Plague and Revolt

Posted by Paula Stiles Jun 1, 2006

The Black Death, the subject of this week's article, struck Eurasia hard and killed a lot of people. It left the survivors mourning their dead. But as they emerged from their shock and grief, those who survived also saw some surprising benefits.

The plague had struck as hard as it did partly because of severe overpopulation and resulting poverty in Europe over the previous century. With the population so reduced peasants took vacant land abandoned by their dead neighbors, artisans asked higher prices for their wares and even day laborers found themselves able to demand higher wages. Europe went from a surplus to a shortage of work in only five years and Europe's lower classes saw opportunity in the new situation.

But kings and nobles both had a very different take on the situation. They saw these non-noble opportunists as upstarts and criminals to their class. The kings, especially, had no intention of giving up anything, either money or power. In France and England, they passed a series of laws and levied new taxes to return things to "normal". When French peasants rebelled in 1358 (the Jacquerie) and English peasants revolted in 1381, the French and English kings cracked down hard.

But though they crushed these rebellions, they could not bring back the dead or stop the living from thinking new thoughts. It wasn't obvious yet, but the peasants were going to start revolting a lot more in the future. And eventually, they'd get what they wanted.

And only seventy years after the Jacquerie, a peasant girl named Joan of Arc would save her country from invaders, becoming France's greatest hero.