Post-plague wages

Why did a plague that killed a third of Europe leave the survivors better paid?

A catastrophe destroys much of a society and the survivors end up better off. Stated plainly it sounds like a moral outrage or a statistical trick. It is neither. In the decades after the Black Death reached Europe in 1347, the real wages of ordinary English labourers rose substantially and stayed high for a century. Something in our intuition about disasters is wrong — and what it is explains rather more than one plague.

Start by asking what a wage actually is. It is what someone will pay for an hour of work, and what they will pay depends on what that hour adds and on whether they can get it more cheaply elsewhere. So a wage is a ratio, not a quantity: labour is priced against the other things needed to produce anything — land, tools, animals, buildings.

Now notice what a plague does and does not destroy. It kills people. It leaves the fields exactly where they were, the mills standing, the ploughs in the sheds. Total output falls, certainly — a smaller society produces less. But the ratio has moved violently: each surviving worker now has far more land and equipment at their disposal than before.

Follow that through and the outcome is close to forced. There is more land than people to work it, so the marginal field — the poor, stony, distant one only worth cultivating when population presses hard — is abandoned, and everyone works better ground. A day's labour on good land yields more, so it is worth more. Meanwhile a landlord with fields and no hands has an unattractive choice: pay up, or let the land lie idle and earn nothing. Grain prices and land rents fell; wages went the other way.

What did the people holding the land do about it? They tried to make it illegal. The English Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 and the Statute of Labourers in 1351 fixed wages at pre-plague levels, made it an offence to refuse work at that rate or to leave a master for better terms, and created justices to enforce it. This was no token gesture — prosecutions were numerous and the machinery real.

And it largely failed. Ask why, because the reason is the interesting part. The Statute set a price below what an hour of labour was now worth to the person buying it, so it was fighting the employers as much as the workers. Any landlord facing an idle field had a private interest in quietly paying more, and there were far too many such bargains, in far too many villages, for a handful of justices to police. A price control needs enforcers whose interests differ from the parties'; here both sides preferred to break it. What the Statute reliably produced was resentment, which fed the rising of 1381 — and in the long run English serfdom eroded rather than tightened.

Now the complication that makes this honest. The same shock struck all of Europe. In the lands east of the Elbe, the outcome was the opposite: over the following centuries lords increased labour dues and tied peasants more firmly to the land, a tightening historians call the second serfdom. Identical demographic shock, identical logic of scarcity — reversed result.

Two refinements connect the pieces.

The first is that scarcity sets the pressure, not the outcome. Evsey Domar put it sharply: free land, a free peasantry, and a landowning class that does not work cannot all three coexist. When land is abundant and labour scarce, labour must either be paid well or be coerced, and which you get is a political question, not an economic one. Robert Brenner's argument about the divergence runs on the same rail: what differed east and west was the balance of organised power — English village communities had real legal standing and cohesion, and English lords were checked by a strong crown and a competitive land market, whereas east of the Elbe lords were better placed to act collectively against a weaker peasantry, with grain exports giving them a motive to do so.

The second is that "wages rose" needs caveats stated rather than buried. The classic English series — Phelps Brown and Hopkins's index of building craftsmen and labourers — covers a narrow, mostly southern, mostly urban cash-paid slice of a population that was overwhelmingly rural and often paid partly in kind. The direction of the finding is well corroborated by other evidence, but the precise magnitudes should be held loosely. The timing needs care too: the second serfdom's decisive tightening came considerably later than 1348, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so it is not the immediate reflex of the plague but a slower institutional divergence in which the plague was one input among several.

• Why high wages and cheap land in fifteenth-century England may have pushed landowners toward sheep, enclosure, and labour-saving techniques.
• How the Brenner debate weighed demographic against class-structural explanations, and where the argument stands now.

Every term the collection defines is gathered in the glossary.