# The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: a Time of Crisis?

History II · Medieval History · https://tryals.app/learn/history-ii/the-fourteenth-and-fifteenth-centuries-a-time-of-crisis

## One Shock, Two Outcomes

The fourteenth century brought severe crises. The **Great Famine** (1315–1317) struck northern Europe after heavy rains. In **1347**, the **Black Death** arrived in Sicily and swept across the continent.

Mortality was immense. England suffered plague outbreaks in 1348, 1361, 1369, and 1375. Europe lost between a third and a half of its people.

Labour became scarce, so wages surged. In England, real wages doubled after 1350. The English government passed the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 and the **Statute** of **Labourers** in 1351. These laws tried to freeze wages, but largely failed.

East of the Elbe, the demographic shock had the **opposite** result. Lords bound peasants to the land, creating the **second serfdom**.

This divide sparked the **Brenner debate**. Historian **Robert Brenner** argued that demography alone cannot explain these contrasting paths. In the **West**, strong peasant solidarity resisted lords. In the **East**, weaker communities succumbed to landlord control.

## Crises and Living Standards

The era experienced repeated systemic strain across Europe:

| Crisis | Dates | What it strained |
|---|---|---|
| Great Famine | 1315–1317 | Food supply at peak population |
| Black Death | from 1347 | Labour supply and manorial life |
| Hundred Years War | 1337–1453 | Royal finance and rural stability |
| Western Schism | 1378–1417 | Papal authority |
| Popular Revolts | 1358, 1378, 1381 | Social deference |

Revolts reflected rising peasant confidence rather than sheer misery. The **English** revolt of **1381** was triggered by a **poll tax**. Its leaders demanded an end to serfdom.

> **Common pitfall:** assuming that population collapse impoverishes survivors. In western Europe, scarce labour drove wages up and rents down. Surviving workers enjoyed higher living standards.

## Practice questions

10 of this lesson's 15 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. The same demographic shock raised peasant wages in western Europe and tightened serfdom east of the Elbe. Why does Brenner argue that a purely demographic model cannot explain this?

A. Wages and rents depend on royal policy and market integration, not labour supply.
B. Population fell across western kingdoms whilst expanding east of the Elbe river.
C. One cause cannot produce opposite outcomes without different lord-peasant power.
D. The plague barely reached eastern Europe, leaving its labour supply undisturbed.

**Answer:** C. One cause cannot produce opposite outcomes without different lord-peasant power.

**Why:** Postan’s Malthusian model explains the western case elegantly: fewer workers, higher wages. Brenner’s objection is that it should then explain the eastern case too, and it predicts the opposite of what happened. His answer is that demography sets the problem and the existing balance of social power decides how it is resolved.

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### 2. Arrange these fourteenth- and fifteenth-century crises in order.

**Answer:**

1. The Great Famine strikes northern Europe
2. The Hundred Years War begins
3. Plague reaches Sicily from the Black Sea
4. The Ciompi rise in Florence
5. The Western Schism divides obedience between rival popes
6. The English peasants’ rising
7. Constantinople falls to the Ottomans

**Why:** Compressed into one sequence, the density is the argument for calling the period a crisis: famine, plague, a war lasting more than a century, three revolts in four years, and a divided papacy, all inside seventy years, and all falling on the same generation.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/the-fourteenth-and-fifteenth-centuries-a-time-of-crisis/arrange-these-fourteenth-and-fifteenth-century-crises-in-order

### 3. Which statements about the English rising of 1381 are supported by the evidence?

A. Its demands included the abolition of serfdom
B. It was a rebellion of the destitute driven by starvation
C. It was triggered by a poll tax
D. Its leadership included relatively prosperous villagers and artisans

**Answer:** A. Its demands included the abolition of serfdom; C. It was triggered by a poll tax; D. Its leadership included relatively prosperous villagers and artisans

**Why:** Destitution rarely organises. The rising drew on villagers with something to lose, in a generation whose labour had become valuable and whose government was legislating to hold wages down. Rising expectations meeting a blocked path is a better model of it than misery.

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### 4. The late medieval popular revolts are often attributed to destitution, yet post-plague peasant real wages had doubled. What accounts for this apparent contradiction, and what does it reveal about the nature of late fourteenth-century unrest?

A. Rebellion emerged from frustration over limits placed on rising expectations
B. Starvation returned periodically whenever local harvests failed across Europe
C. Revolts were desperate attempts to recover pre-plague living standard levels
D. Unrest was concentrated exclusively among lords whose rent incomes collapsed

**Answer:** A. Rebellion emerged from frustration over limits placed on rising expectations

**Why:** Post-plague unrest was not a reflex of destitution; rising economic leverage emboldened peasants to challenge institutional constraints like poll taxes and wage caps. Conflating revolt with misery misses how relative gains fuel political assertiveness.

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### 5. Real wages for ordinary workers in England rose substantially in the century after the Black Death.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True.** Fewer workers competing for more land pushed wages up and rents down; diets improved measurably. The Ordinance and Statute of Labourers of 1349 and 1351 tried to fix wages at pre-plague levels and largely failed, which is itself the best evidence of the pressure.

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### 6. Complete the account of the divergent outcomes of the plague.

**Answer:** In western Europe labour scarcity pushed wages **up** and rents down. East of the **Elbe**, lords responded to the same scarcity by binding tenants more tightly, in the process known as the second **serfdom**. Robert Brenner argued the difference lay in the balance of **class** power rather than in demography alone.

**Why:** The Elbe line is a convention rather than a wall, and the contrast is a tendency rather than a rule, but it is sharp enough that any explanation of the late medieval economy has to account for it, which is precisely what a one-variable model cannot do.

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### 7. Sort each item by whether it supports reading the period as a CRISIS or as a RECOVERY and reorganisation.

**Answer:**

- Supports "crisis": Rival popes commanding divided obedience for forty years, A war between France and England lasting over a century
- Supports "recovery": More land available per surviving household, Improved diets and higher real wages for workers, Printing with movable type from the 1450s

**Why:** The two columns are answering different questions, which is why the debate is hard to settle. Aggregate output, population and institutional coherence all fell; output per head, land per head and wages all rose. Whether that is a crisis depends on whether you are counting the society or the person inside it.

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### 8. Arrange the steps of the western European response to labour scarcity after 1348.

**Answer:**

1. Mortality removes a large share of the working population
2. Surviving tenants find more land available and lords short of hands
3. Wages rise and rents and entry fines fall
4. Governments legislate to hold wages at pre-plague levels
5. Enforcement fails and labour dues are increasingly commuted for cash

**Why:** The last step is where serfdom in England quietly ends: not by abolition but by commutation, as lords found it easier to take money than to compel work from tenants who could leave. The 1381 demand for the abolition of villeinage was refused, and villeinage disappeared anyway within a century.

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### 9. Historians disagree substantively about whether the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are best described as a crisis of feudalism or as a reorganisation.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True.** Bois and Hilton read the period as feudalism breaking down under its own contradictions and being replaced. Others emphasise the fifteenth-century recovery: fewer people, more land per head, expanding trade, printing. Both are working from the same evidence and weighing aggregate against per-head measures differently.

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### 10. The Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 and the Statute of Labourers of 1351 tried to fix wages at pre-plague levels. What does the existence of that legislation tell a historian?

A. Wages were rising sharply, since governments do not ban things that do not happen
B. The plague's demographic shock left agricultural labour supplies largely unchanged
C. Parliamentary statute was the customary way to regulate English wage rates pre-1348
D. Landowners had agreed to pay higher wages voluntarily without any market pressures

**Answer:** A. Wages were rising sharply, since governments do not ban things that do not happen

**Why:** Legislation is a symptom. Repeated statutes, prosecutions and complaints in the decades after 1349 document exactly the wage pressure they were meant to suppress, and their failure is recorded in the same sources, which is a useful reminder that prescriptive documents describe what worried the authorities, not what was true.

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