EXPLORING LIFE, DEATH AND ACHIEVEMENTS IN MEDIEVAL TIMES What were the consequences (impacts) of the Black Death?
1. Population decline: Overall estimates for the number of people killed in Europe by the Black Death vary from about 30 per cent to 60 per cent of the population of Europe. Many villages were deserted. It took almost 150 years before the population of Europe was back to the levels that existed before the Black Death.
2. Shortage of labour: There was a shortage of labour because so many peasants and labourers in the towns and cities died. Those who survived demanded higher wages.
3. Shortage of tenants: There was a shortage of peasants to rent land so rents were reduced to attract tenants and some land lay in waste. Some tenants were able to increase the size of the farms they rented.
4. Uprisings: The changes caused by the Black Death contributed to uprisings in some places. In France, La Jacquerie (peasants) revolted in 1358 and there was the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381.
5. Rise of Anti-Semitism: In some places, Jews were blamed for causing the plague and this led to massacres of Jews.
In the matter of this plague the Jews throughout the world were reviled (hated) and accused in all lands of having caused it through the poison which they are said to have put into the water and the wells. … Thereupon they burnt the Jews in many towns … On Saturday – that was St Valentine’s Day – they burnt the Jews [in Strasbourg] on a wooden platform in their cemetery. There were about two thousand people of them.
The Cremation of Strasbourg Jewry St Valentine’s Day, 14 February, 1349 – About The Great Plague And The Burning Of The Jews, sourcebooks.fordham.edu
See Patterns of Change, Health and Medicine, Chapter 29