Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 39 views

    Black Death and Social Upheaval

    Uploaded by

    chayandutta
    The Black Death arrived in England from China in 1348, killing between one-third and one-half of the population over the next year. It disrupted daily life as there were too few people left to perform essential jobs like medical care, last rites for the dead, legal services, and grave digging. Many Christians also wrongly blamed Jews for the plague and killed thousands. The devastation had long-term effects on society, depleting the clergy, straining rural labor markets and town economies, and exacerbating tensions between landowners and peasants that would lead to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Black Death and Social Upheaval

    Uploaded by

    chayandutta
    39 views1 page
    The Black Death arrived in England from China in 1348, killing between one-third and one-half of the population over the next year. It disrupted daily life as there were too few people left to perform essential jobs like medical care, last rites for the dead, legal services, and grave digging. Many Christians also wrongly blamed Jews for the plague and killed thousands. The devastation had long-term effects on society, depleting the clergy, straining rural labor markets and town economies, and exacerbating tensions between landowners and peasants that would lead to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

    Original Title

    Black Death and Social upheaval

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    The Black Death arrived in England from China in 1348, killing between one-third and one-half of the population over the next year. It disrupted daily life as there were too few people left to perform essential jobs like medical care, last rites for the dead, legal services, and grave digging. Many Christians also wrongly blamed Jews for the plague and killed thousands. The devastation had long-term effects on society, depleting the clergy, straining rural labor markets and town economies, and exacerbating tensions between landowners and peasants that would lead to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    39 views1 page

    Black Death and Social Upheaval

    Uploaded by

    chayandutta
    The Black Death arrived in England from China in 1348, killing between one-third and one-half of the population over the next year. It disrupted daily life as there were too few people left to perform essential jobs like medical care, last rites for the dead, legal services, and grave digging. Many Christians also wrongly blamed Jews for the plague and killed thousands. The devastation had long-term effects on society, depleting the clergy, straining rural labor markets and town economies, and exacerbating tensions between landowners and peasants that would lead to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 1

    Black Death and Social upheaval

    The most devastating of the great fourteenth-century plagues, the Black Death, first
    appeared in Dorset (imported from China) in 1348 and reached its height in the summer of 1349
    and reduced the population by between one third and one half (killing some two hundred people
    a day in London). Originating in China, it spread West along the trade routes across Europe and arrived
    on the British Isles from the English province of Gascony. The plague seems to have been spread by flea-
    infected rats, as well as individuals who had been infected on the continent.

    The Black Death disrupted the customs of daily life. There were few physicians to treat
    the ill or clergymen to deliver the dead's last rites or comfort the sick. And for those who passed
    away, few lawyers were available to draw up wills. Because many believed the plague was
    spread by poisonous fumes from the dead so there was also a shortage of gravediggers and
    hence, bands of beggars and criminals known as the becchini, or "brotherhood of gravediggers",
    filled this job. The parish clergy, thinned out by the Black Death, seems to have suffered from a
    decline not only in numbers but also in moral quality.

    Sadly, another group suffered horrible discrimination as a result of the plague. The
    predominantly Christian population blamed the Jews - Europe's largest minority group at the
    time - for the terrible disease. They believed that the Jews, bent on world domination, were
    secretly poisoning the wells of Christian towns and cities. Thousands of innocent Jews, who had
    also suffered from the plague, were slaughtered in dozens of European communities.

    The effects of this devastation were long term. The parish clergy, professionally intimate
    with the circumstances of the dead and dying, were particularly affected. Not only were their
    numbers severely depleted, so were their financial resources. In one manor owned by the Bishop
    of Winchester it has been estimated that some sixty six percent of tenants died of the plague in
    1348 alone. The Black Death placed a very considerable strain on both the rural labour-market
    and on the towns. As late as the mid-fifteenth century the citizens of Lincoln and York were still
    complaining of the consequent decline in their cities’s trade, population, and manufactures. At
    the time, the pestilence seemed like a visitation from wrathful God—sudden, inexplicable and to
    the survivors, profoundly shocking.

    The Black Death and the labour shortages that followed it served to exacerbate the long-
    standing social tensions between those who profited from the land and those who actually
    worked it. When in the revision of his Latin poem Vox Clamantis Gower introduced an
    allegorical description of a wild peasant rabble rampaging through the land in the guise of a
    beast, his socially privileged first readers would readily have recognized his pointed and
    antipathetic reference of the traumatic Peasants’ Revolt (1381 A.D) which was a class struggle
    resulted from attempts by the landed classes to keep down wages. CHAYAN DUTTA

    You might also like