Example Of Essay On The Later Middle Ages

The later Middle Ages (circa 1300-1500) featured a period of European climate change. In the 20 years 1350-1370, there was a cooling period coupled with wetter summers, often with storms and unpredictable rainfall, resulting in famine and mass starvation. Unfortunately, those wetter summers also exacerbated the already unhygienic conditions that most people of the time lived in, which encouraged a massive increase in rat populations. It was the fleas carried on the rats that transmitted bubonic plague (or the Black Death) to humans. As a result, once the disease had reached Europe (thought to have originated in China), there were massive outbreaks of the disease throughout Europe around that time, which decimated the populations of many European countries. Estimates of the death toll vary, but it is thought that between 20% and 70% of the population succumbed. The huge numbers of deaths from the disease represented just the primary effect of the outbreaks, which caused other problems, as I will show in this essay.
The full consequences of the disease were far more than the thousands of deaths across Europe. The prevailing social and economic structure within Europe was irreversibly changed. The general population tended to live for today, unsure of their future. Because of the huge loss of life, there was a great shortage of peasant labor, which had the effect of a worsening in Europe of an already existing economic recession resulting in part from the famines of previous years. Also, because labor was now a scarce resource, and more land was available to be worked by fewer people, it became possible for peasants to earn more – sometimes as much as five times more than previously. Governments tried to collect higher taxes to restore declining revenues, causing peasant unrest, which in England eventually led to the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.
The earlier famines which had caused at least ten percent of the population to die from starvation and now the many deaths due to the Black Death, had also made people question their faith in the Catholic church, asking why the church could do nothing to save them, even though the wealthy donated gold and other artefacts to the church in the hope that they would be spared. Once people began to question the power and authority of the church, it lost much of its control over the populace, resulting in religious fanaticism including anti-Semitism. Minorities like Jews and lepers were widely persecuted, as also were any people with skin diseases like acne or psoriasis. Interestingly, fewer Jews actually died from the Black Death, partly because their religious laws resulted in a cleaner lifestyle than that of most medieval villagers. Also, the Jews tended to live in ghettos, separated from the rest of the population. This made others suspicious of them, resulting in Jews in many towns or cities being killed or banished. By 1351, over 350 massacres had occurred and more than 200 Jewish communities had been totally exterminated.
Meanwhile, England’s so-called Hundred Years War with France (1337-1453) served to compound the economic and other problems for both countries. By the end of the war, thousands of French people had died, villages and crops were burned, and the French economy had been seriously damaged. On the other hand, their tax-collecting was now uniform and organized. England did not fare well either, having lost forever their former possession of affluent parts of France. However for the peoples of both England and France, one positive outcome of that war was a greater sense of unity, independence and national identity in both countries.
So overall, although the outbreaks of the Black Death caused tremendous losses of life, perhaps triggered by earlier famines followed by climate change, it was the combined effects on the political and social structure of society, plus the economic effects of severe recession and the reduced influence of the once powerful catholic church that combined to show that the events of this era were overwhelmingly negative, with the relatively minor exception of an increased sense of national identity and unity, notably in England and in France.