"}If you heard today that a plague was \ncoming that would rapidly kill between 30 and 50% of the general \npopulation, you might reasonably expect this to lead to the collapse of \nsociety. It\u2019s hard to see how obligations and social accounting could \nsurvive such a massive event. Some might even see it as a chance for a \nnew beginning.
But this catastrophe actually \nhappened in the historical record, and when it did, the direct ancestor \nof our own society continued a remarkable level of its day-to-day \nfunctioning. The bibliography of any book about the Black Death in \nEngland is laden with references to tax receipts, court cases, and \nparish death records. Much of what we know about the plague comes from \nrecords generated by the continuous operations of the very institutions \nthat one might expect to completely fall apart in a super-mortality \nevent.
The English law courts sat with only minimal interruptions\n even during the brutal first wave of the Black Death from 1348 to 1349.\n The Court of Common Pleas conducted its full end-of-year term in 1348, \nwhile the Court of King\u2019s Bench sat uninterrupted at York. In 1349, the \nCourt of Common Pleas continued regular operations at Westminster. The \nKing\u2019s Bench operated at Lincoln, remaining \u201csurprisingly busy.\u201d It appears that the courts were forced to adjourn only for May and June of 1349, the very peak of the epidemic. \u00a0 \u00a0
Evidently, the courts had busy \ndockets even as litigants, judges, and attorneys succumbed to the plague\n left and right. In fact, the very pace of the death was likely driving \nmuch of the litigation: property changed hands at an accelerated rate, \nheirs sued each other over their shares of unexpected windfalls, debtors\n died, and creditors disputed over who would seize the silver and \nfurniture.
Arguments, legal nitpicking, and the \ncross-examining of claimants to estates went on as usual, even as the \nwagons of the municipal corpse collectors creaked past the courthouse \nwindows. At the end of the process, the only result was paper in the \nform of writs and orders, bearing the wax seal of the court. The \nsuccessful litigant would have taken these papers away, and traveled \nhome through a surreal scene of fresh graves, shuttered homes, and \npeople wandering the roads proclaiming the end of days. In all \nlikelihood, the winner of the case would himself die later that year or \nin the next spring, and the process would repeat.
What is missing from this grim \npicture is the expected widespread anarchy. If a manor house is still \nstanding in 2022, the current occupant\u2019s chain of title likely traces \nback to orderly inheritance proceedings conducted during the Black \nDeath.
Law and governance did not just \npersist as usual during the Black Death. The power of both the state and\n the courts actively increased in response to the challenge, much as \nthey have during modern disasters. The ancestors of today\u2019s credit \nsecurement processes evolved rapidly\n during this time: \u201cPenal bonds, punitive remedies under detinue of \ncharters, and uses all came into vogue because their utilization \nencouraged more members of the upper orders to stand by their commercial\n obligations.\u201d Records show that by 1352 \u201cthe use of penal bonds \nincreased dramatically, and they were also used to enforce debts.\u201d
The executive function of government \nalso remained largely unimpaired by the Black Death. Between 1348 and \n1349 it was recorded that many laborers, expecting the imminent end of \nthe world, had absconded from their jobs into idleness, or were \ndemanding greatly increased wages to do any work.
In response to this disaster-holiday \nmentality, the Council of Edward III issued the Ordinance of Laborers in\n the June of 1349, which decreed that everyone under age 60 must work, \nand workers may not receive wages higher than pre-plague levels. The \nordinance also imposed price controls on food and prohibited alms for \nable-bodied beggars. By 1351, a strengthened version of this ordinance \nwas being actively enforced through legal prosecutions against \nviolators, and the English state was largely successful in imposing \nmandatory employment, along with wage and price controls, during the \nremainder of the economic crisis. \u00a0
The Black Death did not bring on any \ngreat social reset\u2014in fact, survivors experienced the very opposite. In \nthe chaos of mass death, the state enforced obligations to work and \nfulfill debts with increasing stringency. Eventually, laborers did gain \nfinancially from their increased bargaining power. But this was a slower\n process that took a generation or two to fully make itself felt, with \nno immediate dramatic reordering of society.
There was only one road to escaping \nfinancial and social debts during the Black Death, and it was traveled \nby plague carts carrying bodies\u2026.
It is very difficult to specify any \ndeath toll or infrastructure destruction that would, in itself, make \nfundamental or lasting changes to our systems of governance. Even \nnuclear war may not reach the threshold.
There are a number of counterexamples\n to the persistence of mundane economic life, property rights, trade, \nand governance. One might ask about the fates of East German landlords. \nOr pre-1949 debts in China. What about paper farm deeds in Cuba? What \nabout French Ancien Regime estates after 1790? \u00a0
These counter-examples quite neatly \nanswer the question of what events are actually known to radically \nchange society. The real force that reorders society is always human \naction, driven by political or ideological coordination. Disaster \nbecomes a moment for organized political actors to upset the existing \norder in a given place, either by foreign conquest or by revolution.
Without some human force ready to \nmake use of disaster, neither plague nor destruction are sufficient in \nthemselves to rewrite how society functions. Where these things occur \nwithout a strong existing revolutionary ideology, the status quo \nrecovers with amazing speed. On the other hand, revolutions have \nsucceeded repeatedly without requiring major physical disruptions at \nall, such as those of Cuba and Iran.
In this sense, the apocalyptic cults \nand radical militias may actually be closer to the truth than the docile\n pessimist who fantasizes about getting to leave his office job. The \nformer, at least, understand that collapse is only ever an opportunity \nfor motivated actors whose power survives or even increases after a \ndisaster. But such people are rarely found among society\u2019s malcontents. \nAs history shows, those who benefit from collapse are often already \namong its heights.