WHY AND HOW POPULATION MATTERS

 changes in population composition and vital rates identify pivotal transformations in social life
though these experiences can only be understood by placing them in context and by finding
non-demographic explanations for them. Of course, causal arrows also flowed in the other
direction: changing forms of behavior modified social systems
 The ‘‘domestication’’ of plague stretched social fabrics. It radically changed how people
negotiated with cultural systems of inherited meaning in new circumstances as well as how they
responded to the deployment of political force in a situation that revised the relative powers of
contending parties.
 After the onset of the new mortality regime, neither belief nor power could be carried out in
old, traditional ways; new methods were developed that reflected the impact of plummeting
population levels on the organization of social and political relationships
 Dramatic reductions in population levels meant that there were fewer surviving workers whose
previously abridged freedoms had been the key to feudalists’ ability to hold sway over them
 After the Black Death, legal reforms that were largely oriented toward disciplining the working
classes provided an overt and explicit governmental tool for the constitutional exercise of
upper-class solidarity
 The sudden opportunity that the plague mortality gave to surviving laborers—to secure higher
wages or to demand personal and tenurial freedom—catalyzed the political nation.
 The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is intimately linked with the death rattle of feudalism but changes
in the level of population or the supply of land could alter the supply and demand axes but, by
themselves, are insufficient to explain the character of political struggle. its immediate cause
was the imposition of the unpopular poll tax of 1380, which brought to a head the economic
discontent that had been growing since the middle of the century.
 Unequal decrease thus unequal resources
