Laborers began to demand a wage for their efforts, which led to the rise of a money-based economy as opposed to the earlier land-based economy (middle-ages.org).
Europeans in the middle ages tended to be superstitious in their religious beliefs. As they searched for something or someone to blame for the wrath of the plague, all of their praying and blind faith did not protect them from being infected.
Comets, earthquakes, astrological configurations and the sin of humankind were all examined as possible causes. Interestingly, as Christians watched as their cardinals, bishops, priests and other clergy fall dead, just as vulnerable as anyone else, the religious strength of the feudal structure began to decline, as well. It is thought that these events may have ignited the Protestant Reformation (Uretsky). Johannes Nohl, in his vivid chronicles of the black plague, sums up its effects on feudalism, saying:
The experience incorporated in these graphic representations is the equality of all men in the face of death, an experience of all the greater import as, not only did it shake the foundations of the rigid system of mediaeval castes, but produced the consciousness of the equality...
if, prior to this, the higher estimation of the great had been successfully sustained by the ostentatious show of their obsequies and the innumerable masses said for their souls, the deception now failed. Even bishops and prelates frequently remained unburied and their corpses became the food of dogs, and more essential elements than external power and position began to assume the first place in the estimation of man.
Works Cited
Funk & Wagnalls® New Encyclopedia. 2006 World Almanac Education Group History.com
Kelly, John the Great Mortality Harper Collins, New York: 2005.
Middle-ages.org. www.middle-ages.org.uk/decline-of-feudalism.htm
Nohl, Johannes the Black Death, a chronicle of the Plauge Compiled from Contemporary sources, Unwin Books, London: 1926.
Ucalgary.com "The end of Europe's middle ages" Feudal Institutions.
A www.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/endmiddle/feudal.html
Uretsky, Samuel D. Plague! A history of the effect of epidemics, the (in)famous black death www.medhunters.com/articles/epidemics.html
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