We can thus safely agree with Rogers that the Black Death must have led to important changes in the social and economic structure of the country. We can accept too the existence of the phenomena which Rogers noted and on which he based his thesis. But now begin the qualifications. In medieval history, it seems, it is not the exception which proves the rule but the rule which generates the exception. A useful principle can be established which may, in memory of that great iconoclast, Dr A. E. Levett, be described as Levett’s law: ‘The enunciation of any authoritative statement shall immediately be countered by the accumulation of evidence leading to its contradiction.’ Once a sufficient body of such material has been compiled then, of course, a new statement is deemed to have been advanced and the work of destruction can change its target.
So, as soon as Thorold Rogers had won general acceptance for his thesis of a Black Death causing profound social changes and leading directly to the Peasants’ Revolt, evidence began to be elicited to prove him wrong. He had argued, it will be remembered, that commutation was already far advanced by 1348, and that it was above all the efforts of the landlords to reverse this process which led to social unrest. As a first stage in the demolition of his theories it was demonstrated that commutation had, in fact, made little progress before the plague.
Mr Page{458} argued that there were not enough freemen available to do the commuted labours. Even if there had been, the amount of money in circulation would not have been sufficient to pay them or to allow the former villeins to pay their rents in cash. He analysed the sources of labour on a group of eighty-one manors spread over twenty counties for the period 1325–50. On rather over half these, villeins did nearly all the work on the lord’s demesne, on twenty-two of them they did about half, on nine an insignificant amount and on only six had predial service been abolished altogether. A similar analysis for the year 1380 of a group of one hundred and twenty-six manors, of which fifty-five had been included in the earlier examination, showed that the villeins did all the work on only twenty-two, about half the work on twenty-five, an insignificant amount on thirty-nine while on the remaining forty no predial services at all survived. A dramatic transformation had clearly taken place in the intervening years, vindication of the statement made by Pollock and Maitland: ‘…it was the Black Death which, by destroying nearly half the population while leaving the available capital and the medium of exchange as great as ever, hastened the transition from a system of barter to a system of money payments.’{459} Furthermore, on no manor did Page find evidence of any villein being held to service after the Black Death if this had not also been the case before.
Studies of this nature certainly contradicted the conclusions of Thorold Rogers but tended to increase rather than diminish the significance of the Black Death. Page’s conclusions were not for long suffered to remain uncontested. Sir Keith Feiling conducted a closer analysis of one of his selected manors and pointed out that several of the leases for money rent on which Page based his case were in fact short term only and were later replaced by leases based on the old scale of rents and services. Several categories of manorial services were definitely more onerous by 1362 than they had been before the Black Death. Two and a half
The next salvo came from Dr H. L. Gray{461} whose techniques have been much criticized but whose signally useful if modest contribution was to rationalize and codify the doctrine that any generalization was futile if it professed to apply to the whole of England. Based on his study of inquisitions post-mortem he claimed that, in the North and West of England, services had nearly always been commuted before the Black Death; in the South and East full or, at least, a large number of services were still exacted in about half the manors while in Kent, serfdom had died out at a much earlier date. It is hardly necessary to point out how quickly examples were forthcoming to show that generalizations were hardly more valid when applied to areas such as the North or the South, than to the country as a whole. But as a rough and ready rule, the value of Gray’s analysis remains considerable.
