The Effect of the Black Death on Labor and Grain Prices






A first answer, which does not satisfy





A second answer, that makes more sense









  • herdgadfly

    I can guess so let me try the angle that all commerce in the 14th century was local and as such both buyer and seller were affected by the same conditions - dead people, sick people, scared people and unharvested crops. So healthy people had the ability to barter or pay lower prices .for grain by doing the harvesting themselves. In the business of farming, you can sell your crops or your crops can rot - sell it or smell it, we used to say in the fresh meat business. As for the workers still around to sell their strength, of course they would demand higher pay, just as in any normal supply and demand circumstance.

  • kidmugsy

    You can feed surplus grain to beasts and fowls, particularly over the winter, and thus the peasantry can eat more meat. Some formerly arable land will be used as meadow or as pasture: similar result. Some abandoned land will tumble down to woodland - so the peasants will be better heated too.

  • Mercury

    I don't understand. Wasn't there uninterupted *climate stasis* from at least the time when humans first left Africa up until the industrial era when humans started pumping huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere?

  • Q46

    You missed the most important factor, the absence of free market competition which is the limiting factor on capitalism as it ensures prices and thus profit margin are at a minimum.

    Landowners/grain producers were a de facto cartel because poor communication made transport of grain difficult and expensive, and there was no import of it.

    They had localised captive markets and no need to compete.

    Margins then must have been at a maximum.

    But post-disaster, just as there was labour competition, so there would be market competition. Landowners would not only outbid one another for labour, but undercut one another for sales.

    Whilst labour rates went up, prices could come down because they had had a high margin and now landowners had to accept much lower margins and thus those increased labour costs were absorbed.

  • Mercury

    In Econ 101 they teach you that farming is such a crappy business because there are so many variables that can bite you and demand is inelastic. I guess it's a crappy business when demand is elastic too.
    It has always astounded me that it took Westerners roughly 1000 years longer than the Asians to invent the stirrup. Try to imagine yourself learning to ride a horse, legs flopping all over the place, and falling off again and again and again. How long do you think it would take before you figured out how to utilize your own weight and your largest muscles to solve this problem? The next day? Two days? Certainly by the end of the week right?

  • Edlin

    Very interesting post. Not everything has to relate to modern politics. I'd love to see more of these historical thought experiments.

  • Eric Hammer

    I suspect another possibility here is that plague hit cities harder than the countryside. As such more non-farmers died than farmers. More marginal productivity for farmers (who don't farm the less productive land) as well as a smaller market for grain in cities drives down the price. Non-agricultural workers are now much harder to come by due to the deaths in the cities, driving up labor costs both in towns and in the countryside as farm workers get bid away by manufacturers.

    There are a few pretty decent articles about the subject I have read in the past few months, though I generally disagree with single shock theories of what caused the Industrial Revolution, which is what most of them get at. Any time someone suggests that killing ~1/3 of the population at random is good for growth a muscle in my eye starts twitching.

  • Maximum Liberty


    The classic on this subject is Douglass North and Robert Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (1973). I say it is the classic because:
    1. It has been used in a lot of European economic history classes, including the ones I took.
    2. It is highly, highly informed by the rise of neoclassical economic theory. North was pivotal in applying it to economic history. (See, for example, his Structure and Change in Economic History for the economic history of humanity in one book.)
    3. It is 40 years old now, and North has moved on to fancier theories that, to my mind, are far less robust and insightful.

    It is available on Amazon and is a good read if you are actually interested in economic history.
    I also like Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750 (1976). He used to teach from his book and the North and Thomas book. They pair together pretty well. I recall that the introduction takes you back long before the period being studies, in order to set the stage. Working from 25-year-old memory, de Vries's book has more odd bits of case studies and such, so it sometimes gives you unexpected depth in narrow fields as examples. (And, if you ever decide to move to Berkeley for a semester, try auditing his European economic history course.)


  • DerKase

    The black death didn't kill more in the cities than in the countryside mostly because cites were not all that populated. The overwhelming majority of the population was dispersed working on the farms. London may have had a population of perhaps 50,000 in 1300, and London was far and away the most populous city in England.

    The aftermath of the black death also signaled the birth and expansion of the European middle class. With the glut of farm products Coyote mentioned, fewer people were needed to produce food. While farm wages
    rose, some farm workers were priced out of the market. The excess population turned to self-employment. People flocked to the cities to find non-farm work, setting themselves up as merchants, artisans, and
    laborers. At the same time, foreign trade was flourishing. Ships sailed farther and more regularly to ports throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, and beyond. The Crusades had opened Europe’s eyes to the possibilities abroad. Money started to flow back into Europe that had mostly flowed out in the previous several
    centuries. All his social movement and influx of new money helped break the age-old cycle of serfdom. People discovered that they didn’t have to spend their lives in subsistence farming

  • Eric Hammer

    Sorry, I perhaps should have specified that the proportion killed was higher in cities, not an absolute magnitude. England is an odd bean though, as their structure was apparently more geared towards towns and villages rather than cities, like say France. Even getting numbers for the percentages in farm/non-farm work is a real bear. However, if say 25% of agricultural workers died compared to say 35% of manufacturing workers that will cause a shift right there. If we further assume that farmers were under capitalized per capita (ie farm workers has less land and fewer tools than they could fully utilize) and that manufacturers were roughly properly capitalized at the time of the plague, losing even the same percentage of workers would make total farm output drop very little compared to the drop in manufacturing, leaving a lot of marginal value in extra manufacturing workers.

  • Maximum Liberty


    You say, "While farm wages rose, some farm workers were priced out of the market." Economically, that is a contradiction in terms. If there were excess workers, farm wages would not rise. Remember, there were no minimum wage laws then.
    The actual mechanism worked like this.
    1. Lots of people died. Assume an even distribution, though it wasn't.
    2. Land-owners are now short of labor. They attempt various strategies to address it. Some poach labor by raising the total compensation. (Whether it is "wages" or something else is not relevant here.) Other owners either responded in kind or attempted to impose serfdom. In either case, you have some level of bidding by land-owners. The highest bidders were the ones with the most productive land, so they bid labor away from the marginal land, which was ultimately abandoned. So, this part of the process results in reallocation of labor to more productive land through a mechanism of wage bidding.
    3. The reallocation of labor to more productive land causes the price of agricultural products to fall. Without anything else, the economy would have ultimately reached some equilibrium in which rural wages stop rising as supply and demand re-equilibrate.
    4. Before that happened, the fall in the price of agricultural products made life as a craftsman much more profitable. The reason is that the price of food and clothing made up the majority of any household's budget. As the price of food fell, it became more attractive to work as a craftsman. As the price of wool fell, it became a lot easier to become a spinner, weaver, or tailor, because the price of inputs fell. (Remember all that marginal, abandoned land? Perfect for grazing sheep.) The price of clothing did trend downwards, but the prices of most other craft products did not, which meant tat cities became the land of opportunity. So, they start growing at the expense of the countryside. And, because of the intervention of kings who needed revenue, feudal lords often had limited rights to go after serfs who escaped to the city.

    In fact, the division between country and city was not necessarily so stark. One of the reasons that the dutch areas grew so much more prosperous during this period was that their land was great, so the population was more dense, and the cities were close. The first system of manufacturing was not a factory in the modern sense, but factoring. In this system, a factor would deliver raw materials to spinner and weavers who lived in the nearby countryside. The workers would spin it or weave it as piecework and get paid when the factor picked it up. The factor only had to invest in raw materials and inventory. The worker usually supplied the tools (spindle, loom, etc.) and location (usually a well-lit corner of the family home).

    One of the interesting themes to me is that the actions that the landlords took in response to the plague undermined feudalism. Many "bid up" labor compensation by waiving various feudal rights. ("OK, you don't have to use my mill or bring me a duck at Christmas.") Others attempted to re-impose labor obligations (the corvee), but their attempts to do so just made their peasants flee covertly. This is rather contrary to the Marxist theory that the feudal noble class acted in its class interests. If it had, lords would have returned fleeing peasants and banded together to force the cities to do the same. Instead, the system ends up moving towards cashing out the odd feudal obligations. The history of France leading up to the French revolution is likewise interesting because population had grown sufficiently to start reversing a lot of these trends, so the nobility was "re-discovering" "ancient" customary obligations that hadn't been enforced since the plague, as an attempt to raise their take from owning the fee (i.e. technical land ownership) other than the usufruct (the right to use the land and take what it provides).

    I'll stop talking now.


  • Maximum Liberty


    You are engaging in hindsight bias.

    We know from actual life that it took westerners about a thousand years. Are we really that much smarter than them that we would have discovered it in 5 days? What will people 100 or 1000 years from now be thinking about our inability to discover the obvious whizamaguzzer?


  • Old Griz

    Where stirrups were really valuable is war. William the Conqueror's cavalry had stirrups while Harald's did not. It is much harder to unhorse a knight with stirrups than without. William won due to better tech. Perhaps the skill needed to ride without stirrups kept the riffraff walking.

  • Mercury

    It's not quite hindsight bias because there is another, contemporaneous group of stirrup developers to compare the non-stirrup developers to. Plus, there were people walking around at the same time in both groups who were (or coming very close to) discovering all kinds of door-opening, fundamental truths about things like mathematics and how the universe worked.

    In a 100 years hopefully they'll wonder why it took us so long to make Al Gore king of the moon.

  • Mercury
  • Maximum Liberty

    Old Griz:

    I've often wondered which part of that is more important: the ability of a massed group of knights to stay on their horses in the impact of the initial charge, or the individual knights' ability to stay horsed while swinging a melee weapon from side to side in the subsequent fighting. I suspect it is the latter, because a mounted lance charge could be broken fairly easily by terrain or set pikes. But I don't know of anything that hints at an answer one way or the other. Do you?


  • Brennan

    I love your blog, but there is no such word as "irregardless." And you tried to use it twice.

  • Maximum Liberty

    Der Kase:

    I went back and re-read, so I have to retract point #4. The data show that most cities probably shrank after the plagues, relative to country population. That is, cities probably had greater population decreases than the countryside did.

    The economic reason for this is that wages will tend to equilibrate through migration, which means that marginal productivity will tend to equilibrate. Vacancies in rural tenancies will attract urban craftsmen until wages equilibrate. Another way to think about it is that the market shrank by over 25%, so you would expect less specialization.

    I was misled by my own logic. There would be rising real wages in the city. But migration will be based on relative real wages, not absolute real wages. If rural real wages grew more quickly than urban real wages, people move back to the farm.


  • lushfun

    Mongol Invasion ~1223...
    France and England more or less constant warfare on the continent.
    German push eastwards with warfare
    Viking expansion and raids.

    My sense is that not only people were led into slavery and died, but then the plague was the final straw. In some sense I would guess it was a ratcheting down effect by the top to keep their cash flow stable as available kept on dropping until there were no more resources and the societal structure collapsed.