In Our Time: The California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush was sparked by the discovery of gold in a river in January 1848 and not only did it make some individuals rich but it also had a significant impact on the politics and economy of the USA and the world. Discussing it on In Our Time were Kathleen Burk (University College London), Jacqueline Fear-Segal (University of East Anglia) and Frank Cogliano (University of Edinburgh).

When gold was discovered in what would become the state of California the land it was discovered on was not actually under the control of the USA. War between the USA and Mexico ended in February 1848 with the signing of a treaty that had the Mexicans cede that part of the continent to the USA. I imagine once they knew what they’d signed away they weren’t best pleased. At the time the area was inhabited by around 150,000 Native Americans, down from a previous population of 300,000 due to diseases and other effects of the colonisation of the Americas by Europeans. There were also around 6,000 Mexicans and other assorted immigrants.

News of the discovery of gold was initially slow to spread, and didn’t get taken seriously by the outside world until late 1848. Thus the gold rush proper was in 1849 – and until I listened to this programme I hadn’t really put two & two together and realised that the song Oh My Darling Clementine refers to the gold rush (“In a cavern, in a canyon, Excavating for a mine, Dwelt a miner forty niner, And his daughter Clementine.”).

In 1849 the population of the area increased significantly – by 1850 there were 100,000 settlers who had been drawn there by the gold. Most of the new immigrants were young men looking to get rich. The region was not yet a state, and it had none of the apparatus of government – amongst other things no law enforcement nor even laws. One of the experts described it as like “a stag party, they came and trashed California”. Most came to mine gold and hopefully make their fortunes that way, but those who came to sell supplies (mining equipment & food alike) to the miners were the ones who were most likely to become rich. This second category included Leland Stanford, who founded Stanford University.

These new settlers came from all over the world. From all 21 states of the USA and from 25 other countries. Not just Europeans either, there were settlers from various South American countries and from China. The journey to the territory was an arduous one no matter where you were coming from, and particularly so from Europe or the East Coast of the USA. By land it took 5 months, and there are few places where it’s possible to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains. By sea – you could cross the Pacific from China, or sail round the bottom of South America, or cross the continent at Panama (by land, the canal is not there yet) – all of which options have their difficulties and dangers.

The scale of mining operations progressed quickly. At first the stereotypical image of the lone miner panning for gold in a river was pretty accurate, and it was possible for individuals to set up on their own and strike rich. But as time went on mining techniques became more intensive and required more capital to set up. No longer did a lone incomer have much of a chance of getting his lucky strike on his own. As it became more industrialised it also became more destructive. By this I mean they were doing things like diverting rivers and blowing up parts of the mountains in order to extract more gold. As well as this physical destruction of the environment there was also a lot of mercury used in the gold extraction processes – which ended up in the rivers of California.

California may’ve started out as a lawless place in 1849 but it became incorporated as a state of the USA very quickly. In 1852 they had got themselves organised and went to the Senate with their constitution already written and asked to be made a state. At this point they already had double the number of people necessary to be considered. This had an unforeseen knock-on effect – they were the 31st state and were a free state. At this point in the USA’s history tensions were rising between the North (free states) and the South (slave states) although it would be another few years before the Civil War broke out in 1861. To ease the tension states were being admitted in pairs, one slave and one free at a time. However California’s swift self-organisation side-stepped around that procedure and unbalanced the Senate. Utah and New Mexico were admitted as slave states to re-balance it but didn’t actually have a slave owning economy.

And in a reminder that the issues are never simple: despite being a free state California is actually one of the first to enact institutionally racist laws. One axis of this is the regulation specifically of Chinese immigration. Another is protection and governance laws concerning the Native American population. Despite the idealistic name these laws actually disenfranchised and dispossessed Native Americans. There was also official encouragement of the lynching of Chinese & Native Americans who “stepped out of line”.

Obviously the biggest effect of the gold rush was on the economy – not just of California and the USA but also globally. For instance one of the experts made a case that the gold rush was critical for the Industrial Revolution in the UK. If there had not been more people with more money to buy the goods that the newly mechanised UK industry was producing then it would not have happened so fast or so succesfully.

The gold rush also affected the culture of the USA. For instance the American Dream mythology began as a spiritual Puritan vision of the City on the Hill being a shining beacon of virtue for the rest of the world to look up to. But after the gold rush this changes to a more material idea – you don’t go to the USA (or to the West Coast) to live the best life you can, you go to get rich quick. California still occupies this sort of cultural space – you go to California to [find gold]/[be a film star]/[join a tech startup] (delete as appropriate). Hollywood and Silicon Valley are the descendants of the strike it lucky & get rich quick ethos of the gold rush.

Towards the end of the programme they talked a little about the role of women in this era of California’s history. The main point they brought out was that there weren’t many women, and so in some ways their social capital was higher than in other parts of the USA. The example used was that divorce was easier for a woman to initiate. I’d’ve liked it if they’d spent a bit more time on this – my notes that I’m writing this up from say that I thought they had more to say about the knock-on effects of this on modern US society.

The Merchant Princes Trilogy, Charles Stross

When I first read The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross (of which the first trilogy is currently published) several years ago they were advertised as fantasy rather than as a science fiction/techno thriller and were published as six books. I’d been getting them out of the library then but stalled out on the third or fourth of the books as the library didn’t have the next one. So when I realised the books had been revised and re-released as 3 books it seemed the perfect time to pick them up and finally find out what happened. These three are The Bloodline Feud, The Traders’ War and The Revolution Trade

The story opens with Miriam Beckstein getting herself fired from her job as a biotech journalist by being just a little bit too good at following where the dodgy looking funding deals are coming from. Turns out that if your employer’s owner is involved he might not be so keen on having you break the story … When she visits her adoptive mother for sympathy she brings home a box of heirlooms/trinkets, one of which is a locket with an intricate design on it. Examining it more closely she ends up somewhere else, with a splitting headache. And nothing will ever be the same again … for her, or either (any!) of the worlds. It turns out that Miriam is, in fact, a princess of sorts – her family in the other world might be nouveau riche but as they and they alone have the ability to walk between the worlds they have political power and wealth that the better bred aristocracy of that world can only dream about.

When Miriam first stumbles into her heritage the Family make their money and generate their power in fairly simple ways. Their own world is technologically less advanced than ours so communication and transport across the landmass of the Americas is very slow, and they make their money by transporting goods and information very quickly via our world. In our world they make their money by transporting drugs very slowly but utterly securely in their own world (as well as growing their own heroin to sell). A pretty medieval way of doing business, and to Miriam’s mind it’s about time it was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. She’s hampered in that goal by many of the other medieval aspects of this new world … the status of women, for instance, and the Machiavellian political situation. And it turns out that these are not the only worlds, and they are not quite the only people who can walk between them.

They’re pretty hard books to give a summary of even the jumping off point – I’ve written those two paragraphs and feel like I’ve barely touched on the elements that are in the books. It starts out as a fairly straightforward portal fantasy/wish fulfilment fantasy trope: adopted girl finds out that she’s a princess in another world. And then Stross takes a good look at the ramifications of that. What would it really be like as a 30-something 21st Century American woman to suddenly become a medieval/early modern noblewoman? Answer: It would suck. And not just in the obvious ways, Miriam also doesn’t have the cultural toolkit necessary to navigate such a hierarchical world where honour and losing face matter – it’s not like she was particularly good at it even in her own world, just look at how she gets herself fired.

And it’s not just the ramifications of that fantasy. For instance: once deciding to do business by transporting drugs (such an obvious step), the Family are then embroiled in the rest of the drug trade in the US … and the law enforcement agencies, the government etc etc. As the series progresses the ways in which the two worlds’ political, military and security establishments are tangled together get more clear, and the consequences of the events set in motion by Miriam get ever more severe.

Culture shock and the misunderstandings when one culture meets another are a theme across the series. This is most obvious in Miriam’s reaction to the new world she finds herself in. But it also comes across in how the politics between the worlds plays out – assumptions made about how “of course they won’t do X so we can do Y” don’t always turn out the way the people involved expect. And it’s present through all the small stuff too – Miriam constantly mis-steps because her cultural values aren’t the same as her new family’s and vice versa.

The science fiction aspect of them takes a while to show up, but one of the big things is that the “stare at this pattern and travel” ability isn’t magic. And one of the threads of this trilogy that I most want to see where it’s going in the next books is the exploration of both the worlds they can get to and where the ability comes from.

I could do with re-reading these, even fairly soon – to see how knowing the big reveals ahead of time changes what I think of the earlier sections. Also because I’m not sure I followed all the twists & turns of the Machiavellian politics and that might be easier the second time round.

Definitely a series worth reading 🙂

In Our Time: Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali was a leading intellectual in the Islamic world of the 11th Century AD, a philosopher, lawyer, teacher, thinker and mystic who made important contributions to Islamic philosophy and to sharia law. The experts on In Our Time who discussed his life and work were Peter Adamson (LMU in Munich), Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities) and Robert Gleave (University of Exeter).

The era in which Al-Ghazali lived was one of political change. The caliphate was beginning to collapse, and the Christian Crusaders were fighting for and conquering parts of the Middle East. There was a rump of the old Umayyad caliphate in Spain, and their Abbasid replacement had for a while been a figurehead government with the Shi’ite military holding the actual power. When Al-Ghazali was alive the Shi’ites were in control in Egypt, but the Sunnis had restored the caliphate to actual power in the east (where Al-Ghazali lived). This was an intellectually rich era, with many important and influential scholars. An important piece of context for Al-Ghazali’s life and work is that he was born when the translation movement had just finished its project of translating the works of the Greek philosophers into Arabic.

Al-Ghazali was born in the 11th Century in Persia and was of humble origins. He was orphaned, and so doesn’t receive his education because of his family connections – instead he is identified as being particularly clever. He was educated in all the subjects that an Islamic intellectual of the era should be – including the Qu’ran and Sharia law. He clearly excelled as when he moves to Baghdad in 1090 he soon gets the best job in the city, when he is still only 33. During the 5 years he lives in Baghdad he is the most senior person in the biggest mosque in the city. His primary duty is teaching, but the role is also a political one – for instance he wrote a tract rebuking the Shi’ite rulers of Egypt.

During his time in Baghdad he writes a work called The Incoherence of the Philosophers which is a rebuttal of the use of Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers in Islamic religious philosophy. this sets him in direct opposition to the leading thinker of the previous generation. The main thrust of his argument is that the Greek notions of causality leave no room for the actions of God in the world. For example if you hold a flame to cotton then the Greek philosophers would say that the fire causes the cotton to burn. But Al-Ghazali believes you need to leave space for God and for miracles. So it is God that causes the cotton to burn when the flame is held to it, and God could choose that the cotton doesn’t burn (i.e. a miracle would occur).

Al-Ghazali was also influential in the field of Sharia law. His work on this topic was philosophical in nature and focussed on the principles behind the laws. These are more important than the details of the laws themselves because an understanding of the principle behind a law will allow the law to be adapted to the changing realities of the world.

After he had been in Baghdad for five years he suffered some sort of breakdown. He left the city and his high status job and wandered as a Sufi mystic. Sufism is focussed on a direct personal and mystical connection with God, and this contrasts with mainstream Islam (which focusses on obedience to the laws). Although he lived a life outside the teaching structure of Islam he continued to publish on philosophical matters – now within the Sufi tradition. At the time Sufism was not very closely aligned with the rest of Islamic thought and it was Al-Ghazali’s work in this part of his life that brought it and mainstream Islam closer together.

In their summing up at the end of the programme the experts said that although a lot of his writing concerned philosophy (and he played an important role at the time) his lasting legacy is in the field of Sharia law.

June 2015 in Review

This is an index and summary of the things I’ve talked about over the last month. Links for multi-post subjects go to the first post (even if it’s before this month), you can follow the internal navigation links from there.

Books

Fiction

The Rai-Kirah Trilogy by Carol Berg – fantasy with desert flavours, a slave who’s more than he seems, and demons possessing souls. Part of Read All the Fiction, I only ever bought the first two books and these will be going to charity.

Total: 1

Non-Fiction

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich. Part of the New Oxford History of England.

Total: 1

Photos

Gathering of the Clans.

Half the Man I Used to Be.

Head First.

Lord of All He Surveys.

Total: 4

Radio

Beowulf – In Our time episode about the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf.

The Eunuch – In Our Time episode about eunuchs in Assyria, China and Rome.

Total: 2

Talks

“An Ancient Flash Flood and Stratigraphy in the Valley of the Kings” Stephen Cross – talk at the June meeting of the EEG.

Total: 1

Television

Non-Fiction

Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman – Michael Wood presenting a programme that was half a biography of Mary Arden and half general social history of the Tudor period.

Total: 1

Trip

Egypt Holiday 2014: Karnak Temple Complex.

Egypt Holiday 2014: Temple of Mut at Karnak.

Egypt Holiday 2014: Theban Tombs of the Nobles.

Total: 3

The Rai-Kirah Trilogy by Carol Berg

As I continue to (slowly!) read through the fiction on my shelves I’ve got to two books by Carol Berg – they are the first two of her trilogy The Rai-Kirah. The books are called Transformation and Revelation. I never bought the third one, and it’s things like that that’ve made me taken on this project – did I not buy it because I didn’t fancy it? Did I not buy it because I never got round to it? Should I buy it? It’s definitely not the only series where I’ve got a couple then not the rest.

The protagonist of the story is Seyonne, an Ezzarian who has been a slave in the Derhzi Empire for 16 long and brutal years when the story opens. In the first chapter he is bought by the heir to the Empire, Prince Aleksander, branded on the orders of one of he Prince’s companions (as a form of revenge on the Prince) and forced to brand said companion by the Prince. Aleksander is spoilt, cruel and doesn’t see why he shouldn’t destroy people when it takes his fancy. Seyonne once had magical powers before they were tortured out of him by the Derzhi, and the very fact of his slavery has made him outcast and unclean in the eyes of his own people – he’s just going through the motions of life until he dies. It doesn’t exactly seem like the start of a promising relationship – but there’s more to Aleksander than meets the eye at first, and Seyonne is drawn into not only caring about the Prince but also joining forces with the Prince to save him & the world from the Rai-Kirah demons he was trained to fight in his homeland.

As I read the first book I was assuming that I hadn’t finished buying the trilogy because I’d just forgotten to pick up the third book. The story sucked me in and carried me along. Whilst there were things I wasn’t keen on when I finished it and thought about them, there were other parts I liked. The setting was interesting – not a faux-Europe, instead something with desert flavours. The Derzhi were once nomads in the desert, and this came through in the ways their empire was set up and how their aristocrats interacted. For instance, hospitality rules (sharing food and drink) are still important despite their change of lifestyle, which was plot relevant. I also found the magic interesting. The Rai-Kirah demons come through from another world and set up residence in human souls – the Ezzarians have learnt ways to enter the victim’s soul and fight to drive out the demon. That was Seyonne’s role in his society before his capture. I also like the relationship between Seyonne and Aleksander. I feel it did go too quickly from the very low point at which it started to trust and liking, even with the help of Seyonne’s mystical sense that Aleksander is worth protecting. But still, I didn’t notice that until I’d finished the book, if you see what I mean – I was hooked into it while I was reading it.

Sadly I didn’t really buy any of the interpersonal relationships except the building friendship between Seyonne and Aleksander. Particularly not the relationships between Seyonne and the women in the novel. And that was one of my problems with the second book in the trilogy. I was much less keen on the series after reading it, and I am now intending to give these to charity rather than complete the series.

The second book takes what we know about the world so far, and makes us – and Seyonne – doubt it. Are the Rai-Kirah really just rapacious demons trying to conquer the world? Where did the Ezzarian’s abilities come from? And why is Seyonne’s heavily pregnant wife now not pregnant and pretending she never was? This last is the driving force of the plot for the beginning of the book, which was a shame as it made me cranky every time that bit of the plot came up. I didn’t buy into Seyonne and Ysanne’s relationship, their utter lack of trust in each other and inability to just have an honest conversation made me unable to believe they’d ever been in love ever. And yes, it’s not supposed to be idyllic (far from it), and Seyonne is supposed to be being an idiot, and Ysanne isn’t supposed to have his best interests at heart and I don’t think she’s supposed to’ve been in love with him. But even knowing all of that didn’t make me any more interested in reading about it. And having spent the first few chapters gritting my teeth and rolling my eyes at the characters I wasn’t inclined to be charitable about the rest of it. I suspect if that plot line hadn’t existed I’d’ve enjoyed the rest rather more, but it does exist.

Another problem I had with both the books was the sheer level of physical & mental abuse that Seyonne absorbs. I’m not sure I believe that he could be either alive or sane by the beginning of book 1 (given the backstory we see later) … and certainly not by the time that Berg has finished gleefully torturing him over the two books I read.

So my overall verdict is that Berg has some interesting world building and ideas, but ultimately I found the execution too flawed.

< Previous on the Shelf | Next on the Shelf >

In Our Time: Beowulf

The epic poem Beowulf is probably the best known piece of Anglo-Saxon literature – it’s certainly one I was aware of, and had an idea of the shape of the story before we listened to the In Our Time episode about it. However it was unknown until the 19th Century when a single manuscript copy dating from around 1100AD was discovered. The three experts who discussed it on the programme were Laura Ashe (University of Oxford), Clare Lees (King’s College London) and Andy Orchard (University of Oxford).

Even tho the surviving version of the poem comes from the 11th or 12 Century, it was probably composed around 750AD. It’s sometimes said to be a little earlier: “from the time of Bede” (who died in 735AD). But Orchard pointed out that Bede is known person from a known time so estimates tend to gravitate towards him. The subject of the poem is older still – it’s a poem about long ago & far away about history that the listeners were expected to already be aware of. Some of the characters in the poem are real historical personages who lived around the 5th Century AD (however this doesn’t include the hero Beowulf). This is a Christian English poem about the listeners’ pagan Danish ancestors, written in a time before the Danes were seen as a foreign threat.

There are three sections to the poem. The first tells of the hero Beowulf travelling to another kingdom and fighting the monster Grendel, who has been terrorising the country. Grendel is a misshapen man who fights without a sword and so Beowulf wrestles with him and wins the fight by pulling off the monster’s arm. Said arm is then hung up as a trophy when Beowulf returns to the king of the country. The second section tells us about Grendel’s mother who comes to avenge her son, as is her legal right. She lives beneath the sea and Beowulf goes to her lair (or hall) to fight her with a sword. The third section of the poem is set 50 years later, when Beowulf is an old man and has become a king in his own right. The story of how he came to be king is told in flashbacks, while the main plot of this section revolves around him fighting a dragon which is terrorising his country. Unlike the first two monsters this is a truely mythological beast instead of fantastical but plausible. Beowulf goes to fight it in its lair, and at first is losing the fight despite his heroic skill. With the help of his men, and using a sword from the dragon’s lair, he finally defeats the dragon but dies in his moment of triumph.

The poem has a very non-linear structure, and after its rediscovery 19th Century critics used the repetition as an example of how it was a poor poem. Modern scholarship strongly disagrees with that opinion! The narrative circles around the story with each repetition of an event giving you new details or nuances, or new references to other literature etc. For instance in the first part the poem first tells one about the fight, then Beowulf tells someone about the fight, then Beowulf tells the king of the country Grendel was terrorising and then Beowulf tells his own king. All have differences that tell you more about the event. This isn’t the only sort of non-linearity – there are also flashbacks (for instance in the third section as I mentioned above), and asides that tell you how some side-event turned out later. Or who owned a particular sword once the current owner died after the end of this story, and so on.

The poem was written to be heard rather than read. The experts read out sections in the original Anglo-Saxon, with Orchard in particular making it sound vibrant and alive (even if incomprehensible – I didn’t get very far the one time I started learning Anglo-Saxon). However it probably wasn’t an oral composition, instead it was written down with the intention that it should be read out. It is a very literate poem, with references to other literature of the period and before including classic Latin literature. Orchard pointed out parallels with things like the Aeneid, which the Anglo-Saxons of the 8th Century AD would’ve known.

It wasn’t just a story about heroes and monsters, and tales of derring do. The peom was also about the ending of one era and the beginning of the next. It tells the story of the pagan Beowulf from a Christian perspective, and contains Christian motifs and structural elements. Most obviously the three-part structure which is more of a Christian motif than a pagan one. And the narrative moralises about the actions of the protagonists – a running commentary of “that’s how it was then, but we know better now”. The pagan culture valued valour & honour, but the Christian one valued non-violence and godliness. The poem reflects that change and the tension between the old ways and the new.

I think the biggest thing this programme told me was how much more there is to Beowulf than I’d realised. I’m pretty sure we have a translation in the house (somewhere!), I should find it and read it sometime 🙂

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 17)

I’m into the home straight with this book – and actually finished reading it a while ago, I’ve just got a backlog of posts to write 🙂 This is the penultimate chapter, all that’s left after this is the conclusion.

Population and the Black Death

The overall picture of population changes in England between 1225 and 1360 is first growth in the 13th Century, followed by a plateau in the early 14th Century and a catastrophic decrease caused by the Black Death in 1348. However despite this clear big picture the details are more difficult to get a proper grasp of, and so Prestwich spent the first half of this chapter looking at the sorts of evidence used to assess the population and discussing the sorts of numbers these indicate.

The population of a region is affected by three things – birth rate, death rate and migration – and Prestwich looks at these in turn. There’s very little evidence for what the birth rate in England was during this period – births were not required to be recorded. And it is difficult to make generalisations from what data there is because birth rates vary within populations & across time. There is some evidence that people tried to control the size of their families (via herbal concoctions or coitus interuptus) despite the disapproval of the Church. However a lack of understanding of reproductive biology & the female anatomy meant that this was difficult to do successfully. Prestwich notes that there is very little evidence for abortion (or attempted abortion), nor for infanticide. Death rates were affected by environmental causes like famines, and also by economic circumstances. Prestwich suggests that the growth in the 13th Century may’ve lead to the population outstripping the ability of the cultivatable land to feed it, leading to the plateau in the early 14th Century. Migration to and from England had little effect on the overall population, however internal migration had a large effect on the population of particular towns etc.

Prestwich next works through a couple of examples of starting assumptions and hypotheses to arrive at some estimates for the overall population at the peak at end of the 13th Century. All the methods of calculating the population have their own problems, and the margins of error are huge. However Prestwich suggests figures of between 4 million and 7 million, with 5 million being a plausible number to keep in mind. This is about two to three times the population at the end of the 11th Century (which one can estimate using the Domesday Book as a starting point). For a couple of modern comparisons: the modern population of Scotland is of the order of 5 milliion people, in contrast the population of London in 2013 (according to wikipedia) was on the order of 8.5 million.

On a more local level there are sometimes surviving records that give a better indication of population levels in a particular community – but historians disagree about how reliable these are (and how to extrapolate from what’s there). For instance manorial court records survive for some areas – like Coltishall in Norfolk where numbers of tenants can be calculated: 119 in 1314, 168 in 1349 and 74 in 1359. That doesn’t tell you how big their families were but it does suggest a rising population which then falls sharply after the Black Death. Prestwich goes through a few examples of the types of records that survive and what they can tell us. He also discusses the indirect evidence that can be used – like how much land is in cultivation (more suggests more people need fed). Or how much tax was returned from a community.

The second half of the chapter discusses the Black Death. This was probably the biggest human catastrophe ever to affect England – up to half the population died. It is generally said that the Black Death was an epidemic of Yersinia pestis (bubonic plague), and I had thought this was a known thing. However Prestwich devotes three or so pages to discussing the problems with this identification and what alternatives there may be. The argument against bubonic plague being the Black Death is that the symptoms & fatality levels as well as the spread speed & pattern of the disease do not match that seen in more modern outbreaks where we have much more accurate information. The usual answer to this is that the bacillus has mutated significantly since the 14th Century, and thus the disease we see now is not the disease they suffered. Prestwich is very keen to point out that this is just a hypothesis, and other explanations should not be dismissed out of hand. He doesn’t, however, have a favoured answer – he lists three possibilities (anthrax, influenza, a viral haemorrhagic disease) but also explains why they are implausible.

The epidemic, whatever it was, arrived on English soil sometime in June 1348 at the port of Melcombe Regis in Dorset. By November it had reached London, and in 1349 it spread throughout the country. Mortality was highest during the late spring & early summer of 1349. Death rates can be estimated using the surviving records although these generally do not list cause of death so some interpretation is needed to arrive at figures. Although perhaps as much as half the overall population died this was not evenly spread through society. The higher aristocracy were much less affected with only one member of the royal family dying in the outbreak, and only 13% of the parliamentary peerage in 1349. Clergy were more affected than this – with figures ranging from 29% to 60% in different areas. Those who resided with their congregations were more affected than those who did not. Mortality among monastic communities was very variable with some being nearly wiped out and others barely affected. Mortality amongst the rural population was much the same as for the clergy who resided amongst them (unsurprisingly). Data for the urban population is much more incomplete but one might assume it would be higher than in rural areas due to the greater numbers of people in close proximity. There are indications such as numbers of wills registered compared to a normal year or how many tax payers are recorded that back up this assumption.

The immediate effects of this huge loss of life on the economy & on government are surprisingly limited. The greater amount of available land (due to deaths of the tenants) and the death toll combined to reduce the number of landless labourers available to work did exert pressure to raise wages for labourers – and similarly for other professions in urban areas. However the government acted to freeze wages to pre-Black Death levels, and the long term economic effects of the population drop don’t show up till after 1360 when these measures began to fail. The mechanics of government and law & order also show surprising resiliance – the effects that show up in the period this book covers are primarily in low tax revenues and greater difficulty fielding large armies. The effects on the Church were greater. With so many dead clergy there weren’t as many truly appropriate candidates as needed to fill the vacancies. However again there was no danger of a collapse of the system. Society in general was also very resilient. There must surely have been an effect on the general population of seeing half the population die in such a short space of time, but Prestwich says it’s difficult to detect in the contemporary sources.

Prestwich finishes the chapter by reminding us that longer term effects were much greater – transforming society during the 15th & 16th Centuries.

< Previous Chapter | Next Chapter >