In the wake of a devastating pandemic, millions of people are dead and many more have had their lives turned upside down. Many of the survivors, worn out by a sense of worthlessness in their work and the insurmountable gap between the rich and everyone else, refuse to return to their old jobs or resign en masse. Tired of being overworked and underpaid, they feel they deserve a better life.
This could be a story about the present day, but it’s also the pattern that emerged across Europe after the deadliest pandemic in recorded history, the bubonic plague.
The struggles over wages and the value of work that defined the years after the plague were, in some ways, as intense as the pandemic itself. After all, Europe erupted in violence. Seeing where we are now, it is worth paying attention to the series of events that led, step by step, from the pandemic to panic and bloody revolt.
The plague swept the Eurasian continent like wildfire from 1347 to 1351. The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun recalled in horror: “Civilization in both East and West was visited by a destructive plague that ravaged nations and made populations disappear. good things of civilization and eliminated them”.
Hard-hit Europe lost somewhere between a third and half of its population (although historians still dispute the number). “Many lands and cities were left desolate,” wrote the Italian historian Giovanni Villani in 1348. “And this plague lasted until ____.” He never filled in the final date, as he died of the plague before he could.
When we think of the Black Death, we tend to think of the horrific scenes reported in cities: the piled up corpses, the ditches where bodies were unceremoniously dumped. What contemporaries also found strange, however, was what they saw in the countryside—not scenes of destruction, but images of plenty and plenty. Fields of ripe grains lying inert under the sun. Heavy vines of grapes. These visions were unsettling because they suggested that there was no one left alive to harvest the crops.
“Many fine and noble estates / Are idle without people to work them”, wrote the poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut, who withstood the plague locked in his tower. His poem continues:
“The cattle lay in the fields completely forsaken / Grazing on the corn and among the grapes / Anywhere they wanted / And they had no owner, no cowherd / No man to drive them.”
After the demographic collapse, there was a severe shortage of labor. And so, after the initial shock, as modern economists would predict, the price of labor soared. Machaut wrote:
“No man had his fields plowed / His grain sown, or his vineyards tended / Even if he paid triple wages / No, certainly not even 20 times the fee / Because so many had died.”
Workers of all stripes — rural workers, artisans in cities, even poor parish priests who had to tend to the dying — looked at their lives after the pandemic subsided and recalculated their value. And they saw an impossible system, which was tilted against them.
In England, for example, about half the population was legally tied to the land in servitude, forced to work for the local landlord. But suddenly these workers seemed to have some bargaining power. They were no longer obliged to tolerate unreasonable demands. Their employers could no longer take them for granted.
On the one hand, they needed higher wages to support the runaway inflation that followed the plague: in England, despite the fall in the price of some basic raw materials such as grains, general prices for consumer goods rose by around 27%. from 1348 to 1350. Workers complained that they couldn’t pay for basic necessities—and if they didn’t get what they asked for, they dropped the plow, fled their landlord’s villages, and went for a better deal.
We didn’t take such a brutal demographic hit during Covid, yet American workers have recalculated the meaning of work and its value — and record numbers of workers have left their jobs in the Great Layoff of recent months. About 3% of the total US workforce quit in November alone, the Labor Department said. According to a September survey, 46% of full-time employees were actively considering or looking for a new job.
Low-wage jobs have become especially difficult to fill, as social media is full of angry discussions about the need to have two or even three jobs to pay an average rent in an average city.
In recent months, there have been several high-profile strikes, with workers demanding fair compensation and notable union successes at Kellogg’s and Deere companies. In this sense, we are seeing echoes of the situation after the Black Death, as workers refuse to return to pre-pandemic conditions and reassess their needs and their worth. A lot has changed in the last two years. The world is different.
As we move into a new post-pandemic era, the tensions in the 14th century job market can teach us something about the turmoil to come.
In the years following the plague, across Europe, landowners and nobles watched, first in indignation, then in fury, as people quit their jobs and set out in search of a better life. What followed was a hysterical wave of laws trying to return the economy to where it was before the plague. Statutes and ordinances froze wages at pre-plague levels; made it illegal to abandon a lord’s land, illegal to flee; in effect, they have made unemployment itself illegal.
The English Statute of Workers condemned peasants fleeing their feudal contracts to have an “F” stamped on their foreheads, for “Falseness”. In Italy, Florence’s new labor laws, openly called “Against Rural Workers,” declared that those who neglected their master’s land could be prosecuted as rebels — liable to be dragged through the streets in red-hot currents and buried alive.
The pressure continued to mount: on the one hand, a newly empowered workforce demanded a living wage, a chance to flourish; on the other, kings and councils, lords and wealthy commoners were determined that nothing should change.
Over time, the pressure became too great. In the second half of the 14th century, violence broke out across Europe. Workers filled the streets of large cities, burning feudal records and labor contracts. They destroyed any evidence of their service and their ties to the land.
A shocked chronicler in France in 1358 wrote that the outraged peasants “killed, slaughtered, and mercilessly massacred all the nobles they could find, even their own lords. Not only that: they razed the houses and fortresses of the nobles.”
The nobles, in turn, began to burn villages and massacre workers. The same French chronicler describes them attacking “not only those whom they believed to have done them harm, but everyone they encountered, whether in their homes or digging in the vineyards and fields”.
In England, popular resentment over taxes and outrageous inequalities erupted into vandalism and violence in the Great Revolt of 1381. Mobs executed the Chief Treasurer and displayed his severed head on London Bridge. They demanded the end of lordship and did not recognize any authority other than that of the king.
Of course, there are many important differences between our financial and political situation and those of the decades after the plague. But the growing sense of frustration among America’s vast working population connects us to the medieval peasants and artisans who bucked elite expectations and sought a better life for themselves.
Over the past four decades, most Americans have seen their wages stagnate relative to the cost of living. Trump-era tax laws of 2017 predicted loopholes that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. And we, like medieval peasants, are surrounded by the spectacle of high-income individuals and their expensive adventurism. The fortunes of American billionaires have grown by 70% in the pandemic — and, as we learned this summer, some of them routinely pay little or nothing in taxes.
The rich are taking the rest of the population for a ride in a system that is tilted against us.
Left and right formulate this in different ways — but we are all aware of this gap.
The mood of the country is gloomy and basically divided. If we see spasms of violence, I predict them to be less like the revolutionary politics of medieval uprisings than the mindless and absurd atrocities that often took place in the shadows of these uprisings, when mobs targeted outside groups: Jews, accused of poisoning wells; the Flemings, accused of stealing jobs from the English, some of whom were hunted down in the streets and killed.
How, then, can we address cavernous inequalities and avoid the violence of resentment?
The American electorate needs a shared story that matches the facts, without scapegoating or conspiratorial paranoia. This is a propitious moment for action, precisely because we share some fragments of a story: a tiredness and caution; a feeling that we cannot move forward; an indignation because the powerful are never held accountable.
The great medieval uprisings brought together people from different social classes, rural and urban: not just peasants, but artisans, builders, small traders and even the clergy. A collective workers’ movement could do something similar for us today.
The union victories of the past two months are a great example of how workers can come together and capitalize on this moment of dissent — and an example of how executive elites can strengthen employee loyalty at a time of high turnover.
We also need to more proactively address the growing income inequality gap that has marked this new century. At this point, the top 1% of income own almost a third of all the country’s wealth, while the poorest 50% own about 2.5%. We’ve known for a long time that such stark inequality stifles economic growth — and that’s a story we need to keep telling.
But the answers also need to come from our own ruling elite. US lawmakers must alleviate the tremendous — and potentially violent — pressure built up with actions that address the things that contribute to our national sense of worthlessness: raising the minimum wage, helping with debt, balancing the tax code so the rich pay. their fair share, create solid infrastructure jobs, provide childcare and health insurance for American workers (a move that would also help small employers).
Instead of helplessly witnessing division, we could seek prosperity and opportunity for all our countrymen. Imagine the sense of pride and shared purpose that is possible. Such consumer support measures would pump money into the bottom of the system. The economy as a whole becomes more stable when there is a broad base of people who have money to spend. Politically, the country would be less prone to riots. Young people could even feel hope.
But it is rare for the elite to be willing to think long term. Most, like those across Europe after the plague, choose to cling more tightly to what they own, to try to keep a lid closed on the shared prosperity of others — and, in holding on to everything for themselves, in the end push their countries into crisis and are left with nothing but turmoil, grief, fear, flames and suffering.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
