Part 7 of What If This Never Happened
What If the Black Death Never Happened
The plague never reaches Europe. What the record says follows: fifty million live, wages stay low, serfdom stays, and the forests never come back.
Have you ever wondered what would have happened if the Black Death had never come?
The ships that carried it never reach Europe. This is what the record says would follow: fifty million people who live, wages that never rise, a peasantry that stays bound to the land, forests that never grow back, and a wave of massacres that never happens. Where it turns into a guess, it says so.
What really happened
Between 1346 and 1353 plague crossed Europe and killed up to fifty million people, somewhere between thirty and sixty percent of everyone living there. It was the largest loss of life the continent has ever recorded, and it took two centuries to make good: the population did not regain its level of the early fourteenth century until the sixteenth, and some Italian cities not until the nineteenth.
What followed is one of the best-documented turning points in economic history. With half the workers gone, the survivors were suddenly worth more. Wages soared; farm wages in England, on average, doubled between 1350 and 1450, and labourers found they could walk to the next manor and be paid more there. The lords tried to stop it. In 1351 the English Statute of Labourers made it illegal for a peasant to ask for more than he had been paid in 1346. It did not work. In western Europe serfdom, the system that bound peasants to the land and its lord, never recovered and all but disappeared. In eastern Europe the opposite happened: the remaining peasants were tied to the land more tightly than ever.
The land itself changed. With fewer hands, grain fields that needed many workers gave way to sheep and cattle that needed a shepherd and a few dogs. Abandoned fields and pastures were reforested; much of the older vegetation of Europe returned. And the plague brought out the worst as well: by 1351, sixty major and a hundred and fifty smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed in more than three hundred and fifty separate massacres, by people looking for someone to blame.
Now change one thing
The plague never crosses into Europe. The ships that carried it in 1347 are lost at sea, or the sickness burns out in the east before it reaches the ports. Fifty million people live. Nothing else about the fourteenth century changes.
What follows
The first thing is the living. Fifty million people who died in seven years do not die. That is the whole case for this world and it is enormous, and it is said first so that nothing below is mistaken for an argument against it.
The second thing is that the workers stay cheap. The medieval economy had more people than good land, which is why a lord could pay a labourer what he liked and why serfdom held: a peasant who ran had nowhere better to go. Take away the plague and that does not change. There is no labour shortage, so wages do not double, the Statute of Labourers is never needed, and the peasant who in our world walked to the next manor for better pay has, in this one, no next manor that wants him. Serfdom in the west does not collapse in the fifteenth century. It lingers, the way it lingered in the east, where the plague was followed not by freedom but by tighter law. The evidence says the freedom of western peasants was bought with the deaths of their neighbours, and nothing in this world buys it.
The third thing is the land. Without the empty fields, grain farming does not give way to sheep, the abandoned pastures do not go back to forest, and the older woodland of Europe does not return. A fourteenth-century Europe with a full population goes on clearing land rather than losing it. The countryside of 1500 looks like the countryside of 1340, only more so.
The fourth thing is the thing that does not happen, and it is one of the few unambiguous goods in this world: the massacres of 1348 to 1351 have no occasion. Two hundred and ten communities destroyed in the search for someone to blame are not destroyed, because there is nothing to blame anyone for.
Where the guessing starts
Whether a Europe with twice the people and none of the plague's upheaval would have reached the printing press, the Atlantic crossings and the rest on the same timetable is a guess, and historians disagree about how much the plague had to do with any of it. The honest reading is that the plague changed who had power over whom and what a day's work was worth, and that those changes rippled into everything after; how the ripples would have run without it, nobody can say.
What is not a guess is the size of the trade. In our world the survivors inherited more land, higher wages and, in the west, their freedom, and every one of those was paid for by the dead. In the world where nobody dies, nobody inherits. The lords keep their labourers, the labourers keep their lords, and the ordinary person in 1450 lives much as their great-grandparents did in 1340: on someone else's land, for someone else's price. It is a better world by fifty million lives, and a worse one for almost everybody who lives in it.