How the Black Death helped bring prosperity to Europe

As the media alarms us about an approaching ‘quad-demic’ of diseases this winter (Covid-19, Flu, RSV, Norovirus) it is a timely moment to think about the travails of our mediaeval forebears. Their common scourges were typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, anthrax, scabies and syphilis – all untreatable at the time. And then there was the plague.

Arriving at the ports of Venice, Pisa and Marseilles in 1347, shipboard rats carrying the Yersinia Pestis bacterium disbursed the bubonic plague in Europe. Originally it is thought that plague was brought by Genoese ships from their trading fortress, Caffa, in the Crimea. By legend, the Mongol Jani Beg, leader of the Golden Horde, catapulted plague-infected bodies into the city. Though we often think of the plague as a European phenomenon, in the same year it arrived in Aleppo, Gaza and Damascus and decimated large parts of Africa’s population. Some believe it to have originated from Kyrgyzstan, while others favour China as the source.

The plague was not restricted to a single epoque. While we tend to think of the Black Death as a one-time event starting in 1346 and ending in 1353, it was a disease that has emerged time and again throughout history. A famous outbreak, known as the Plague of Emperor Justinian, began in 541 AD. There were also dozens more outbreaks in Europe in the 14th century and beyond. Across the world, plague has been a common visitor, though rarely with the scale of the pandemic that killed 30 to 60 per cent of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1353. The population of England halved to two-and-a-half million. The plague pits of east London are well known, but there were also pits in Vincent Square, Westminster; Golden Square, Soho; Knightsbridge Green and Green Park, St. James. In Hoxton (Hackney), the name Pitfield Street is a bit of a giveaway.

While the devastation that the plague wrought on Europe is well known, less remarked is how the Black Death changed the continent in the years and centuries that followed. The plague tore up the foundations of society and paved the way for dramatic economic, political and social change. Without it, Europe might well have looked very different.

With the agrarian population decimated in the 14th century, significant changes took place in terms of agricultural practice. Enclosures, the removal of common land into more efficient privately-owned fields, was a transformation of England’s feudal past that had begun at least 100 years earlier. But it seems likely that the Black Death hastened this process. The dead left land and its rights to the survivors. Property was consolidated.

With fewer people, agricultural labourers’ wages rose. Historians such as Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth have suggested that the dearth of peasants spurred technological change. The heavy plough, originally a Chinese invention, was imported from Holland and helped to increase labour productivity. As Professor Thomas Anderson has asserted:

The heavy plough turned European agriculture and economy on its head. Suddenly the fields with the heavy, fatty and moist clay soils became those that gave the greatest yields.

Animal husbandry became more labour-efficient and profitable than growing crops. This led to the breeding of better livestock. By the 16th century, the preponderance of sheep was such that Sir Thomas More hyperbolically complained:

Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, have become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.

The wool trade, which had already become the backbone of the mediaeval English economy by the 14th century, increasingly moved to production of finished cloths that were sold not only throughout England but also the Netherlands. In East Anglia, for example, the Heydon family developed flocks of 20,000 sheep and turned their castle into a processing factory. Thus the Black Death may have been a contributing factor to the development of a yeoman class and indeed an entrepreneurial ‘landed gentry’.

It is not exaggerating to suggest that the agrarian changes wrought by the Black Death were a consequential precondition of the Industrial Revolution. Eventually, the agricultural revolution led to a rapid growth in population in the 15th and 16th centuries. People moved to towns and cities in search of work, while increases in agricultural productivity provided surplus capital to be deployed elsewhere and enabled a non-agricultural urban labour force to be fed.

However, the contribution of the Black Death should not be overegged. Similar increases in agricultural productivity were taking place at the same time in other parts of Europe. But the Industrial Revolution was a unique sui generis development in England. This was a result of a combination of favourable preconditions.

The signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede laid the foundations of property ownership in law by limiting the power of the executive – the King. The development of English common law is an often-overlooked feature of the take-off of economic growth in England. Later the dissolution of the monasteries with their ‘fire sale’ of land led to the growth and consolidation of private estates. Enclosures reached their peak in the 16th century. Primogeniture, a system of inheritance not practiced in France and elsewhere in Europe, further consolidated estates and enabled more efficient management of land including the widespread adoption of the ‘Norfolk System’ of four-field crop rotation.

In an age where transportation of agricultural goods was only economic within about ten miles of any town, the existence of navigable rivers was a boon. It took a horse to pull a cart weighing one ton, but that same single horse could pull 30 tons of goods on a boat. Dykes built by the Romans also aided the growth of national markets for food, but particularly for wool. There was Car Dyke, which linked Cambridgeshire with York. It was preceded by Fossdyke in 50 AD which linked the River Trent to Lincoln. The agricultural economy further benefitted from the absence of internal tariffs. Britain was the largest free trade zone in Europe. As such, Britain was able to develop national markets for goods faster than other European countries.

Developments in shipbuilding also benefited an island state in terms of transportation cost. The Dutch showed the way in terms of shipbuilding, overseas trade, and perhaps most importantly the development of joint stock companies. England benefited from these technologies. The early development of a capital market in London was the driving force behind industrialisation, and it remains the single most successful part of the UK economy.

The catalyst for the Industrial Revolution, Britain’s singular and most important contribution to humanity, remains a subject of great debate amongst historians. But what was is clear is that, to the annoyance of Marxists, it was not a deterministic path. The Industrial Revolution in England was an unplanned, haphazard coincidence of multiple factors of which the Black Death was one.

By tracing back the origins of the agricultural revolution to the 14th century, the current leftist belief that British wealth was built on colonisation, slaves and Empire can be shown to be an absurd myth. The Industrial Revolution, the creation of a system of sustainable economic growth and the accumulation of wealth was initiated long before Britain began to acquire significant imperial assets.