How did the Black Death change wages and labor in Europe?

The Black Death was the largest demographic shock in European history, and it shrank the pool of agricultural labor sharply. In the short run, wages and per capita income rose, and peasants gained bargaining power. Economists reviewing the evidence note that the rise was sustained in the long run only in some parts of Europe, so the outcome was not the same everywhere. [1] [2]

Before the plague, a growing population had kept wages low and rents and prices high, which favored lords. Afterward, cash wages in England rose by twelve to twenty-eight percent from the 1340s to the 1350s, and by twenty to forty percent by the 1360s. Some local jumps were larger: at Fornham All Saints in Suffolk, part of the hired reaping cost 5d. per acre instead of the pre-plague 3d., an increase of 67 percent. [2]

Servile peasants could bargain for lighter duties, and if a lord refused, a peasant often moved to better conditions elsewhere. At Tivetshall in Norfolk, vacant holdings cost the lord sixty percent of his week-work by 1350-51. The income of English lords fell by twenty percent from 1347 to 1353. Tenant farmers also moved to towns in search of better-paid work. [2] [3]

Authorities tried to hold wages down by law. England's Ordinance of Laborers (1349) and Statute of Laborers (1351) called for a return to 1346 wages and terms. Similar laws appeared in Aragon, Castile, France and several Italian cities. Such caps often failed: France revised its 1349 law in 1351 to allow a one-third raise. Only in England, where government could enforce rules effectively, did the law slow wage growth for a time. [2]

Court records show workers defying the rules. A 1352 case describes an employee who left his post without permission, and another worker who demanded an excess of six shillings eightpence for reaping. Landowners often conceded higher pay rather than do the work themselves. [4]

Scholars agree that nominal wages rose but differ on how far living standards improved. One view, in the EH.net survey, stresses that plague mortality increased the per-person supply of gold and silver and set off inflation lasting in England until the mid-1370s and longer on the continent. That cut real wages so much that higher cash pay bought no more, and often less, than before. [2]

A second view, in a Duke University Press essay, challenges the idea that conditions improved immediately or universally. In Italy, where real wages have been calculated, the benefit for laborers did not arrive until two or three generations after 1348, and it varied between and within city-states. The Washington University history department, by contrast, describes the period as one in which wages rose and inequality lessened, while social and labor hierarchies stayed the same. [5] [4]

On the labor laws, Samuel Cohn argues they did not follow logically from supply and demand for labor. He reads them as responses to elite anxiety about the supposed new power of lower classes after mass death. [6]