Practice question · Put in order
Arrange the steps of the western European response to labour scarcity after 1348.
- Governments legislate to hold wages at pre-plague levels
- Enforcement fails and labour dues are increasingly commuted for cash
- Wages rise and rents and entry fines fall
- Mortality removes a large share of the working population
- Surviving tenants find more land available and lords short of hands
Hints
- The legislation is a response to the wage rise, so it comes after it.
- The final step is the outcome of the legislation failing.
Show the answer
- Mortality removes a large share of the working population
- Surviving tenants find more land available and lords short of hands
- Wages rise and rents and entry fines fall
- Governments legislate to hold wages at pre-plague levels
- 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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