what those effects were. An immediate reaction, observed in many places, was the suspension of conventional values, a decline in moral restraint, hedonistic abandonment; and to this some have wished to connect, in the longer term, the questioning of authority and of religious truths, sentiments of equality and satisfaction at those brought low, the rebellions that were widespread a few decades later, even a new spirit of enquiry and the development of new medical and intellectual interests. At the same time others have pointed to the development of a new piety, of repentance movements, and of a more sombre style of painting (as has been noted in Tuscany). All these are difficult to attribute to the Black Death, or at least to the initial epidemic of 1347-50. The true impact was more gradual and more subtle. The plague returned with great frequency over the next 130 years. As sucessive generations experienced it and understood it to be an unpredictable but ever-present threat, the feeling of precariousness became more rooted and attitudes changed.
There is equal difficulty in assessing the economic impact of the plague, and historians have retreated substantially from the view which saw the whole of the fourteenth-century depression as its consequence. Among the consequences that are most obviously attributable to plague are those arising from the sudden depopulation of certain areas. In much of Spain and Portugal, southern and central Italy, as in much of the rest of Europe, there was a crisis on the land; labour was scarce, wages rose, the landlords were temporarily disadvantaged, governments tried to prevent these trends by legislation against peasant mobility. In many places the existing tendency to replace agrarian with the less labour-intensive pasture farming was speeded up, and many landlords were quick to recover their position by switching to the short-term renting out of land and other devices to protect themselves against changing conditions. Equally wide-spread was the phenomenon of urban immigration; peasants abandoned the land (in some cases whole villages were deserted) in the fond hope of finding employment, or at least chancing their luck, in the towns. But much of this, and even the decline in population, had begun
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