How did the Black Death free the serfs?

[Baron]

They say the Black Death helped free the peasant class from feudal oppression by reducing the labor force and thus giving the survivors more leverage to demand higher wages and better treatment. If the Black Death killed half of Britain's population, then the population would have simply been returned to levels a century or two earlier, when feudalism was strong. Obviously, there's more to the story than "it killed half the population". What other factors were at play? Perhaps the plague spared the gentry more, leading to a surplus of employers.

[Michael B]

The plague was an equal opportunities disease: it killed regardless of social class.

However, as always, it was more severe in the towns and cities where people were crowded together and transmission was easier. It did not leave the country alone - many villages were hit so badly that they were abandoned. The net results were:
...active demand for labour, especially in the towns. It was mainly to towns and cities that serfs fled: "City air is free air." Townsmen who previously were choosy about which escaped serfs they would take in now had less choice: the serfs correspondingly had greater opportunities. Those from abandoned villages had the greatest opportunities of all.
...Where before the plague landholders would automatically support their class by returning runaways to their own village, they would no longer do so. Where land was still in cultivation labour was so short that they would accept an incomer claiming to be a free peasant - and no questions asked. There was no shortage of landholders or rural employers. When one died (of plague or otherwise) the next of kin took over, so that there was a growing imbalance between the number of people needing to hire labour (much the same number as before) and the few workers left.
...Here and there ex-serfs would intake abandoned land and cultivate it in an attempt (sometimes successful) to establish themselves as yeomen farmers. This further reduced the supply of available labour, increasing the upward pressure on wages and the temptation to take risks to desert one's manor.

In any case the labour market was becoming unstable even before the plague arrived. Market forces were driving wages up (repeated legislation to stabilise the situation by limiting wages had, just as repeatedly, absolutely no effect in practice) so that where a serf was once in a relatively favourable position (house, land and employment assured, security in famine years etc.) and often had little incentive to move, he was increasingly aware that he could vastly improve his standard of living by escaping. By disrupting normal life, the plague simply made it easier to leg it without being caught. Often, the landholder (himself perhaps only just having succeeded to the estate and so being out of touch) might not know exactly which of his nominal workforce were dead, and which alive but elsewhere.

An excellent question. Please accept a star.

Hope this helps.

[Man60]

The principal disturbance was the passage of property through death. A single incompetent young girl could end up overnight as the owner of vast tracts of land, equally she could be dead before the ink was dry on her own will. Conventional society could not withstand the loss of labour, or the loss of organised ownership. Quite quickly, and haphasardly, there was no reason to care as death could strike the following day. This has a seriously releasing effect on people's behaviour

[Jonathan]

The theory would go that although the population might have simply returned to an earlier level, the economy in, say, 1350 was not what it had been in 1150. The centuries of population growth and general prosperity from 1000-1300 had resulted in the appearance of many new cities, more industry (particularly in textiles), and trade. With so many dead and so many people trying to rebuild, laborers had a lot more options to choose between. In a sense, of course, those options had been there all along, but now there was less competition with other peasants for them.

From the perspective of the lords and merchants, however, it was different. Yes, there were fewer lords owning land, but there was no less land to be worked. Plague among the landowning classes meant that the existing land ended up concentrated in fewer hands by inheritance. So another result of the plague was a sudden boost in Europe's wealth per capita, which may explain Europe's flourishing in the later Middle Ages and early modern period.

It should be pointed out, though, that the evidence for all this is far from conclusive. We don't even know for sure how much of the population was killed by the plague, and the trend toward greater monetization of the economy and greater liberty for peasants was well underway before the plague struck.

[Joan]

An excellent answer, Michael B. A thumbs up to you.

[lwhhow]

Feudalism when it was created wasn't created for labor shortages/ labor surpluses but for 'protection' from Viking and other raiders of the Dark Ages. The Plague may have returned the population numbers back to where they were 200 years before....but...it could not turn time back 200 years.
When the Plague ended in the late 1300's the surviving people were still left with an economy as big as it was in the early 1300's before the Plague but with only half the work force. They couldn't go back to feudalism because by 1400 nation states and strong kingdoms were the rule and they didn't need it for 'protection' anymore which is why it existed in the first place.
Unable to go back in time, they could (like all of us) only go 'forward' to new ways for the new conditions (an economy too big for it's work force, no need for feudalism)..