Why the 100 Years After the Black Death Were the Strangest in English History

The century following the Black Death was the most socially unstable, economically disorienting, and politically volatile period in English history — a hundred years during which the old feudal order tried to reassert itself against a peasant population that had discovered, through pure demographic accident, that it had leverage. Labor shortages created by a population that had been cut in half gave surviving workers the ability to demand wages, move between employers, and refuse conditions that their parents had accepted as fixed features of existence. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the breakdown of villeinage, the early stirrings of Lollardy, and the Wars of the Roses all emerged from the specific instability that the Black Death's demographic catastrophe had made structurally inevitable.