“Until God Brings a Remedy”

The plague struck the peasants hard. ¹ They could not afford to hire physicians or to flee to a country house in the hills, and the conditions in which they lived provided excellent homes for the rats and other plague vectors. The blows were severe, direct, and personal; the death of a father, husband, or son deprived the rest of the family of support, plunging prosperous families into penury and poor families into utter despair. Whole families died. Yet, people moved on, coped with the disaster, and began to carve out new lives for themselves. Men and women married and remarried. Wages rose, as did standards of living. For a few decades, at least, peasant life improved. Dyer has shown that even for smallholders, life expectancy would soon be increasing due to better nutrition and better housing (1989, 182). Yet the newfound wealth and opportunities proved ephemeral, as the peasantry’s aspirations collided headlong with seigniorial attempts to improve the woeful financial conditions of estates, especially in the 1370s. The peasants chafed at these policies, which to them seemed maliciously calculated to restrict their new freedoms and opportunities. Across England, the peasantry resisted these new and reimposed policies, through a variety of methods: boycotts, legal action, even revolts. ² Poos has described a slow escalation of resistance in Essex to the combination of wage control, feudal reaction, and the national crises of the 1370s: “a rising crescendo of resistance to these irritants, in part in the form of individual acts of defiance but also, it would appear, increasingly in the form of group actions” (1991, 240). This resistance grew gradually, but even early in the 1370s the lords were beginning to see and fear the resentment they themselves were generating. A 1371 petition in Parliament complained that serfs demanding freedom were crippling estates and preventing them from functioning (Hilton 1969, 28–29). Faith found that many peasants already were uniting and coordinating their resistance during the 1370s, with their attempts to claim ancient demesne status leading to the concern in Parliament (1984). Discontent peaked in the “Peasants’ Revolt” of 1381, as organized peasant bands rampaged through large portions of southern and central England, attacking manorial officers and destroying documents, and finally marched on London to demand an end to serfdom and to oppression by their lords. Although non-manorial issues (such as the failure of the government to provide protection from French raids) provided the spark to unite the peasants and ignite the rising, much of the peasants’ anger arose from the frustration of their new economic freedom and the increased limitations on their actions (Dyer 1984, 9). The lords had dashed the peasantry’s expectations and hopes; the return to labor services and the imposition of older dues were harsh not because of stigma but because it limited the peasants’ newfound opportunities.