On the whole these were progressively less violent but the second epidemic of 1361, by any standards other than those of the Black Death, was catastrophic in its dimensions. The progressive depopulation of England which resulted from this sequence of epidemics, as each new generation was attacked before it had made good the losses of the last, was economically and psychologically a depressive quite as dangerous as the holocaust of the Black Death itself. One authority, indeed, has gone so far as to say that the ‘most important consequence of the Black Death in fact was simply that the disease was firmly established in England’.{436}
Whenever, therefore, the question arises of the responsibility of the Black Death for any marked change in England – as in the evolution of some new social form or a decline in wealth or population – unless the comparison is strictly between the period before 1348 and the period between 1351 and 1361, then two and not one epidemics have got to be taken into account. If the comparison is made with the state of affairs at some date near the end of the fourteenth century then the problem of responsibilities becomes still more difficult to resolve since three or four epidemics had, by then, taken their toll, as well, of course, as all the other factors which may have contributed to the transformation. It is not uncommon to find that a certain village had, say, fifty-five land holders in 1310 and only thirty in 1377 and for the deduction to be drawn that the Black Death must therefore have been responsible for almost halving the population. It may have been. Almost certainly it was the most important single factor. But in the absence of evidence which will show exactly when and why the drop in numbers took place the contention must remain unproven. Reservations of this kind are still more important when the problem relates not to a fall in population but to a switch from one kind of land-holding to another or to some other social problem.
The second point to remember is that some signs of the decline of the economy were already evident before 1348. No graph could be charted to show the point which the process had by then reached nor was there any consistency between one area and another. But for at least twenty-five years before the Black Death exports, agricultural production, the area of cultivated land and possibly also the population had all been shrinking. In assessing the baleful effects of the Black Death these earlier difficulties must never be forgotten. Continued deterioration in the state of England – and, indeed, of Europe – would have been likely, even if it had never occurred.
Thirdly and finally, the economic impact of the Black Death was to some extent blunted by the fact that England, even though by 1348 there may already have been some decline, was still grossly over-populated. By this it is not meant that the population was greater than the land could support, though this can and has been argued,{437} but merely that the working population had expanded far beyond the work available. In the economic conditions of the fourteenth century this led to chronic under-employment rather than unemployment. Vinogradoff has pointed out that each virgate often had as many as five men working or living on it so that the villein’s land could be tended, the service rendered to the lord and a comfortable surplus of labouring capacity still be left unconsumed.{438} Maitland’s contention that the landlord was exacting only about half the labour services owed to him, amply confirmed by Miss Levett in her study of the manors of the Bishop of Winchester,{439} is another illustration of this point. It was not through any generosity on the part of the landlord that these services were remitted but nther because there were by so far too many villeins available to do the work that the landlord would have found it quite impossible to employ them all.
This surplus of labour was not confined to the peasants. The lowest computation of the number of priests then available to serve the 8,670 parishes of England is fifteen thousand. For a population of 4.2 million this would give an allowance of one priest for every two hundred and eighty parishioners or more or less every sixty-seven families. Dr Coulton estimates{440} that, even in January 1349, there must have been three priests surviving to fill every two priestly vacancies. Unless so generous a margin existed it would be impossible to explain how, throughout the plague, almost every vacant benefice was filled within a few weeks.
