 Wus i ynog'i roedd Cymru за'n ddynnu ar hynny i ddod, llwyddo i'r wybodaeth sydd eich cyffredinol cymru o ran maen nhw'n rhoi. So mae'n blaen o'r cysylltu arnyn nhw'n gwleidio, ond rwy'n cael ei gweithio'r cyfan yn ddod, ond mae'n gweld ei gweithio'r cysylltu ar y cwrs iawn, ac ei gweithio'r cyffredinol, roedd yn cael cyfreunio'r cyfreunio, yr ysgol iawn ar ddod yn ffynol iawn os yw'r meddwl yn cyflwyd yn ystafell ar y cyflwyd. Mae'r hystod i ddechrau ffawr yn y llai yn rhoi'r cyflwyd. Ond yn y periad yn ein blynyddoedd mor ffynig. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i ffynol iawn i gyd yn y cyflwyd, rydyn ni'n rhyw ymddir yw'r hyd yn rhagorol. Rydyn ni'n meddwl. Ond mae'r hyn yn ysgrifetau mewn ymgyrchu y pandemi 19, maen nhw gweld i'r llai'r oedd, As naturally, and with it bringing in its train, the probably the greatest capitalist crisis, well, Bank of England has said 300 years. That's basically in the history of capitalism. It's naturally got a lot of people looking around for some kind of historical analogy. In order to, you know, we use historical analogies often to try and understand what can we expect. Now, to tell you the truth, there is no historical analogy for this period. But if you had to pick something and what quite a few people have picked, mae'n cael ei ddweud o'r 14 yma oedd yng Nghymru, efo'r gwybod yma, yng nghymru yn ei ddweud, ac mae'r rhwflosnus, sy'n ddweud? Mae'r ymdau arall, a fydd yn ymlaen â'r ddweud. Felly mae'n ymweld i'r teimlo i gael y ddweud. Felly mae'r mwythbeth o'r ddweud. Mae'n eu cynnig, mae'n ddweud i gael y ddweud. Mae'n ddweud i gael eu ddweud, ac mae'n ddweud i'r ddweud, Mae'n dechrau i chi'n gweld i'r defnyddio arall yn y rhan o gyfweld a'u gweld i'r Coronavirus. Felly mae'n chael oedden nhw'n chael i'n ei gweithio o'r dipyn o ddiolethaeth. Mae'n dweud bod y rhan o'r黃fyrn amser yn ddechrau'r rhan o'r cyfweld i'r rhan o'r rhan o'r eich cyfweld. Mae'r dweud y dyfodol yn ymlaen iawn i'ch gael ei wneud am y bobl yn y busbun yng Nghymru. Ie, mae'r ddigon yn cael ei ddweud fel yw eich gael rhai oedd y gwbl mewn cyffredinol. O'ch yn rhaid fyddi'r gweithio'r teimlo ar hyn o'i ddau, mae'r ddweud ei ddweud. Ond mae'n ei ddweud ond oherwydd ddim yn y bwrdd ffwyd â'r gyfer yr unig, ond mae'n gweithio'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r cyfan yma. Mae'r articul yn yr FFT rwy'n ddydd yn bwysig, ernyn a'r defnyddio blwysig yn y ddweud yn dweud. Mae'r ddweud yn dweud yn dweud yn dweud, y ddweud yn y ddweud yn ddweud, a'r adegau ffondol yn ddweud yn y dioloredd, dwi'n ddullteniol iddo i'r ofertynig ei bod fynd yn yr ysgrifennu gwirdd. Felly mae'r gweithio o'r cyfnod i'r dweud, a'r cyfnod i'r ysgrifennu gwirionedd. A gyd wedi eu bod i'n ffraith ff Strawfyrdd yw cael yw'r gweithio? Byddai'n gweithio iawn i gyd ac mor ychydig i chi'r gwaith ar-egle i gweithio'r ysgrif hon. Felly mae chi'n iawn, roedd am y dweud ni mai yw'r yn fflaen i ddweud, o'r cyfrifiodd fel y ddweud, ─ maen nhw ar y cyfrifiodd, oes o'r cyfrifiodd, oherwydd o'r cyfrifiodd y cyfrifiodd ac oedd. Mae'r ddweud yn gweithi mike am dda hynny o Ieyn yr colliad oedd y Ddweud The first time was in the fifth century AD, it was called the plague of Justinian, because Justinian, who was the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, was in the process of reconquering the fallen western Roman Empire, and during that time, his troops, and basically the whole of Europe, got a plague, they think it came from Africa, which wiped out up to half the population, it's very difficult to know. And this kind of, if you like the cemented permanent demise of the Roman Empire in the west, there was no reconquest of the west after that, but also it accelerated the decline of the Eastern Empire and played a role, I don't think it played the decisive role, but it played a role in the capture of much of the Eastern Empire by the Arabs in the seventh century. In the words it helped shape Europe in that period, and also played a role in the European Dark Ages, going even further back, I don't have time to go into detail, but it becomes difficult to say with certainty, but some people think that plague, not necessarily the same plague, but plague and pestilence played some kind of a role in the Bronze Age collapse. That's at the end of the second millennium BC, so we're talking about what would that be, about 3 million over 3,000 years ago, sorry. Now what we see from this is there seem to be in history a number of points at which it's almost like the four horsemen of the apocalypse appear, pestilence, war, famine and death, and they seem to ride out almost calling time on the existing social order. And to many of the time in these different periods in history, especially during the Black Death, we have records of people saying exactly this, it seemed as if the world itself was ending. And to be perfectly honest, I think that's quite, if you lived through the Black Death at the time I would not be surprised if you and I felt that as well. What we know with the advantage of historical hindsight is that the world was not ending, but rather a given social system, the old world order, which was no longer capable of further development. It was leading humanity into a deep crisis and in some ways the plague was an expression of that, if you like. And in each case, around the corner in historical terms, not necessarily immediately, was a whole new period, a different social order and a whole new chapter, if you like, of the development of human society. And this makes the Black Death very much worthy of our attention and our consideration as revolutionaries fighting for a new world today. So the questions I want to try to ask in this introduction are what was the Black Death, what impact did it have on society at the time, and what lessons can we draw from this today. But before I start on what was the Black Death, I think in order to understand its impact on society, we ought to talk about what society was like at the time. And a very common mistake people tend to make when they look at the past, is that they cast an image of the present day, which they assume to have certain permanent characteristic on to whatever period they're looking at. Excuse me, and assume the same relations and classes that they effectively assume that capitalism has always existed in effect. You can call it, if you like, the Flintstones effect, where no matter how far you go back in the past, you always have this slightly cartoonish view that everyone was living more or less the same way, but with fur clothes or, you know, stone wheels, cars, those kind of things. Now, one example of this, you know, that's maybe a particularly cartoonish, a comical example, but one example of this is actually a recent article on the BBC website about the Black Death, which was including the title, The Black Death caused the rich to get richer. During a parallel with what's happened under this pandemic, which is certainly true, talking about how merchants and bankers in short the bourgeoisie of the time or part of the bourgeoisie became more wealthy in this period, or it neglects and it has a kind of pessimistic view that kind of it's always the case. The problem with this attitude, this approach, is it ignores the vast majority of the population, ignores about 90% of the population at the time, in England it was about 90%, who did not live in the towns, were not bourgeois, and lived under a completely different set of social relations which dominated society, namely feudal relations. As a matter of fact, you might, you did have rich merchants in medieval society, but the ruling class of the time was not the merchants, it was not the bankers. The industrial bourgeoisie, the kind of the captains of industry, the factory owners, didn't even exist. The closest thing to an industrial bourgeoisie you had in the 14th century were the craftsmen of the guilds who lived and worked in the cities, the predecessors if you like of the modern bourgeoisie. They were certainly not a ruling class, they were oppressed even within their own cities by the wealthier merchants. Banking was, it was developing, you know, depending on different places, but it was, compared to today, hardly developed at all, it was still in relatively primitive stage of development. The merchants were probably the most powerful and influential of the bourgeoisie, but even then, even they were in a relatively early stage in their development, you know, we're not talking about the days of the East India Company or anything like that. I think in the 14th century you start to have the merchant adventurers, but that's really just the beginning of it. So the main unit in society in short was not the town, certainly wasn't the factory which didn't exist, although the towns were growing and, you know, were playing an increasingly important role in society, but rather than the town it was the manor, the feudal manor. Now what the manor was, it was based in the countryside, as was the bulk of the population, and you could describe it essentially as a village really, as a farming community if you like, where the lord of the manor owns basically all of the land. But a certain quantity of that land is parceled out to the residents of that manor, peasants who live off the land, who produce their own subsistence on whatever plots, you know, of larger or smaller size. So in return for being able to live on the Lord's land and work the Lord's land, they have to pay some form of rent effectively, they have to pay up the surplus of the Lord, but in addition to that, they also had to provide forced labour services on the Lord's domain. Basically, this was the part of the Lord's land that he held, rather than parceling it out and giving it to the people, he held on to it, but of course he didn't work it himself, rather he got peasants to work on it for him. In addition to that you also had things like boon work, more kind of short work, short term demands on the peasants' land. This was all unpaid by the way. This was all basically the unpaid labour of the existing kind of exploited class. And then in addition to that you would also other kind of impositions like having to pay the Lord to use his mill and so on to grind your corn. Now, what comes from this is actually the oppressed exploited class in society was not the working class as we see it. In reality, you did have wage workers, but those wage workers tended to own, you know, for example, a cottage, a small plot of land, or they might be an artisan from the towns. It's not really the propertyless proletariat that we see today. The basic kind of exploited class in society were called serfs. That came from the Latin, it was a French version of the Latin for slave service. And these serfs were the peasants I described, who basically lived on the Lord's land in return for rent and labour services. Now, by the 14th century, in the past, in addition to these kind of like brute force labour services, forced labour, you also had the payment of rent in kind. So that means that your produce, part of your produce would go up to the Lord. Now, in the 14th century, you'd started to have the introduction of money rent, which would play quite an important role in the development of capitalism. This is still relatively new development. So what comes from this, an important point I'd like to stress is the foundation of the economy was completely different to capitalism today. It was not comparable to capitalism today. You can see elements of what would become capitalism. The foundation of the economy was not this market of commodities, which we see today, and I've seen throughout the history of capitalism. Instead, it was production, particularly on the land, for use, for immediate use. And the transfer of wealth was not in the form of the service, did not sell their labour power as a commodity on a labour market or anything like that. They were effectively in a more or less personal relationship of domination, which stemmed from the production for use. Now, this meant that the ruling class was not the merchants and bankers of today. It was the military aristocracy, the lords and nobles and the church, which was also a major landowner in the medieval period. Now, together, the ones who fight and the ones who pray, the kind of the two top estate, if you like, in feudal society, they own the bulk of the most important means of production at the time, the land and the best land. And then you had also common land, which was shared in common, accessible in common at that time. Now, the king was effectively just another one of these lords. You don't have the absolutist period at this time, although the foundations have been laid for it. Instead, what you have was primus inter paris bingship, and that means the first among equals. A good example of that is that, yes, the king had certain powers and was kind of tasked with the protection of the general interest of all the nobles, all the barons. But he also had a number of limitations, which you can see in Magna Carta. It's quite interesting that people see this as kind of a constitutional democratic doctrine and the great bulk of it is the feudal nobility stressing the limits on the king's power in relation to them, necessarily in relation to the masses that effectively left them free to exploit and dominate their serfs in the masses of the country with an even greater free reign. So this was kind of a grief picture of the feudal system at the time, which had grown up out of the dark ages, out of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the kind of German invasions and migrations, which are kind of set a new foundation really for society. And looking back, it may seem kind of the manor system and serfdom, feudalism basically. It may strike you as perhaps barbaric, certainly less efficient and productive than capitalist production, and liberals often make great pay out of this. I mean, we certainly don't defend feudalism, but often liberal defenders of capitalism have tended to stress how progressive it is relative to feudalism. Whenever they're challenged about how progressive it is relative to, you know, future mode of production, they kind of come unstuck. But it's important to remember that all social systems that arise in history, they don't arise as just a sorry accident. And they don't arise as just a conspiracy of a few great men or strong men who somehow managed to employ an immoral or irrational system on the rest of society. All social systems, however barbaric they may appear in hindsight, they arise because they further, in some way, the development of the productive forces, the capacity of humanity to meet its ends through its constant interaction with nature, perhaps is one way to put it, productivity of labour, essentially. Now, this of the feudal system and the manner actually did play that role. Rising out of the dark ages, Engels actually comments in his masterpiece, The Origin of the Family, Private Property in the State. And yet progress was made during these 400 years. The social classes that spanning from the collapse of the Roman Empire up to the 9th century. The social classes of the 9th century AD had been formed not in the rottenness of a decaying civilization, but in the birth pangs of a new civilization. The Germans had in fact given Europe new life and therefore the breakup of the states in the Germanic period ended not in the subjugation by Norsemen and Saracens in the further development of the system of benefits and protection into feudalism. And in such an enormous increase of the population that scarcely two centuries later, the severe bloodletting of the Crusades was born without injury. And to give a statistic that is estimated that between the 10th and 13th centuries, population of Europe roughly trebled to around 80 million people. That's the highest it has been since the height of the Roman Empire. They actually talk, they use an expression, they call it the medieval boom. And in this context, you not only have a growth of population, you have the clearing virgin land which had never been cultivated. So you have an expansion of the production as well as the population. In England you have in the Anglo-Saxon period the use of the greater use of heavy plows and so on. The development of the productive forces, you might say relatively limited, but developed nonetheless. And on the basis of this medieval boom, you actually also have the re-emergence of trade, arguably on an even high level, into connections with Asia again and with the Middle East that had been lost for a period and the growth along with this, the growth of towns. The growth of towns weren't just the product of a passive kind of growth of the economy. The growth of towns also were the product of class struggle because as kind of towns started to re-emerge, if you like, you also have serfs struggling for their freedom against the lords. And this was the poor class struggle, the feudal period struggle between serfs and lords for greater freedoms from forced labour, low rents and so on. You also had a phenomenon of serfs actually fleeing their estates, manners, and coming to the cities. There was a German expression that city air makes you free because after a year of dwelling in the city, the Lord actually lost his right to claim your person. And so this is the kind of picture, if you like, that we have of society in the feudal period. It's important to stress, I've talked about the kind of aggressive element of feudalism, but it's also worth pointing out, as Marx explained, from forms of development of the productive forces, at any given set of relations eventually turn into their fetters, it turns into its opposite, and from then begins an era of social revolution. And you see this, this point is reached by the end of the 13th century, after which the feudal system enters into irreversible decline. So by about 1250, roughly speaking, the expansion of land that I, you know, arable land that I talked about earlier, that effectively come to an end in reached its limits. And this wasn't simply a question of there was no more land to cultivate. The question was under the existing set of social relations, the domination by the laws, for example, could there be any further development. We see examples of this, of course, under capitalism and its inability to combat things like climate change. Now the serfs or even small holding peasants who own their own lands and weren't unfree, they had neither the means nor really the incentive to revolutionise productivity on the land. Or to cultivate marginal land, which was becoming increasingly difficult to cultivate. And the laws weren't interested in developing production at all. What they were interested in their material interest was obtaining the greatest possible proportion of the existing surplus product from the greatest number of peasants. The result of this was as the system reaches its limits, you have an increasing poverty amongst the masses, because you've got the further division of land into smaller and smaller holdings, division between the sons of the peasants. But even that didn't allow, even further division of the land into smaller and smaller holdings didn't allow the heirs to have the access to the land that they needed. Some might have gone to the cities, but even the cities were actually struggling to obtain as much food as they needed. Now the historian Robert Godfried in his book on the Black Death actually makes, I think, an incisive comment. He says, in the past, the peasant had been guaranteed the right, so to speak, to be a peasant. After 1250, this was becoming more and more difficult. The old manorial system was crumbling, and the lords who seem now to be doing little of real benefit were getting richer. Now what does that sound like? That also reminds me of something Marx and Engels write in the Communist Manifesto that in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to the oppressed class to continue its slavish existence. He goes, and here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It's unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to the slave within his slavery. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie. In other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. Now in short, by the 14th century, the existence of the feudal system was no longer compatible with society, with the needs of society. And this fact was expressed before the Black Death, it was expressed even with a wave of famines that more than decimated Europe from the early 14th century onwards, up to about 1325. That wave of famines is thought to have killed as much as the highest decimation, as much as a quarter of the European population. This is before the Black Death. What we see is a deep social crisis that was literally creating a hell on earth. And so into this context steps, the plague known as the Black Death. Now what was this plague? The plague was caused by a specific bacterium, eosinia pestis, it's called. This is thought to, it lives inside the bellies of fleas. And there are certain, what they call, inveterate foci, but basically certain, if you like, base locations where the fleas live on certain rodents are carried about. And some of these, they dwell in parts of Africa and parts of Asia, even today actually, this bacterium can be found in parts of Mongolia and China. Actually recently this year you might have seen in the news there was a plague warning in Mongolia. That's the same plague as the Black Death basically, or the same bacterium. And on what we call the Black Death was actually three different strains of this bacterium. The most famous was called bubonic plague. It was called that because of the hideous black bubos, the round kind of saws, if you like, that would form on the lymph node. Basically the lymph nodes of the victim would swell and turn black, I think because of blood. Now 60% of the people who contracted this awful disease died as a result. So a much higher death rate than COVID-19. Even deadlier actually caused by the same bacterium was the pneumonic plague. This was passed in the air and basically if it got into the lungs, then it was extremely fatal, grew fatal in at least 95% of cases. And then septicemic plague, which was when the bacteria actually got into the blood supply in great quantities. That was much less common, much more rare, but it was always fatal. So what we see here is a really deadly hideous plague that struck society. Now it emerged, it's thought to emerge, there's still a debate on this, but it's thought to emerge out of the Gobi desert in the 1320s. Now something that has to be remembered about this period is at this time, most of Asia was united, maybe united is overstating it, it was ruled in one form or another by the Mongol Empire, part of the Mongol Empire. And it's thought by historians that I guess one of the ironies of history that the bringing together of the Asian continent and Eurasian landmass by Mongol horsemen. Of course they were very famous horsemen and trade caravans actually meant that the plague was able to spread much further and faster. And of course if it hadn't been there, it's ironic that it's through trade routes in particular this plague spread. Now this is debated, but many historians believe that the plague hit China in about the 1330s and killed up to a quarter of the population. But it seems also that a plague, possibly this one struck China again in the 1350s. Now what we do know, what is less debatable is that eventually the plague reaches parts of Central Asia in 1339 and it reached the Crimea on the post of the Black Sea by 1345. Now what's important about this place, the Crimea, it was a very important stop in the trade routes that spanned Asia. You had land routes which went to Crimea and the Black Sea, you also trade routes that came to the Persian Gulf, and their Arab and European traders would take goods to the European continent places like North Africa. And this is exactly what happened. And it's one of the coincidences of history, sorry, that the first part of Europe to be hit by the plague was as with COVID-19, it was Italy. Now at this time, the merchants of Italy were, Italy was the centre of Mediterranean trade, the merchants of Italy, place like Venice, Genoa, they dominated, Pisa as well, they dominated trade in the Mediterranean. And in this case it was, it's thought to have been Genoese merchants, who from their kind of trade post in a place called Kaffa. They somehow managed to get the plague in their holes, most likely it's thought to have been rats rodents who ran onto the holes, ran into the holes of the ships, which is a very common occurrence of course. And then brought it home to Italy, the rest of Europe, places like Constantinople in now Istanbul in Turkey, and of course the Arab world in the Middle East and North Africa. It was actually from Italy that all these places were hit that people think. And again, it's interesting to notice through trade routes. Actually, despite the fact that it came to the Crimea, Russia wasn't struck until much later through Europe. The plague didn't cross across the steps, it went through human trade routes. And actually it was the most well connected trade centres that were worst hit. Italy is a great example. East Anglia in England was the worst hit part of the whole of England. It lost up to 50% of its population because it had so many trade links with other parts of Northern Europe. But anyway, I have to move on in the interest of time. Now, I can't give you a list of all the devastation the plague wrought. As you can imagine, that would basically be an extremely long and also extremely bleak and depressing introduction. But I can give you some examples, some of the most striking examples. Cairo was one of the largest, if not the largest city in the world. At that time, it had a population of 500,000, which was more than five times anything. In fact, probably more than 10 times anything in England at that time, larger than any Christian city. The population of that city was reduced by 200,000 by the plague. So what we're talking about, I think that's more than a third of the population brought down by the plague. Observers at the time, sorry, talked about mass burials. People lying unburied in the streets, in Damascus, also part of the Muslim world. At the peak of the plague, apparently the death rate was 2,000 a day. Roughly a third of the population in the Arab world was killed by the plague. In towns it was even greater, it was up to 50%. Now, the Arab historian and famous polymath Ibn Khaldun, if you forgive the pronunciation, he witnessed the plague, he lived through it, he actually lost his parents to it. He makes a very insightful remark in his great work on history of the Muqadima. He said, civilization in both the east and the west was visited by a destructive plague, which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and waste signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. Another chronicler in the Italian city of Siena, and the Italian cities never really recovered from this episode, to be honest. Angola Ditora, who lost five of his children to the plague, he wrote, they died by their hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered with earth, and as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug, and so many died that all believed it was the end of the world. There was the sense that, as I mentioned earlier, that the world itself was ending. Now, this picture that I've drawn was not limited to Italy and the Arab civilization, it was universal basically across the whole of Europe. Some places were worse than others, but wherever was hit was met with equal or almost equal devastation. Now, people did, they did try to resist this plague, like quarantines were imposed in places, the problem is, a quarantine restricts the movement of people, it doesn't necessarily restrict the movement of rodents and fleas, and so really, even population density didn't seem to have that much of an effect, plague just cut its way through the population. Also, it's worth pointing out that the medical profession at that time, I mean it wasn't really a medical profession, to be perfectly honest, it was dominated by the clergy, and it was effectively the analysis of ancient texts. Now, those ancient texts may have had some value, but there was not really much of a scientific method, and so the best people could come up with was things like regular washing, which is logical, but sadly in relation to this plague, it was not sufficient. And I want to talk a little bit about the effect that that hasn't had on consciousness, first of all. You can imagine the kind of horror and despair that people met this plague with. I mean it probably seemed like the vengeance of a wrathful, the wrath, sorry, of a vengeful God. It seemed like something out of the book of revelations, and many people kind of reacted to it as such. One quite important effect on consciousness is it massively discredited the existing religious authorities at the time, and by religious authorities I mean the dominant ideological authority in the whole of society. First of all, the medical profession was attached to the church, so they didn't get a very good reputation, but also even in spiritual matters, you had instances of first of all, there were groups in the church not having any explanation for this, which called into question their kind of link to the Almighty, but also you had priests on the ground actually fleeing. Now I can understand why they might want to do that, but at the same time that left many people in these communities without their last rights, without any kind of spiritual guidance, and so there was a great deal of resistance, not towards Christianity or Catholicism, or the religion as a whole, but rather towards the religious establishment. And this expressed itself in many interesting ways. One way it expressed itself is in a cult of new saints, who effectively were often these were kind of ordinary people who've become famous in the plague for trying to fight the plague, and actually sometimes against the resistance of the church authorities, they were made saints. Now the best example of this is Saint-Roc, or Saint Saint-Roc in France or Saint-Rocco in Italy. This was a real person, I guess. An ordinary person in Montpellier, I think, who actually fought the plague, I guess you could see him as a bit of a Florence Nightingale figure, and at the insistence of the masses later on, he was made into basically the patron saint of plague victims, and if you ever see any Renaissance art, and you see a guy with an arrow in his leg, or somewhere part of his body, that's usually depicting Saint-Roc. But aside from that, you also had this phenomenon of the flagellant sects. Now these were quite large bands of sometimes even hundreds of people who would roam for 33 and a third days, which is symbolising the years of Christ's time on earth. They turn up in a town, they would strip themselves down, and they would whip themselves, they would flagellate themselves, in penansfer humanity's sins, in an appeal to God to basically stop the devastation of the plague. And what's interesting is that these people were actually, they weren't seen as nut-paces or anything like that, but they were welcomed by the local population at least at first, because they were seen as actually trying to do something, whereas the church was seen as discredited, these people were actually trying to establish some kind of direct line to God and tackle the plague. And so actually they were welcomed with open arms. In some ways it's not necessarily the same, but it echoes in my view the rise of what you might call conspiracy theories today that the establishment and the authorities, I think in my lifetime at least, have never been so discredited. People are seeing this devastation, they're seeing things like lockdowns, things they've never seen, and so they're talking about, oh, it's all hoax or they're using it, it was man-made. People don't really trust the government and the rules it puts forward, which I think also speaks to the social crisis under capitalism, and possibly in the 14th century as well. But this movement eventually began to split along class lines, because the poorer ranks of the flagellate sect, if you like, they actually started talking about the resurrection, and they started talking about things like Frederick Barbarossa, former German Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor, coming back to life and forcing the rich to marry the poor. You can see a class element in that, can't you? And then of course Christ would return to the earth and you would have the resurrection basically. Now those kinds of demands were not very attractive to the rich, you were supposed to be forced to marry the poor, so that you had nobles who were originally involved dropping out, you had respectable bourgeois, well-to-do peasants, and eventually what was left was kind of the most destitute and have nots of society. Eventually, having been initially welcomed, these movements were crushed by the state. One other product of the despair of this period, perhaps the most horrific product of the despair of this period of all, in fact, almost certainly, was the rise of vicious pogroms against the Jewish population in the towns. They were often accused of poisoning the wells, which was a completely bonkers claim, but they were thought to have been responsible for the plague, at least in some towns, and they were massacred in their thousands. Hundreds of communities of Jews were simply wiped out or forced to flee. What's interesting is actually the feudal authorities tried to dispel these rumours, and the people who seemed to be pushing this in the most part were themselves the Mark merchants, there's one episode in Strasbourg where before the plague even hit, the elements in the towns were calling for the Jews to basically be rounded up and killed to save the town as they saw it. The local town council didn't want to do it, and the town councils were actually replaced under the influence of the rich merchants by anti-Semitic councillors who were going to carry out, and 2,000 Jews died as a result. It is an interesting aspect to this that it seemed to be the bourgeois leading this, but that's really an aside. The result of that was on top of the deaths of thousands of Jews, on top of the deaths from the plague, is that a great bulk of the Jewish community in north Europe moved east, where they were welcomed by at least in Kazimir III in Poland. Of course this would set the scene for the large population of Jewish people that existed in Eastern Europe in the 20th century, and of course that kind of has a tragic ring to it because of that historic link you might see to the Holocaust of course, and the attacks on the Jews in Eastern Europe at that time. But another, aside from the psychological impacts of the crisis, you also have an economic crisis felt by all of course, but particularly by the ruling class. This instigates a crisis for the ruling class. First of all production stopped, not in this case because of a lockdown, but because of the deaths of the workers. There were not enough people to do the work, so the Lord's lands and the estates were largely empty at times. Production in the Cornish tin mines, for example, ground to a halt, the mills were silent. It seemed basically like production was a hold and been brought to a stand still. And this caused, as you can imagine, this caused hardship for everybody, but actually it struck the ruling class more than anyone else. You can see this in particular in England. Now in England the plague reached our shores in September of 1348. It arrived in a place called Morcom Regis, or Midcom Regis I think, in Dorset, from wine merchants from Bourget and Bourdieu, which was actually under English control at the time. Now it then spread to the rest of the country. And the drop in population and the inability of the landowners to find workers, it meant a couple of things. It meant one thing, the rents fell, because you didn't have the same demand if you like, the same population pressure on the land. It also meant that wages for day labourers and agricultural labourers actually rose. Now these aren't wage workers in the modern working class sense. These are effectively peasants who also worked on the side for a wage. But because they effectively had more bargaining power, if you were a church estate or a feudal landlord, you were actually having to pay people more to produce a product that was worth less, that you could get a lower price for. In other words, they would get hit at both ends. And to give one example, a place called Cookson Manor, this is near Oxford, and it was actually run and owned by Merton College Oxford. The profit, so to speak, of the manor, fell from an average of £40 per year per year. That's in the money then, so that was a lot of money. £40 was a lot of money in those days, up to £1349. And then by 1354, which was the first year that any profits were recorded at all in our estate since the arrival of the Black Death, they were £11. So they were still making some profit in the 1350s, but it had been reduced to about a quarter of its former size. That's a pretty unhappy situation for the feudal ruling class. It's estimated that the aristocracy as a whole, its income fell by 20%, more than 20% between 3047 and 1353. It reminds me a little bit of the collapse in GDP that we're seeing. Of course, the ruling class, both then as now, will make sure that the burden of that is placed firmly on the shoulders of the masses, but we'll come onto that. This actually led to a collapse, really, the manorial system. Many landlords in the Church of States actually stopped cultivating their own domain, which will remember as the land that they directly cultivated, and started parceling it out and giving away to tenants for some kind of rent, including money rent. Now, so this set the stage for what was referred to by some as a golden age for the labourers because they had high wages, because they had more bargaining power. At that books and manner that I mentioned, Plowman was paid 10 shillings six months in 1350, but for the same amount of work, he would have only been paid two shillings in 1347. In a piece called Piers Plowman, William Langland notes that beggars were demanding, I mean, this could be fictional, but beggars were demanding white bread and milk, and lowly day labourers enjoyed quite like this, enjoyed lunches of meat pies and golden ale. I think that's better than the lunch of most workers today. In addition to the fact they were asking and getting higher wages, but this wasn't just a kind of good, a better time for the labourers. The labourers themselves had more mobility and could actually kind of resist serfdom on a scale never seen before. In fact, actually, serfdom had become impossible, really. It had become absurd because of the shift in relations. Here we come to a very, very important point. I must add actually, serfdom had been on the decline already. This, if you like, the plague expressed and accelerated a deep underlying change in society that had been existing under the surface for some time. Harvey Set mentioned something in his introduction that I found very interesting. He talked about the objective basis for change, but he also expressed there needs to be a subjective element in that. History doesn't just passively work without our intervention. You see this in this period in the number of revolts, revolutionary movements, you could say, from peasants and also press layers in the towns in the wake of the Black Death. What you see basically is a great example of the feudal class struggle, which set the stage for actually the rise of capitalism in a way. As you can probably imagine, the ruling class weren't very happy about all this loss of income and profits and these higher wages. They, through their state, actually sought to restore the old normality and effectively repress the workers, put them back in their box, if you like. In 1349, in England, the King Edward III, he actually introduced a statute of labour designed to put a maximum wage in place, not a minimum wage like we're used to, a maximum wage that actually didn't work because the economic forces were just too powerful. He had a series of maximum acts basically throughout this period. The Church actually complained. The Archbishop of Canterbury even wrote a text attacking people who dared to charge extra for regular services. What you've got is effectively a united front of the landowners against the masses that had actually, after the horror and devastation of the plague, actually starting to get a better deal. Now, this objective clash of interests subjectively expressed itself in consciousness. There was a rabid hatred of each other between the peasants and the lords. In France, this was particularly extreme, actually. The nobles had nothing but contempt. They despised the peasantry and they saw it. They hated the fact that the peasants were actually making more demands and kind of putting on airs in their view. There was a common phrase at the time, like a parable, I guess. Smite a villain, that was another word for a serf. Smite a villain and he will bless you. Bless a villain and he will smite you. The French knights also, they came out with this proverb. Now, from the despior villain, which was addressed to a noble audience, I'd like to quote it extensively. It says, tell me, Lord, if you please, by what right or title does a villain eat beef? God suffers from it and I too. But they are sorry lot those villains who eat fat goose. Should they eat fish rather than let them eat thistles and briars, thorns and straws and hay on Sundays and pea pods on weekdays? Yet each day they are full and drunk on the best wines and in fine clothes. Should they eat meat rather they should chew grass on the heath with horn cattle and go naked on all fours. So you've got class hatred there, class contempt. And don't worry, it wasn't all one way. The peasants saw the knights and the landlords as nothing but brigands, robbers. You basically parasites who existed on the production of the people, they were right. Now, this wasn't just a war of words. Eventually this conflict, this class conflict broke out into extremely violent scenes. And one example of that in France is the Jacquerie, which arose in 1358. Now the word Jacquerie, it comes from the name that the nobles gave for a peasant of a Jacques. A Jacques was kind of like a leather jerkin that they wore to battle because they couldn't afford armour. In other words, it was putting them down. Jacquerie was basically a peasant uprising. And this took place in the same valley, which is basically the heart of France, one of the most important and wealthy parts of the kingdom. It was a mass uprising in which, to put it bluntly, the peasants rose up and murdered their lords. They murdered the knights and burnt down their castles. It was an expression of class hatred in basically the purest way you can imagine. Of course, the kind of hypocritical writers on the part of the nobles at the time described them as cannibals. They thought this is the worst thing possible. It's important to remember that this, like any slave uprising basically, was a long time coming. And it was effectively a result and a response to the centuries-long oppression and violence committed against the peasants by the knights. So I wouldn't feel too sorry for them just to add that. One thing that I'd like to mention very quickly, one interesting phenomenon here is that the leader of the Jacquerie, the first one anyway, was actually a bourgeois. He was a draper, if I remember correctly, from Paris. His name was Etienne Marcell. He was a draper. And he actually led the movement. So you've got already in quite a primitive form the alliance between the bourgeois in the towns, at least the lower ranks of the bourgeois, and the peasantry. The reason I bring this up is because precisely that phenomenon, in a more developed form, characterised the French Revolution. The French Revolution was more than just a Jacquerie, but it would not have succeeded without a mass uprising in the peasantry all over the cities, led, of course, by the radical revolutionary bourgeoisie. At this time, though, in the 14th century, we're not quite at that stage yet, in fact, quite far off. And actually, Etienne Marcell was murdered by the peasant masses. He lost control, basically. He was murdered, and after that the bourgeoisie kind of retreats from the scene. Eventually, the peasants are crushed in blood, as you can imagine, by the knights. But this kind of set the stage for many other peasant rebellions, both in France and across Europe. You actually also have an uprising of, you might call them the proto-working class called the chompy in Florence. Now, these were textile workers. They were artisans, but they worked under the bigger merchants. So we've got something, you know, these are the beginnings of capitalist production in the towns. They were excluded from the political system in the city. And not only that, although wages were rising, they were being crippled by inflation, because actually you had a two-tier currency at that time. The rich used Florence, which was relatively stable, but the workers just used pennies, which was hit by inflation. In other words, standard of living was actually being eroded, and at the same time they were divorced from political control within their own city. What happened was an uprising, which occupied and even burnt down the manners of the rich. In return, they won political representation and the right to form their own guilds. What I find interesting about this is this is a bit of a proto-workers movement, but it's taking quite bourgeois forms. They basically want the same rights as the rest of the bourgeoisie in the towns. It actually reminds me, again, it's almost like a primitive foretaste of the demands of Peterloo and the Chartists. The working class were calling for the same democratic rights of the middle class, but they were doing it with their own class content. So in some ways, you've got kind of the embryo, if you like, of the workers movement which we study today. And finally, about time to go into this in detail, in my opinion, perhaps the most inspiring and most important of all of these is the peasant revolt in England in 1381. Now, the ruling class, I mentioned the maximum wage act. The ruling class at that time, they effectively wanted to put the peasant back in their box. They wanted to reintroduce serfdom, and one way in which they did that was by the poll tax, basically. The poll tax was a levy that was brought in a number of times, and it was just a sum of money effectively that every single, I think, head of family, not necessarily any individual if I remember right, had to pay to the state. I guess I could attack, similar to that poll tax. Now, this was used several times. It was loathed by the peasants and in 1381, peasants in Essex refused to pay, which sparked off the peasants' revolt, which was led by a wealthy peasant called Wattaila. He led an army to London. This similar revolt therefore then broke out across the kingdom. It wasn't just in Essex, even heading north, I think, up to Lincoln. Wattaila led an army to London, declaring kill all lawyers and servants of the king. You had this priest, who was another leading figure called John Bohr, who actually called for everything to be common. He said that we may all be united together and that the lords be no greater masters than we be. This again, this is the kind of peasant communism that you see in the diggers and kind of has an echo in the communist movement today. It's part of our heritage, I would say. I don't really have time to talk about that in any more detail. But they managed to take London. How did they take London? The masses in the towns, the bourgeois, the poorer level of the bourgeois in London, they actually lowered the bridge in Southwark, they lowered London Bridge and let them in. Again, we're seeing this kind of primitive alliance between the bourgeois and the peasants. They took the Tower of London, they beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury, and long story short, they actually succeeded in getting the king to cede to their demands. Once they were going home, the king, as is always the case, renaigd on his demands and he murdered them in Coldwood and then you have a wave of repression. But what's important to note is that serfdom continued to decline. There was not really a return of serfdom in England and what emerges after this. The poll tax was never brought in again except for, I suppose, the United States Actors attempt, which was equally disastrous. In the more long term, the period after the peasant revolt is, as I said, known as the golden age of the labourers. You actually have, the period of the 15th century is a period of relatively well-to-do, independent freehold, property-owning peasant, not a serf, and a period of continued decline of the nobility, who continued to exhaust themselves in the wars of the roses. Now I have to finish up. But what comes later is, I'm sorry to say that the lords did get their revenge later on, but on a different basis. The feudal nobility had been basically hollowed out. They'd had to sell much of their lands to not only peasants, but also to more merchant types. Who were much more interested in producing for the market, producing wool, for example, than the chivalry and wars of the old nobility. Eventually this new nobility would, if you like, get revenge on the peasants. Not by forcing them into serfdom, though. This is interesting. But actually by clearing them off their own land, enclosing the common land, expanding their own lands in order to basically create what we now recognise as capitalist agriculture. That Marx actually identifies that it's only after the end of serfdom that you get the beginnings of capitalism and the culmination of this process, the rise of capitalism, it occurs with what you might call agrarian capitalism, with the clearings and enclosures and the creation of capitalist farmers on the one hand. Also a massive impoverished, property-less corpus who would eventually be recruited into the mills and factories of the industrial revolution. In other words, these fundamental classes of the capitalists and the proletariat come into being in the 16th century out of the aftermath of the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt. Now, just to finish up, what does this tell us a bit more broadly about history? Well, you know, in terms of the question of, can we say that all of these processes that I just mentioned were caused by the Black Death, the Black Death on its own change society? I'd have to say not. I mean, the crisis of feudalism that I described exists, it predates the Black Death. But that doesn't mean the Black Death doesn't matter, that everything just continued in the same pace or in the same way. You could say that the Black Death similar to the COVID-19 pandemic is like some great external shock, which this great accident, which expresses and accelerates, intensifies the necessary development under the surface. So in the sense that the pandemic did change society, and it is changing society today, but not on its own strength. It's because of the relations and changes that were happening under the surface already. Now, what does it tell us for today? I think it tells us a lot of things for today. I'd be interested to hear what people have to say in the discussion. But one thing I'd say we should keep an eye out for is that after the Black Death society was never the same again. And one thing that the ruling class tried to do was reimpose the old way of living. Now, I'm not saying that the period after this is going to be the golden age of the labourers. Already, you've got people shifting consciousness, people saying, well, they could support our jobs during the lockdown. Why can't they do it now? Why can't they provide preschool meals? And already the Tories are actually trying to stick the boots in so that workers don't get big ideas effectively to reinstate normality. In the 14th century, that led to the peasant revolt. And I can guarantee you, I'll bet my bottom dollar, that the attacks going on against the working class for now, workers may be shell shot by the pandemic currently, but in the years to come, we're going to see much bigger movements and even more revolutionary movements than the peasant revolt in almost every country in Britain. That's something we have to prepare for. One last point I want to make is one actually regarding the differences in this period. I talked about some of the outlines of a future society, the outlines of capitalism in the 14th century. It was only a vague outline that you can say that this was a period of transition, that the old society was crumbling, it was dying, but the new society was not actually ready to be born. That's not the case today. People living today can actually clearly see the outlines of a new world order, of a socialist world order. And the working class, which is the majority in society, is already rising to its feet and fighting for this future, whether explicitly sees it as such actually is not the most important questions at this time. What is needed is for us to learn these lessons, to prepare for these great events, and actually organise in order to finish the job of the like to what Tyler and John Ball, to create a world with no masters and no landlords. And I think with the ideas of Marxism and with the power of the working class, we have everything we need to make that a reality. Let's go forward. Thank you.