STUDY GUIDE FOR LESSON THREE

Topic 1: Feudal England

Title: A declining order: the Great Mortality; Casting off the Yoke; The Commons’ Early Voice; A
Well-Shot Arrow; A White Rose, a Red Rose. Renaissance Poetry

Vocabulary
1-commutation = conmutaciòn, cambio y trueque
2- flea-pulgas
3-noxios- nocivo, tòxico

Exercises to Get Ready for Class

1.A) What was the commutation of services?

From its early days, military services established in the feudal contract were commuted by
payments in cash. For the Norman kings, it was more practical to hire mercenary troops who
would fight as long as they were paid. In time, with the increasing importance of money that
resulted from growing towns and commerce, the practice began to be extended to labour services.

With the growth of towns, the development of trade and the increasing importance of money,
landowners began to accept monetary payments as substitutes for the forced labour of their serfs.

B) Why is it said that commutation leads to a vital transformation of English feudal society?
Explain.

Commutation changes an essential aspect of a feudal society: forced labour services, a vital
element of the feudal relationship between lords and vassals . If a serf is a man bound to the soil
by his obligation to perform forced labour, the commutation of services implies freedom from
serfdom and the transformation of the serf into a rent-paying peasant or a wage labourer.
Consequently, it was usually resisted by the lords and actively sought by the serfs, who included
commutation as a basic demand in their struggle.

Commutation also led to a gradual differentiation between great barons and knights (lesser
landowners). More and more, knights exploited their lands with wage labour, growing crops that
had a market or raising sheep for the export of wool. The great barons, on the other hand,
continued to act as feudal lords, using serfs in their manors, keeping armed retainers and
engaging in wars and politics.

2- A) What was the Black Death?

The Black Death is the name given to a bubonic plague that swept through Europe in the
late 1340s. The Pestilence, or Great Mortality, as it was called at the time, was caused by a
type of bacteria that infected black rats and humans alike and that found its host in fleas
that sucked the blood of both. Given the sanitary and cultural traditions of the time, there
 was no possible defence against the disease. Bathing was not a daily practise in Medieval
Europe, soap being a scarce and costly commodity. A few years before the arrival of the
plague, cats were slain en masse, due to their alleged relation to Satan and witches, and
this may have contributed to the proliferation of the disease-bearing rats.
For centuries, before and after the Black Death, there were several outbreaks of the plague,
but the one that reached England in 1348 was the most devastating. It had originated in
Asia and was transported by rats in merchant ships travelling to the Mediterranean and
North Africa. It killed an estimated 30 to 60 per cent of the population of the infected areas.
B) How did it influence in the process of the commutation of services?

By 1350, the whole of Britain and Ireland was devastated. Agriculture was in disarray as a result of
the massive death of labourers. Wages and prices rose and serfs found themselves in a better
position to demand the commutation of their labour services.

In some places, the social chaos that resulted from the Black Death broke the village structure and
augmented the numbers of itinerant workers looking for jobs. For many it was now easier to
escape from the manor and find another lord ready to offer their empty lands for rent. To face the
situation, some landlords began to resort to the method of stock and land lease. It implied that the
land was rented for a fixed number of years and seed, animals and implements were also
advanced. The contract provided for a rent that would cover all the costs of the investment, with
the stock having to be returned in good order at the end. Some tenants who took land under these
terms prospered and began to hire wage labourers themselves, so it was a step towards a
capitalist agriculture.

In general, the Black Death increased the pace of the changes taking place. The commutation of
services was hastened by the scarcity of labour and new forms of exploitation such as the rent and
the wage systems advanced this further.

2. What were the consequences of the Peasant Revolt of 1381?

The struggle of the peasants for their freedom or for better terms was a constant phenomenon in
the middle Ages. Medieval England was no exception and its history was punctuated by frequent
uprisings of the serfs, always bloodily crushed by the lords. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 stands
out as the best-known instance of the peasants’ fight for their rights and freedom.

When it happened, it was not the action of men driven to despair and acting spontaneously, but
the work of an underground organization: the Great Society. It was the Poll Tax of 1381 that
triggered the revolt. Villagers at Fobbing and Brentwood, Essex refused to pay this tax and when
the local sheriff was sent there to punish the transgressors, he was attacked. After this incident,
the revolt spread like wildfire, spurred on by the network of organizations set up by the Great
Society. In a short time, a large peasant army, under Wat Tyler, an ex-soldier, marched on
London.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE REVOLT

The revolt was bloodily suppressed; however, things were never the same afterwards. The
peasants had been given a taste of the power they had when acting in concert. The lords were
seriously alarmed by the Revolt and could not but treat the serfs more prudently thereafter. To
begin with, there was no more talk of the Poll Tax. In the years that followed, there were frequent
peasant uprisings on a smaller scale, reminders to the landowning class of the power and violence
latent in the mass of peasants who worked for them and sustained their privileges. Most
importantly, the practice of the commutation of services continued apace and the disintegration of
the manorial system led to the growth of farms rented to farmers or exploited by means of wage
labourers. The serf became a rent-paying peasant or a wage labourer. Serfdom rapidly declined
and by the 15th Century, it was extinct almost everywhere in England.

The abolition of serfdom was a remarkable achievement. Serfdom was only abolished in Denmark
in 1788, in the Austrian Empire in 1848, in the Russian Empire in 1861 and in Poland in 1864.
From a historical perspective, England was marching far ahead of the rest of Europe.

1. How did the Hundred Years’ War influence the ongoing changes in English society?
 As a result of the war, England, an exporter of raw wool during the middle Ages, became a
manufacturer of cloth.
 The prolonged warfare also had an impact upon feudal institutions in England, accelerating
their decline. In the battlefields of France, the English peasant saw that a well-shot arrow
could bring down an armoured knight, the symbol of feudal military superiority. In England,
the long bow was a household device in which every peasant was versed, since time
immemorial.
 The national scale of the Hundred Years’ War and its growing complexity transcended the
capacity of the feudal system and raised demands that could not be met by the feudal state
or the feudal lords alone. Technical advances like gunpowder and firearms 1 required
resources and organization that had little to do with feudal economy: they were weapons of
the towns, and industry and money were required to produce them.
 The English troops fighting in France were hired for long periods and had to be paid
regularly in wages, all of which required a stable system of taxation and support from the
moneyed classes of society.

1
The Battle of Crécy in 1346 was one of the first in Europe where cannons were used.
 5- In what ways did the Wars of the Roses contribute to the decline of feudalism in
England?

The Wars of the Roses were a series of dynastic civil wars in England, fought between 1455 and
1485 by descendants of Edward III who had contending claims to the crown. They belonged to the
rival families of Lancaster and York. The struggle was so named many years later because,
allegedly, the badge of the house of Lancaster was a red rose and that of the house of York a
white rose.

The central goal of the supporters of each family was to attain control of the Crown. Consequently,
the wars were particularly destructive for the nobility because each faction sought the utter
annihilation of the opposing family and their supporters as well as the confiscation of their lands by
the Crown. Historians consider that the Wars of the Roses greatly contributed to the self-
destruction of the nobility as the ruling class of England.