By transforming the agrarian depression of the 14th century into the terminal crisis of feudalism, the Black Death ushered in a new era of profound social dislocations and economic change. In this context, many peasants increasingly turned to the market in order to escape the machinations of serfdom. This is a particularly significant point given the tendency among Political Marxists to stress that market dependency must be imposed upon economic agents; under no circumstances, they argue, would peasants willingly choose to be capitalists or subject themselves to the systematic imperatives of the market. While this position has the great merit of denaturalising the emergence of capitalism, the historical evidence does nonetheless indicate that, under certain circumstances, peasants sought to use the market to escape from serfdom. Over time this often had the unintended consequence of making them market-dependent.128
In the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, many English peasant producers were able to use their improved conditions to accumulate land,129 produce surpluses130 and participate in the market as a means to secure their material reproduction.131 The ongoing process of peasant differentiation was greatly accelerated by the impact of the plague on England’s feudal agrarian economy. This was above all the result of the demographic shifts resulting from the plague’s diffusion from the Mongol Empire to Europe. ‘There can be little doubt as to the importance of the Black Death’, Michael J. Bennett notes, ‘to both the progressive amelioration and differentiation of peasant fortunes’.132 For in numerous regions of England, high mortality rates left unbreachable gaps
in the ranks of the peasantry. The consequent shortage of labour was bound in the long run to work to the advantage of most sections of the peasant class, and the large number of vacant holdings inevitably enabled the more enterprising survivors to add to their tenancies on a scale hitherto unimaginable.
Similarly, as Jane Whittles writes specifically in regards to the situation in the county of Norfolk, England:
Manorial lords had retained their hold on the economy in the century before the Black Death because of the high demand for land. Once this factor was removed by population decline, the diversified economy undermined the manorial lords’
position. Land was still an important element in the economy, but it was not the only element, and it was now not difficult to acquire .... Peasants, or rather wealthy peasants, had capitalized on the fifteenth-century situation, building up their land holdings, and orientating themselves increasingly towards market production.133 Such statements generally confirm the picture painted by Rodney Hilton of the dramatic changes to Europe’s agrarian economy in the wake of the Black Death. The plague’s effects in transforming the ‘land : labour ratio’ in Europe had, according to Hilton, two major long-term consequences for the European peasantry: first, it increased the availability of suitable land to farm; and second, it diminished the rent burden on property holdings.134 In the century following the Black Death, rent revenue fell at rates ranging between 40 per cent in the Tuscan contado and 70 per cent, as witnessed in Normandy and some regions in Flanders. Moreover, rents paid per crop shares dropped from a half to a seventh or an eighth, while at the same time real wages rose. In England, wages doubled over the same period, placing a much greater strain on the seigneurial economy than the peasant economy, which remained largely dependent on family labour.
The diminishing of the rent burden was in turn ‘partly due to peasant pressure, and partly (especially in war-devastated areas) to the anxiety of landowners to attract tenants to keep land in cultivation’. Increases in money wages for peasant labourers were ‘no doubt the immediate consequence of their scarcity (though the demand must also have fallen) but could not have been sustained at the high level without a considerable increase in the productivity of labour’. Such increases in labour productivity were, in turn, the ‘consequence of the abandon-ment of marginal soils, the increased availability of pasture and the increased number of animals’. The effects this had on increasing the process of internal differentiation and stratification within the peasant class were hugely signif-icant, as the ‘number of smallholders was considerably reduced’, the ‘middle stratum’ appreciably strengthened, and the richer peasantry also ‘improved their position’, though not as ‘consistently as did the middle peasants’.135
The reduction in the proportion of smallholders was perhaps the most important development in the changing landscape of the feudal agrarian
economy. As ‘the families of smallholders were more likely to die out than those of the better-off peasants’ and since the latter held larger holdings and had generally smaller families, ‘the heads of richer households could endow their sons without depressing them into the smallholding class’.136 This decline in the number of smallholdings was most markedly demonstrated in the English case.
The Cistercian Abbey of Stoneleigh in the Forest of Arden saw the proportion of tenants holding under 8 acres (across all its land that was leased by the peas-antry) drop from 61 per cent in 1280 to 46 per cent in 1392. In a less extreme but more representative case, in five Midland counties in 1280 the average propor-tion of smallholders was 46 per cent, but by the late 14th and 15th centuries the percentage had dropped in a number of Midlands manors to somewhere between 11 and 28 per cent. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these reductions in the proportion of smallholding peasants for the functioning of the agrarian economy as a whole, since the smallholders predominantly made up the ‘hired labour reserve for the lords’ demesnes and the rich peasant holdings’.
Moreover, these were the very labourers ‘who pushed up wages and were gener-ally regarded as an insolent and demanding group’ among the feudal ruling classes; that is, they were those at the forefront of the class struggle against the lords. Further, because of the commutation of labour rents resulting from inten-sifying peasant struggles and changing lordly practices over the years, ‘lords had to rely largely on the labour of these independent workers for the cultivation of the demesnes, as had the richer peasants for their holdings’.137 Thus, Hilton argues:
[i]t is likely that the cost of labour was largely responsible for the abandonment of demesne cultivation and it is possible that, at any rate before the latter part of the fifteenth century, high labour costs restricted the expansion of the economy of the large holding.138
The particular significance of these plague-induced processes in England during the period between 1350 and 1450 is not that we find merely a ‘relative abundance of land’, since this abundance could already be found in the early Medieval epoch, which had witnessed ‘the strengthening of the power of the landed aristocracy and of considerable pressure for rent, service and jurisdictional profit’. Instead, we find in the years between 1350 and 1450 that the ‘relative land abundance was combined …with a relaxation of seigneurial domination and a notable lightening of the economic burden on the peasant economy’. Hence, English peasant society,
‘in spite of still existing within (in broad terms) a feudal framework’, Hilton concludes, began to develop ‘according to laws of motion internal to itself’.139
The importance of Hilton’s account, as Byres tells us, is his identification and tracing of ‘some of the processes of class formation critical to [the emergence of ]
a later agrarian capitalism’. For while the middle peasantry prospered during this period, ‘a class of “quasi-capitalists”’ was also being formed in the graziers.
At the same time, the rich peasantry, though still constrained, were beginning to acquire the means of production (that is, land) ‘that would be a critical part of their transformation into capitalist farmers in the sixteenth century’. By this time, ‘it was not only the nature of the leases upon which they held the land’
that was significant but ‘their ability to acquire larger holdings’. And, crucially, by the end of this period, there emerged the possibility ‘that the constraint asso-ciated with high labour costs was coming to an end, and that a true potential rural proletariat existed’.140
Each of these developments contributed to a long drawn-out process of class differentiation within the peasantry. On the one side, there emerged a class of wealthy peasants, possessing capital and larger plots of land,141 who were conse-quently imbued with ‘the desire, the means and the capacity to accumulate and expand, if the opportunity presented itself’.142 It was these wealthier peasant tenants who would also come to contribute to the engrossment of land and the formation of capitalist farms,143 which were not, contrary to what Brenner claims, solely the preserve of the lordly class.144
On the other side of this process of peasant differentiation was the emergence of a stratum of peasant wage-labourers compelled to work the land as tenant farmers.
As Colin Mooers, a sympathetic critic of Brenner, writes, ‘The ability of the English lords to carry through an assault on the peasant rights in the seventeenth century can only be explained by the prior weakening of the peasant community as a result of economic differentiation’. The breakthrough of the yeomanry that emerged through the process of ‘petty capitalist accumulation’, Mooers notes, ‘was a crucial intervening stage in the later development of large-scale capitalist farming. How else is it possible to explain the unique triadic pattern of English agrarian capi-talism?’ For the tenant peasants who would later work as wage-labourers on the large-scale capitalist farms of the 18th century ‘had to have come from some-where’.145 In short, the long drawn-out process of socio-economic stratification among the peasantry was an integral aspect of the story of how capitalist relations of production first emerged in Europe, and in particular in the English countryside.
And it is this story that really took off and matured in the age of the Black Death.
The crucial upshot of all these interrelated developments for understanding the transition from feudalism to capitalism is well summarised by Byres, who discusses the transformations in the English agrarian economy in relation to the sharpening of class conflicts as the 1350–1450 era progressed and the
‘“well-to-do peasant farmers” were able to take on the new leases’. Without the presence of this stratum of wealthier peasants that had emerged from the preceding period of peasant differentiation under feudalism, the possibility of taking extended leases would not have existed, or at the very least would have taken much longer to develop. Those richer peasants wishing to further expand
their holdings would have then needed to take on additional hired labour (both seasonal and permanent). As a consequence, ‘their relationship with such labour would change, and the likelihood of conflict would increase’.146
Whether or not we agree with Byres that this process of peasant differentia-tion was the ‘primum mobile’ behind the transidifferentia-tion, the point should nonetheless be clear: the Black Death’s effects on the feudal agrarian economy and its class configurations, particularly in England, spread wide and deep in hastening the myriad developments heralding the demise of the old – the feudal system – and the awakening of the new capitalist dawn. The Mongol vector of uneven and combined development through which the plague was first transmitted to Europe thereby acted to further exacerbate processes of internal unevenness (peasant differentiation) and class conflict, substantially weakening extant feudal power relations while simultaneously hastening the development of new (capitalist) productive relations and social forces. We now turn to examine one final significant factor in the transition to capitalism resulting from the Black Death: that is, its effects on the development of the productive forces.