The Black Death полностью

Dr Levett has provided the weightiest evidence against the presentation of the Black Death as a watershed in English social history. She has shown that, on many of the manors of the Bishop of Winchester, commutation was hardly known before the Black Death and that there was remarkably little change introduced in the years immediately afterwards. When William of Wykeham did begin to indulge in substantial commutation of services against money payments it was more to raise money for his projects at New College and Winchester than because of pressures generated by the Black Death.^{462} Her statistics are impressive but against them it can be contended that the experience of manors belonging to rich, powerful and conservative churchmen need not necessarily be applicable even to other manors in the same neighbourhood, let alone to the country as a whole.

Nor did her findings apply even to all the manors of the Bishop. A companion study of the Manor of Witney reaches remarkably different conclusions.^{463} In that manor, two thirds of the population died, much land was thrown on to the lord’s hands and had to be let on new terms and for a money rent, the landlord gradually abandoned the struggle to farm the demesne and, having no further use for labour services, willingly commuted them for cash. The number of villeins employed at harvest-time dwindled from one hundred and twenty-one in 1348 to twenty-eight in 1350, rose again to forty-two in 1352, but by 1354 had only reached forty-eight. All new tenants were excused tenurial labour and the whole system quickly withered away. Similarly, on the estates of Ramsey Abbey, the Black Death heralded the introduction of a new style of rent involving a larger cash payment, but the disappearance of all, or virtually all villein services.^{464}

To take another example in which the landlord similarly enjoyed enough wealth and influence to ride almost any economic storm; at Cuxham, a manor of the College of Merton, prior to the Black Death well over half the work on the demesne was done by the famuli, labour attached to the manor and living within its compound. Two thirds of the rest was done by customary labour and only a third by hired labour. The proportion of work done by the wage-earner actually dropped in the seventy years between 1276 and 1347 – the period during which, according to Thorold Rogers, commutation was rapidly gaining ground all over England. After the Black Death labour services virtually ceased and work done by the famuli was halved. Total work done on the demesne was reduced but the cost of hired labour nevertheless trebled. In 1361, Merton College decided to lease the manor rather than continue to run it at a loss.^{465}

In some parts of England, therefore, the Black Death was a sharp stimulus towards rapid and lasting commutation of manorial services, in others it gave rise to much commutation but the landlords were able to check the process and more or less restore the status quo ante, in yet others it had little perceptible effect on the manorial structure and, finally, in a few it impelled the landlords into a reaction which sought to resurrect labour services that had long been suffered to fall into disuse. The more prosperous and stable manors were the least affected; where the land was poor, the landlord ineffective, or the disease raged with especial violence, then the consequence was likely to be a rapid growth in commutation. It would be impossible to estimate in how many cases this development was something entirely new and in how many the process was already under way. Professor Postan has argued in favour of a rapid move towards commutation in the twelfth century which slackened or even went into reverse in the course of the thirteenth.^{466} However that may be, it is reasonable to contend that commutation was well known in most parts of England before 1348, and that the Black Death did no more than accelerate, though often violently accelerate, an established and, in the long run, inevitable progress.