Shift In Plagued Society :: essays research papers

Many aspects of European life changed as a lead of the Black Death. Not least among these changes was the shift that occurred among the economic standing of the medieval family and the last-ditch ushering out of the feudalistic age. Prior to the plague, society in Europe remained largely feudalistic. Kings had their lords, lords their dukes, dukes their barons, and so on and so forth, with the majority, the peasants, sitting at the bottom virtu whollyy providing for all the nobility above them. Providing for the masters of the land was not easy for the peasants, taxes here and there kept there worth low, and their only assets to begin with were the weeny they had, their land, family labor, and swell (Hanawalt, p112)Regrettably, for the nobles, things began to shift in the economic make up of Europe. As a noble, one was expected to maintain an army at call in sound reflection for land received from the king. Each successively lower noble had less land and a little army to maint ain, but it remained that in order to be a noble one had many expenses to provide for. As the trade routes began to reopen after the plagues, people began to find the cities much more attractive than the farms that entailed a life of servitude to a lords.Prior to the plagues, the population of Europe as a whole had been largely stagnant, while there were famines rather frequently, they were merely a result of population overspill, and society as a whole did not topple. (Herlihy, p39) With the introduction of the plague to Europe, the city populations rapidly declined, thus making room in the cities for the farmers who thirstily entered the cities. Because they were, of course, not farming in the cities, people had to take up trades and so Europe began to flourish again economically. But because the people were living in the cities, they had little pauperization to pay taxes to a lord, and thus emerged the middle class, a class that was able to make good money off of their trade, b ut, unlike the nobility, had no need to spend their money on armies and land maintenance, and could save for themselves. Furthermore, with the sharp drop in overall population peasants who continued to farm had a much smaller population to support, and as some peasants moved to the city, so did the farming peasants move to take over the land left over.