Up until now this series has explored the king’s relationship with his barons and elite members of society. In this post, medieval peasants finally find the lever they needed for change to happen – they died in droves…

But first a reminder. Medieval society worked on the premises of feudalism – the king sits at the apex, he owns everything. In return for land, the barons swear fealty to the king – this means that they will be loyal to him and provide him with troops and a variety of feudal dues. The barons sub-let their land to their own men. These lesser nobles and knights swear loyalty to the baron who gives them parcels of land. Knights and lesser nobility offer military service and loyalty to their overlords. At the bottom of the pyramid, the peasants work the land in return for protection, food, justice and shelter. Some of them are free men. They pay the lord of the manor rent and feudal dues.

Another group of peasants, approximately 40% of them, are villeins. In return for some land of their own, they have to work for the lord and are not free to leave the arrangement if they become dissatisfied. They are tied to the manor where they were born and raised. In addition to working for the lord of the manor all peasant are obliged to pay all manner of feudal dues, fees and fines. For instance, a villein needs his lord’s permission for his daughters to get married or for any of his family to leave their village. They are also required to pay fines to inherit their family lands and rights after the senior member of their family dies – in much the same way that the heirs of barons have to pay fines to enter into their inheritances.

Essentially a villein was somewhere between a freeman and a slave – remember that the Normans did not have slaves – I’m just using slavery as an example to demonstrate where villeins sat in the social order i.e. at the bottom of feudal society. The words villein and serf are often used interchangeably. It was possible to become a freeman by paying for freedom if you could save enough money or else villeins who ran away to a town and who remained free for a year and a day could not be forced to return to their former lord.

Magna Carta, the Provisions of Oxford and the parliaments of Simon De Montfort, Henry III and Edward I offered nothing to the peasants. They were in no position to make demands of their lords.

Things changed in 1348 when the Black Death, or bubonic plague, arrived on English shores. It is estimated that a third of Britain’s population died. It originated in China during the 1300s and was carried to Europe by merchant vessels. It arrived in England in June 1348 and moved north, infecting Wales and Scotland as it went. The Scots were initially delighted with the epidemic’s effects and thought that they could use the opportunity to invade England – which was, perhaps, something of an error. The first wave of the Black Death in Britain lasted until about 1350.

After the plague came famine and even more death. Harvests were bad not only because there weren’t enough peasants to look after the fields but because of changing climate which caused a so-called Little Ice Age during the fourteenth century. Many chroniclers thought that the end of the world was on its way.

Wharram Percy, to the north of York, is probably the best known example of a medieval deserted village in the country. The lord of Wharram Percy died when the plague had reached Yorkshire, in 1349. A third of the village died with him. Records show that the new lord of the manor was a minor and that only 45 people survived. The village never really recovered. It continued to shrink throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are many other examples of deserted medieval villages around the country – though not all of the depopulation was because of the Black Death, some of it was because farming methods changed – sheep farming was not so labour intensive.

The shortage of labour after the Black Death changed the relationships between the peasants and landowners and it also changed preferred farming methods – sheep became more common, landlords such as the Duchy of Lancaster in Derbyshire chose to rent its land to tenants rather than continuing to be the ‘farmer’ – there were fewer risks that way.

Peasants who survived, both freemen and villeins, often sought new lives for themselves away from the manors that their forefathers had been tied to. Landowners began to offer better wages and conditions. This was called commutation- or the replacement of one form of payment with another. It meant the substitution of wages for labour rather than the previous feudal practices of land and protection.

The Pastons, a famous medieval family from Norfolk, began their story as villeins. Clement Paston was born in about 1350. By the end of his life he was a free man – he was able to work for wages and no lord of the manor could dictate the manner by which he lived his life. He purchased land that had belonged to men who died from the plague, on the strength of his landholdings he was able to have his son William educated. William Paston eventually became a lawyer and then a judge. His wife, Agnes, was the daughter of a knight. Their eldest son, John Paston, became an MP and held Caister Castle. By the 1470s Clement’s grandsons were knighted and part of the royal household. This would have been unthinkable before 1348. Freedom from feudal bondage gave men the chance to rise.

It didn’t take long for the barons and the king to recognise the dangers of the feudal pyramid losing its base or the problems of peasants trying to improve their lives and positions in society. During 1349, an Ordinance of Labourers was issued. This became the Statute of Labourers in 1351 and fixed wages at pre-plague rates. It also determined that villeins must remain on the manor where they were tied. It proved an ineffective law. The Black Death was not responsible for the start of the change in method of payment but the plague did speed up the process of commutation and the decline of feudalism. Be warned though that not all historians agree about the extent to which feudalism declined because of the Black Death.

Once the changes began, peasants were often able to improve their living conditions and their status. In 1363 a Sumptuary Law was passed that shows the extent to which the elite were becoming alarmed by the changes going on all around them. The act decreed the quality and colour of cloth that people at different levels of society (below the nobility) could wear. It also tried to limit what ordinary people could eat. The law was impossible to enforce, but it is useful to show that for the ordinary men and women who survived the plague there was the potential of wealth from higher wages and from holding the lands of their neighbours who had died from the plague.