The Black Death

T | SHE fourteenth century was a century of violent contrasts. Unparalleled military triumph was followed by humiliating military failure and defeat. Kingship was raised to a culminating point of glory by Edward III who was, for contemporaries, the embodiment of the feudal virtues, only to be disgraced by a successor, his grandson Richard II, who had to be bundled off the stage amid scenes of public scandal and private degradation which moved one modern writer to conclude that "in the end the case for deposing him looked stronger than the case for deposing his great-grandfather".' And the century witnessed, in the unprecedented famines and epidemics that marked its course, an assault on the social system at its base which was infinitely deadlier than any which it had sustained at its apex by way of military loss or political subversion. Yet the result of this assault was to inaugurate a century of prosperity for the vast majority of the population, the like of which was not to be known again for generations to come. The new age, which was not without its problems for contemporaries, is not without its problems for us. Everyone knows that the extraordinary reversal of the established order of things which inaugurated this new age was caused by the decline of the population. But no one is quite sure as to when that decline began. It is tempting to look back on the succession offamines and pestilences that marked the course of the fourteenth century, as Mr Saltmarsh once did, and see the recuperative vitality of the population progressively weakened by loss and debility.2 But the statistics of wages and prices make it very difficult to credit this plausible account of what happened. If the population had declined substantially as a result of either the famines or the early visitations of bubonic plague then land should have lost value as its scarcity diminished. As rents fell, dragging prices after them, wages should have risen. Many years ago when Prof. Postan