By the end of the fourteenth century, the Black Death killed nearly 60% of Europe’s population. First arriving in Europe through sick merchants on Genoese trading ships that docked in Sicily, the plague caused boils, fever, diarrhea, horrible pain, and shortly, death. No one was sure how the Death spread, and this combined with the fast course the disease took and the primitive medical practices of the time allowed for the disease to spread through the continent in devastating time. It only took about twenty-three days from the point of infection for the plague to be fatal (Benedictow). The Black Death spread extensively through Europe, affecting both nobility and peasants.
This epidemic caused panic and distress among people of all classes. People were willing to do almost anything to avoid being infected by the Death. Priests would no longer give last rites to the dead, many doctors would not see their patients, and shop owners closed their stores. Thinking they could escape from the Black Death, many fled to the country, but because the disease also affected livestock, those who left their homes in the city were still infected. People also went to extreme lengths to try to find a cause for the epidemic. They believed the Black Death was a punishment from God himself as retribution for their sins. According to this way of thinking, earning God’s forgiveness was the only way to stop the disease from spreading further. Some thought in order to achieve this they had to purge their communities of troublemakers. As a result, townspeople massacred several thousands of Jews in 1348, and thousands of the Jews fled to the less densely populated Eastern Europe, where they could be safe from mobs in big cities. Others tried to regain God’s favor by publicly displaying their own punishment. An example of this is the flagellants, some upper-class men who visited town after town and struck themselves and each other with heavy leather straps studded with sharp pieces of metal while the townspeople watched in horror. However, the Pope did not approve of their terrifying rituals and forced them to stop after they ran through the process thrice a day for nearly thirty-four days. The Europeans affected by the Black Death experienced unfathomable tragedy, and had trouble finding ways to tolerate it and prevent it (History Staff).
The aftermath of the Black Death led to improved lives for the peasants of Elizabethan England. The country, before the plague ravaged it, was under the feudal law system. In this system, the lord owned the land in small communities, and the peasants living there farmed the land and gave him a portion of their crops as a form of payment. The plague forced this system to collapse. The Black Death killed most of the aforementioned peasants, so the fields they were expected to farm on were left unplowed. In addition to this, lords advised peasants to leave their homelands during the epidemic to come work for them, but also refused to let them return to their original village. Peasants realized they could move from village to village, constantly switching to whomever offered them the best deal. This greatly changed the traditional feudal system, which served to confine peasants to a certain piece of land. In response to this, the government passed the Statute of Labourers in 1351 that forced peasants to remain in their homelands and did not allow lords to change their wages from what they were in 1346. This infuriated the peasants and led to the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. Survivors of the Black Death felt that they were special, chosen specifically by God to be saved (Trueman), and after this the lower class began to demand more economic and social equality. When the government passed the Statute, the poor felt that the law served to keep them from this equality. Unfortunately, the Revolt did not immediately result in the end of serfdom, but the Whig historians saw it as the “beginning of the end of the feudal system” (BBC Staff). Consequently, albeit in an indirect way, the Black Death led to the abolishment of the feudal system and more freedom for the peasants.
The Black Death also led to the decline in power for both the Church and nobility. According to John Kelly, the mortality rate for priests during this plague was “42 to 45 percent.” This forced Pope Clement VI to announce that the dying could make their confession to whoever was present without losing salvation because there were not enough priests to visit everyone. This was an extreme change for the Catholic Church, as before only clergy were allowed to perform last rites for the dying. After the epidemic, the new priests hired to replace the ones killed by the plague were much less scholarly and thoroughly trained, and this led to a loss of respect in church officials by the public. Religion became a more personal institution rather than dependent on clergy (Cybulskie). As mentioned before, the spread of the Black Death caused a massive loss for farmers. Thus, the nobility and clergy, whose incomes were based on ownership of land and selling grains, lost a large amount of their income. Both groups of people decided to solve this problem by selling freedom to the peasants. Though this provided them with an immediate source of money, this did not help them in the long run, as they no longer had anyone to work for them. Without as much wealth as they previously had, the nobility lost a large amount of power to kings and nation states (Butler). As a consequence of the Black Death, neither the nobles nor the clergy possessed as much wealth and influence as they did before the illness spread throughout Europe.