived.

Editorial assessment

It would be wrong to say the plague was good for workers. It killed millions, and many survivors endured grief and poverty. But the episode is strong evidence that economic outcomes depend on bargaining power, and that bargaining power depends on politics as well as numbers. Scarcity gave workers a chance. Whether they could keep it was decided by institutions.