The 1430s were characterized by extreme weather conditions, food and fodder shortages, and high mortalities among animals and humans, although the severity of events and their consequences in England have received limited attention. The economic downturn and the depressed customary land market in this decade marked the beginning of the Great Slump, which lasted until at least the 1460s. Evidence is drawn from across England to sketch the anatomy of the crisis, followed by consideration of its impact on tenurial change. Various devices adopted in the 1430s to retain or attract tenants gained traction over the next three decades. Some lords opted to alienate sections of their demesnes permanently into the peasant sector on customary tenure; the practice of leasing customary land diminished; grants of land for money tenure held heritably or for lives now became the dominant form of customary tenure; and the issue of copies of unfree land transfers became widespread. These changes were decisive in preventing any return to direct demesne management and the traditional servile tenures based on labour services and uncertain dues, and created the essential preconditions for the emergence of copyhold tenure.

Historians dispute the nature of medieval English serfdom. For some, it represents one of the most powerful and pervasive systems of serfdom in medieval Europe, highly extractive of peasant surpluses: consequently, only concerted peasant resistance in the century after the Black Death could trigger its dissolution. Others, however, criticize this view for relying too heavily on the legal theory of villeinage and not enough on evidence for its practice on the ground: in reality, serfdom was relatively weak even at its peak and it dissolved rapidly through market forces in the wake of the Black Death. Such incompatible claims can only be resolved through more case studies, preferably focusing on the operation of the lord’s manorial court as the principal medium through which seigneurs enforced their legal powers over serfs. This article presents an empirical study of the manorial court rolls of Bredfield (Suffolk), a middling manor held by a lower status lay landowner. Such lordships were typical of English manorial forms, although they feature infrequently in the current scholarship on serfdom. The study reveals the relative weakness of serfdom on the eve of the Black Death and the chronology and reasons for its subsequent decline.

The responses of labour markets to global pandemics are attracting renewed interest, although the English labour laws in response to the Black Death of 1348/9 – capping wages, imposing annual contracts, and restricting mobility – have a long and established scholarship. The conventional wisdom is that the legislation represented an extension of existing local practices and created common cause among all categories of employer. Yet this view is hard to reconcile with the fact that, despite subsequent revisions, the legislation soon failed. These arguments are tested through original research into how the legislation was actually enforced in a variety of legal tribunals (manorial, borough, and royal). A clear distinction is maintained between public presentments and private litigation, and a robust methodology is pursued to record their absence as well as quantifying their presence. This casts new light on the novelty of the labour laws, the reasons for their failure, and their influence on contract law. The analysis exemplifies the potential for short-term legal responses to infectious diseases to have unintended and unanticipated long-term consequences.

This article critiques the debate over the extent to which labor shortages caused by the Black Death and subsequent epidemics empowered women economically, and whether this had significant implications for overall demographic behavior and long-term economic performance. Some historians have argued that after ca. 1350 women in the North Sea region were drawn into the land and labor markets to a far greater extent than women in other parts of Europe, and in particular into employment as single live-in servants, which led to a rise in the average age of women at first marriage and the proportion of women never marrying. This in turn led to the formation of the European Marriage Pattern (EMP), which is associated with fertility restriction and higher levels of household income. The evidence and arguments underpinning this viewpoint are critically evaluated for England, where by 1600 the EMP was certainly established. The extant sources do not enable us to measure the extent of women's financial gains after the Black Death, or to assess changes in their marital choices. There is no convincing evidence for any rise in the proportion of single female servants in the century after the Black Death or for the existence of the EMP before 1550. Young women did not increase their participation in the land market in order to construct a marriage fund. The article concludes by assessing the possible chronologies of England's transition to the EMP, and by suggesting new lines of enquiry about structural changes in women's work during the sixteenth century.