The Economic Impact of the Black Death It's all been done - Before. Conclusion The European economy at the close of the Middle Ages (c. 1500) differed fundamentally from the pre—plague economy. In the countryside, a freer peasant derived greater material benefit from his toil. Fixed rents if not outright ownership of land had largely displaced customary dues and services and, despite low grain prices, the peasant more readily fed himself and his family from his own land and produced a surplus for the market. Yields improved as reduced population permitted a greater focus on fertile lands and more frequent fallowing, a beneficial phenomenon for the peasant. More pronounced socioeconomic gradations developed among peasants as some, especially more prosperous ones, exploited the changed circumstances, especially the availability of land. The peasant’s gain was the lord’s loss. As the Middle Ages waned, the lord was commonly a pure rentier whose income was subject to the depredations of inflation. In trade and manufacturing, the relative ease of success during the high Middle Ages gave way to greater competition, which rewarded better business practices and leaner, meaner, and more efficient concerns. Greater sensitivity to the market and the cutting of costs ultimately rewarded the European consumer with a wider range of good at better prices. In the long term, the demographic restructuring caused by the Black Death perhaps fostered the possibility of new economic growth. The pestilence returned Europe’s population roughly its level c. 1100. As one scholar notes, the Black Death, unlike other catastrophes, destroyed people but not property and the attenuated population was left with the whole of Europe’s resources to exploit, resources far more substantial by 1347 than they had been two and a half centuries earlier, when they had been created from the ground up. In this environment, survivors also benefited from the technological and commercial skills developed during the course of the high Middle Ages. Viewed from another perspective, the Black Death was a cataclysmic event and retrenchment was inevitable, but it ultimately diminished economic impediments and opened new opportunity. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-impact-of-the-black-death/
%% RATS + rat fleas + dead bodies=main carrier. Most likely explains where the expression ''you dirty rat'' comes from......................