The first economic consequence of the pandemic was to wreak havoc on prices and wages. When Europe’s population peaked at the start of the century, there had been abundant workers, many of them bonded to the land in the legally unfree status of serfdom. However, the effect of losing around one in every two people, virtually at a stroke, stood the world on its head and put labor suddenly at a premium. The chronicler Henry Knighton recorded that in 1349 “crops perished in the fields for lack of harvesters”; even where willing workers could be found, the cost to landowners of bringing in their
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