The Plague That Made European Wages Triple

Between 1347 and 1351, the bacterium Yersinia pestis killed somewhere between a third and half of Europe's population. The lower estimates put the death toll at 25 million; the upper end, around 50 million. Whichever number you use, no recorded event before or since has wiped out so much of the continent so quickly.

The arrival is well-documented. Genoese trading ships fleeing the siege of Caffa in the Crimea brought the disease into Messina in October 1347. From Sicily it walked the trade routes — first into Marseille and Pisa, then up the rivers and roads, into Paris by 1348, into England the same summer, into Norway by 1349. In some Italian cities the chronicler Giovanni Boccaccio reported sixty thousand dead in five months.

What happened next is the more interesting story. Pre-plague Europe was a Malthusian system: too many laborers chasing too little arable land, wages stuck at subsistence, food prices high. The plague inverted both inputs overnight. Land was suddenly abundant; workers were suddenly scarce. Real wages for English agricultural laborers roughly doubled within a generation, and in some trades tripled.

The nobility tried legislation. England's Statute of Labourers in 1351 froze wages at pre-plague levels and made it illegal for a worker to leave one employer for a higher-paying one. France passed similar ordinances. Enforcement was patchy and resentful, and within thirty years it helped fuel the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the French Jacquerie of 1358.

Historians still argue over how much the resulting labor leverage accelerated the end of serfdom in Western Europe. The numbers, at least, are not in dispute: a serf in 1400 ate more meat, wore better cloth, and worked fewer days than his grandfather had.