were made to carry it out, the chronic weakness of a medieval executive soon recoiled before the hopeless task of enforcing impossible laws on an unwilling population.  Class prejudices only showed themselves in the stipulation that, while the employer was forbidden to pay the new rate of wages under pain of heavy fines, the labourers who refused, to work on the old terms were imprisoned and only released upon taking oath to accept their ancient wages.  In effect, however, the king’s arm was not long enough to reach either class.  The labourers, says a chronicler, were so puffed up and quarrelsome that they would not observe the new enactment, and the master’s alternative was either to see his crops perish unharvested, or to gratify the greedy desires of the workmen by violating the statute.  While labourers could escape punishment through their numbers, the employer was more accessible to the royal officers.

Thus the labourers enjoyed the benefits of the scarcity of labour, while the employers suffered the full inconveniences of the change.  Producers were to some extent recompensed by a great rise in prices, more especially in the case of those commodities into whose cost of production labour largely entered.  For example the rise in the price of corn and meat was inconsiderable, while clothing, manufactured goods, and luxuries became extraordinarily dear.  Of eatables fish rose most in value, because the fishermen had been swept away by the plague.  Rents fell heavily.  Landlords found that they could only retain their tenants by wholesale remissions.  When farmers perished of the plague, it was often impossible to find others to take up their farms.  It was even harder for lords, who farmed their own demesne, to provide themselves with the necessary labour.  Hired labour could not be obtained except at ruinous rates.  It was injudicious to press for the strict performance of villein services, lest the villein should turn recalcitrant and leave his holding.  The lord preferred to commute his villein’s service into a small payment.  On the whole the best solution of the difficulty was for him to abandon the ancient custom of farming his demesne through his bailiffs, and to let out his lands on such rents as he could get to tenant farmers.  Thus the feudal method of land tenure, which, since the previous century, had ceased to have much political significance, became economically ineffective, and began to give way to a system more like that which still obtains among us.

Struck by these undoubted results of the pestilence, some modern writers have persuaded themselves that the Black Death is the one great turning-point in the social and economic history of England, and that nearly all which makes modern England what it is, is due to the effects of this pestilence.  A wider survey suggests the extreme improbability of a single visitation having such far-reaching consequences.  Moreover the Black Death was not an English but a