y 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 European calamity, and it is
strange to imagine that the effects of the plague in England should
have been so much deeper than in France or Germany, and so different.
In the fourteenth century there was little that was distinctly insular
in the conditions of England, as compared with those of the continent.
A trouble common to both regions alike could hardly have been the
starting-point of such differentiation between them as later ages
undoubtedly witnessed. There was a French counterpart to the statute of
labourers.

In truth the Black Death was no isolated phenomenon. There were already
in the air the seeds of the decay of the