After the Black Death: labour legislation and attitudes towards labour in late‐medieval western Europe

Abstract

The Black Death spurred monarchies and city-states across much of Western Europe to formulate new wage and price legislation. These legislative acts splintered in a multitude of directions that to date defy any obvious patterns of economic or political rationality. A comparison of labour laws in England, France, Provence, Aragon, Castile, the Low Countries, and the city-states of Italy shows that these laws did not flow logically from new post-plague demographics and economics-the realities of the supply and demand for labour. Instead, the new municipal and royal efforts to control labour and artisans' prices emerged from fears of the greed and supposed new powers of subaltern classes and are better understood in the contexts of anxiety that sprung forth from the Black Death's new horrors of mass mortality and destruction, resulting in social behaviour such as the flagellant movement and the persecution of Jews, Catalans, and beggars. I ew syntheses of the Black Death appear yearly, but few of them explore the cultural, political, or economic consequences of the plague comparatively. Instead, perhaps taking their cue from contemporary chroniclers, historians continue to assume that the Black Death was a 'universal' catastrophe with 'universal' reactions and consequences across Europe. 1 But as debate about the social and economic impact of the Black Death between eastern and western Europe or France and England has highlighted, the social, economic, and psychological impact from more or less the same demographic collapse was not everywhere the same; regions might even react in ways that were diametrically opposed. 2 The Black Death and its successive waves, moreover, appear not to have hit all regions with the same ferocity and demographic consequences. A city such as Douai and its region in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe may not have borne 1 For a recent work that states this universal argument boldly, see Benedictow, Black Death . 2 See for instance, Aston and Philpin, eds., Brenner debate , and for differences in the economic consequences of the Black Death between the Middle East and Europe, Borsch, Black Death in Egypt and England . N

Plague and Lethal Epidemics in the Pre-Industrial World

“…The Cyprian "plague," for example, helped favor "the progress of an obscure and radical cult, Christianity, within a religious culture dominated by civic paganism" (Harper 2015, p. 256). The sociocultural consequences recently by Cohn (1992Cohn ( , 2002Cohn ( , 2009 point out that in the short run, the Black Death…”

“…Although we know little about the outbreaks in the century immediately after the Black Death (for a useful synthesis, see Cohn 2008), those occurring in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries have been studied in detail.…”

“…Northwestern Europe also lagged in the development of medical literature on the topic, which often came from translations of Southern European tracts. Publication of plague tracts boomed in sixteenth-century Italy and France (Cohn 2009). They established the state-of-the-art in terms of knowledge about the disease and usually included sections on "governing the plague" (what we would now call "policy suggestions"), based upon the consolidated experience.…”

Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy

“…At least in this case we might expect that the reduction in labour led to an increase in salaries and an improvement in the conditions of the most underprivileged groups, determined by an increase in buying power even in a regime with stable prices. As far as we know, the wages of all kinds of workers tended to increase considerably after the Black Death in the fourteenth century, provoking differing reactions in various cities in Italy and in Europe, at times involved in keeping the new trends in check by regulating the labour market, at others more concerned in maintaining public order and avoiding any further haemorrhage of skilled workers, aiming instead to attract others from nearby towns (Cohn, 2007).…”

A risk society? Environmental hazards, risk and resilience in the later Middle Ages in Europe

“…If the impact was widespread, as it was in the case of the Black Death, there were new opportunities for employment and better housing, and so people moved to take advantage. Siena and Orvieto (Italy) were not alone among civic authorities in passing emergency legislation to restrict population movements (Cohn 2007). In the case of rapid onset events such as floods or earthquakes, where the effects tended to be more localised, the devastation was rarely total or so widespread.…”