The coronavirus is killing poor people at twice the rate of better-off people, and exposing the appalling inequalities and injustice of our broken system. We need a new revolt, to bring about real change
Dr Lisa McKenzie ..via rt.com.. shared with thanks
Dr Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic. She grew up in a coal-mining town in Notts and became politicized through the 1984 miners’ strike with her family. Dr McKenzie lectures in sociology at the University of Durham and is the author of ‘Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain.’ She’s a political activist, writer and thinker. .on Twitter @redrumlisa.
The coronavirus is killing poor people at twice the rate of better-off people, and exposing the appalling inequalities and injustice of our broken system. We need a new revolt, to bring about real change.
“Things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all goods are held in common, and until there will be neither serfs nor gentlemen, and we shall be equal” said the Priest John Ball, during his speech before marching into London with Watt Tyler…
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The Most Revolutionary Act 
I’m not sure the black death was the cause of the peasants’ revolt, at least not directly. Rather, think of it as the first “organised” action against unfair wages and destruction of income. The black death halved the population of England with the low point around 1450. After the black death first struck England 1347-48 there were too few labourers to work the fields. The economy slumped. At that time the labourer’s day rate was one penny a day + lunch. Heaven forbid, a labour market sprang up and the price of labour doubled to tuppence a day. Labourers and even serfs were running away to work for an increased wage. The aristocracy said “we can’t have that” so in 1351 in Edward III’s reign the draconian Statute of Labourers was passed returning pay rates to a penny a day and specifying dire consequences for anyone who broke the rules (they still did in their thousands). The breaking point was the return of the black death in the late 1370’s. Tenant farmers were “bankrupted” because they had to pay successive heriot taxes (from memory 6s 8d or your best cow) because more than one head of the family died over a relatively short time frame. The heriot was an “inheritance” tax paid to the lord of the manor. Most peasants had one cow if they were lucky and few could save 6s 8d even over a lifetime. So they lost their land while the serfs lost their commons (the strips of land they were allowed to grow food on for themselves).
That’s an extremely potted and oversimplified history. Essentially the poor were deprived of their historical livelihood. The revolt came from despair and the inability to feed their families. It was an “employment issue” rather than the black death itself
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Good background, Lowell, Thanks. My sense of the article is that the author is attributing the revolt to circumstances surrounding the Black Death, rather than blaming the pandemic itself. I have always personally believed that the brief period of higher wages gave peasants a brief taste of what a better life might be like.
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