It would have been extraordinary if the striking changes which the Black Death had helped to evolve in the relationship between landlord and tenant had not produced perceptible results in the practice of agriculture and even the appearance of the English countryside. The crucial consequence of the epidemic was that much land fell free and that the lord not only did not wish to farm it himself but was often anxious to divest himself even of that part of the land which had formed part of his demesne before 1348. The tenements of those who died and left no heir were therefore available for distribution among those who remained. Sometimes such tenements might be taken up by immigrants who had sickened of their own, less fertile holdings and let the wilderness take over its own again. But more often the lands of the deceased were carved up among the surviving tenants of the village.
Each tenant, therefore, was likely to have a larger holding than before and, in the fluid conditions which prevailed after the plague, these could be organized into more coherent and viable blocks than had been possible under the old pattern of cultivation. The tendency was reinforced where the landlord alienated his demesne. Once a tenant was established in possession of a coherent parcel of land, then it was inevitable that he would seek to demarcate it more clearly and organize his different activities on a more workable basis. It would be wrong to speak of any dramatic and sudden switch; it took generations to transform the face of the countryside. But the hedged fields of England can plausibly be argued to have had their genesis in the aftermath of the Black Death and though such changes would, in the long run, have been inevitable, their evolution might otherwise have followed a distinct and far more protracted path.
Textbooks have often nurtured the tradition that another consequence of the Black Death was a wide-spread switch from arable to sheep-farming. The logic of such a development is clear. As a result of the plague, labour was scarce and dear – what more natural than to switch from labour-intensive crops to sheep which called for a minimum of skilled attention? But because something could reasonably be expected to have happened, it does not follow that it did. In fact there is little evidence to show that there was any movement to pasture farming, none to show that the movement was general throughout the country. The acreage under plough certainly dropped but this was no more than a symptom of the retreat from the less profitable marginal lands which was already marked before the plague. There is no corresponding increase in wool production to set against this trend: on the contrary, the third quarter of the fourteenth century is one of diminished demand for wool and of stagnation or even decline in English sheep-farming.{488} The great swing to sheep, with its concomitants of vastly increased national prosperity and the harsh social policy of enclosure, was checked rather than advanced by the Black Death.
Another field in which the significance of the Black Death seems more significant in legend than in reality is that of architecture. The skilled masons capable of executing the fine traceries and, still more, the figure sculpture of the Decorated period were, it is contended, almost wiped out by the plague. Those who were left were too much in demand, too pressed for time, to be able to use their talents to the full. The new generation of masons, artisans rather than artists, were affected by the new mobility of labour which was so marked a feature of the post-plague period. Forced to work in a variety of stones, most of them unfamiliar, it was inevitable that the workmen should opt for less complicated and ambitious techniques.{489} The result was a sharp fall in standards. Prior and Gardner write with disdain of the ‘same stereotyped monotony, the same continuous decline in the skill of execution, the same obvious diminution of interest in the craft of the artificer’ which were to be found in the detailed work of the period.{490}
There is, of course, something in this argument. Without doubt many skilled craftsmen died during the plague and were never replaced. With them died one of the glories of English religious architecture. There can be no absolute standard of beauty but most people would probably agree that York Minster would be more perfect a building if work had begun ten or twenty years before it did. As it was, work came to a sudden stop on the almost completed west front and nave. The choir had not yet been begun and no further progress was made till 1361. For its construction the old plans were scrapped and the Decorated style replaced by the formal stiffness of the Perpendicular. One reason at least for this must have been the technical impossibility of continuing to build a Decorated church when so many of the more experienced masons were dead.{491}
