Economic Transformation and the Social Revolts of the Fourteenth Century

The drastic reduction of Europe's population created an unprecedented shortage of available labor, in agriculture as much as in urban crafts, and this scarcity handed surviving peasants and artisans a bargaining position they had never previously enjoyed. Real wages rose substantially in England and other parts of western Europe in the decades after the pandemic, and the process of "commutation," by which serfs converted their traditional labor obligations into simple money rents, accelerated considerably as lords competed to retain scarce workers. Landowners tried to resist this shift through legal means: the Statute of Labourers, enacted in England in 1351, attempted to freeze wages at pre-plague levels and restrict peasant mobility, but it proved largely unenforceable against the sheer structural shortage of hands.