ABSTRACT
The plagues had much more far-reaching structural effects in the countryside than in the towns. In Europe east of the Elbe, this intensification of feudal repression was successful: towns were fewer and less powerful, and the nobility was stronger because it could rely on the crown to enforce laws which bound peasants to the manor where they were born. Peasants were encouraged to commute their labour dues into money rent and lords could give up demesne farming altogether, and lease their demesne lands as well. In the traditional, feudal relations of lord to tenant, the prosperity of the lord depended on the difference in their legal status. Thomas Hobbes, who was in exile in Paris as a Royalist during most of the first English Revolution, gave a very different justification of absolutism. Within Hobbes's philosophy, the idea of the total freedom of the individual in nature is made to imply the need to accept complete subjection in society.
