antoine-roquentin:

If you heard today that a plague was coming that would rapidly kill between 30 and 50% of the general population, you might reasonably expect this to lead to the collapse of society. It’s hard to see how obligations and social accounting could survive such a massive event. Some might even see it as a chance for a new beginning.

But this catastrophe actually happened in the historical record, and when it did, the direct ancestor of our own society continued a remarkable level of its day-to-day functioning. The bibliography of any book about the Black Death in England is laden with references to tax receipts, court cases, and parish death records. Much of what we know about the plague comes from records generated by the continuous operations of the very institutions that one might expect to completely fall apart in a super-mortality event.

The English law courts sat with only minimal interruptions even during the brutal first wave of the Black Death from 1348 to 1349. The Court of Common Pleas conducted its full end-of-year term in 1348, while the Court of King’s Bench sat uninterrupted at York. In 1349, the Court of Common Pleas continued regular operations at Westminster. The King’s Bench operated at Lincoln, remaining “surprisingly busy.” It appears that the courts were forced to adjourn only for May and June of 1349, the very peak of the epidemic.    

Evidently, the courts had busy dockets even as litigants, judges, and attorneys succumbed to the plague left and right. In fact, the very pace of the death was likely driving much of the litigation: property changed hands at an accelerated rate, heirs sued each other over their shares of unexpected windfalls, debtors died, and creditors disputed over who would seize the silver and furniture.

Arguments, legal nitpicking, and the cross-examining of claimants to estates went on as usual, even as the wagons of the municipal corpse collectors creaked past the courthouse windows. At the end of the process, the only result was paper in the form of writs and orders, bearing the wax seal of the court. The successful litigant would have taken these papers away, and traveled home through a surreal scene of fresh graves, shuttered homes, and people wandering the roads proclaiming the end of days. In all likelihood, the winner of the case would himself die later that year or in the next spring, and the process would repeat.

What is missing from this grim picture is the expected widespread anarchy. If a manor house is still standing in 2022, the current occupant’s chain of title likely traces back to orderly inheritance proceedings conducted during the Black Death.

Law and governance did not just persist as usual during the Black Death. The power of both the state and the courts actively increased in response to the challenge, much as they have during modern disasters. The ancestors of today’s credit securement processes evolved rapidly during this time: “Penal bonds, punitive remedies under detinue of charters, and uses all came into vogue because their utilization encouraged more members of the upper orders to stand by their commercial obligations.” Records show that by 1352 “the use of penal bonds increased dramatically, and they were also used to enforce debts.”

The executive function of government also remained largely unimpaired by the Black Death. Between 1348 and 1349 it was recorded that many laborers, expecting the imminent end of the world, had absconded from their jobs into idleness, or were demanding greatly increased wages to do any work.

In response to this disaster-holiday mentality, the Council of Edward III issued the Ordinance of Laborers in the June of 1349, which decreed that everyone under age 60 must work, and workers may not receive wages higher than pre-plague levels. The ordinance also imposed price controls on food and prohibited alms for able-bodied beggars. By 1351, a strengthened version of this ordinance was being actively enforced through legal prosecutions against violators, and the English state was largely successful in imposing mandatory employment, along with wage and price controls, during the remainder of the economic crisis.  

The Black Death did not bring on any great social reset—in fact, survivors experienced the very opposite. In the chaos of mass death, the state enforced obligations to work and fulfill debts with increasing stringency. Eventually, laborers did gain financially from their increased bargaining power. But this was a slower process that took a generation or two to fully make itself felt, with no immediate dramatic reordering of society.

There was only one road to escaping financial and social debts during the Black Death, and it was traveled by plague carts carrying bodies….

It is very difficult to specify any death toll or infrastructure destruction that would, in itself, make fundamental or lasting changes to our systems of governance. Even nuclear war may not reach the threshold.

There are a number of counterexamples to the persistence of mundane economic life, property rights, trade, and governance. One might ask about the fates of East German landlords. Or pre-1949 debts in China. What about paper farm deeds in Cuba? What about French Ancien Regime estates after 1790?  

These counter-examples quite neatly answer the question of what events are actually known to radically change society. The real force that reorders society is always human action, driven by political or ideological coordination. Disaster becomes a moment for organized political actors to upset the existing order in a given place, either by foreign conquest or by revolution.

Without some human force ready to make use of disaster, neither plague nor destruction are sufficient in themselves to rewrite how society functions. Where these things occur without a strong existing revolutionary ideology, the status quo recovers with amazing speed. On the other hand, revolutions have succeeded repeatedly without requiring major physical disruptions at all, such as those of Cuba and Iran.

In this sense, the apocalyptic cults and radical militias may actually be closer to the truth than the docile pessimist who fantasizes about getting to leave his office job. The former, at least, understand that collapse is only ever an opportunity for motivated actors whose power survives or even increases after a disaster. But such people are rarely found among society’s malcontents. As history shows, those who benefit from collapse are often already among its heights.