impossible.  “The sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and corn,” says a contemporary, “and there were none left who could drive them.”  Even when the first burst of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on the enormous diminution in the supply of labour, though accompanied by a corresponding rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the course of industrial employments.  Harvests rotted on the ground and fields were left untilled not merely from scarcity of hands but from the strife which now for the first time revealed itself between capital and labour.

[Sidenote:  Its Social Results]

Nowhere was the effect of the Black Death so keenly felt as in its bearing on the social revolution which had been steadily going on for a century past throughout the country.  At the moment we have reached the lord of a manor had been reduced over a large part of England to the position of a modern landlord, receiving a rental in money from his tenants and supplying their place in the cultivation of his demesne lands by paid labourers.  He was driven by the progress of enfranchisement to rely for the purposes of cultivation on the supply of hired labour, and hitherto this supply had been abundant and cheap.  But with the ravages of the Black Death and the decrease of population labour at once became scarce and dear.  There was a general rise of wages, and the farmers of the country as well as the wealthier craftsmen of the town saw themselves threatened with ruin by what seemed to their age the extravagant demands of the labour class.  Meanwhile the country was torn with riot and disorder.  An outbreak of lawless self-indulgence which followed everywhere in the wake of the plague told especially upon the “landless men,” workers wandering in search of work who found themselves for the first time masters of the labour market; and the wandering labourer or artizan turned easily into the “sturdy beggar,” or the bandit of the woods.  A summary redress for these evils was at once provided by the Crown in a royal proclamation.  “Because a great part of the people,” runs this ordinance, “and principally of labourers and servants, is dead of the plague, some, seeing the need of their lords and the scarcity of servants, are unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive wages, and others are rather begging in idleness than supporting themselves by labour, we have ordained that any able-bodied man or woman, of whatsoever condition, free or serf, under sixty years of age, not living of merchandise nor following a trade nor having of his own wherewithal to live, either his own land with the culture of which he could occupy himself, and not serving another, shall if so required serve another for such wages as was the custom in the twentieth year of our reign or five or six years before.”

[Sidenote:  Statute of Labourers]