- Britons have never taken kindly to restrictions on freedom and finances
- Peasants' revolts should serve as a lesson to current policy makers
"Having withdrawn, living separate from everybody else, they settled down and locked themselves in, where no sick person or any other living person could come, they ate small amounts of food and drank the most delicate wines and avoided all luxury, refraining from speech with outsiders, refusing news of the dead or the sick or anything else, and diverting themselves with music or whatever else was pleasant. Others, who disagreed with this, affirmed that drinking beer, enjoying oneself, and going around singing and ruckus-raising and satisfying all one's appetites whenever possible and laughing at the whole bloody thing was the best medicine."
In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio summarised contrasting responses to the Black Death in a rather dreary novella called The Decameron. The polarising opinion is oddly familiar in 2020 Britain; everyone is immensely fed up.
The Black Death killed more than 20m people in Europe in the 14th century, and is thought to have started in Asia, spreading to Europe on trading ships – historians are unlikely to confirm that one was called the Diamond Princess.
The scale of the pandemic had a dramatic and lasting impact on the UK’s economy. As the agricultural workforce was diminishing due to deaths, the role of peasants became increasingly important, which they recognised as an opportunity to demand higher wages. This led the government, keen to maintain its beloved class divide, to introduce The Statute of Laborers; a law to prevent peasants making financial gains. The statute declared that peasants who were “not willing to serve unless they receive excessive wages” or “prefer[ed] to beg in idleness”, would be sent to prison and branded with the letter “F” (possibly for fugitive, not furlough) if they escaped. Happily, the statute failed to maintain the subordinate position of the peasantry, as some lords offered 'fringe benefits' as an alternative to wages and others ignored the law altogether. Many peasants eventually became free to move away from estates and buy their own land as a direct result of the plague.
It is a different story during today’s plague, as key workers in the NHS have been refused a 15 per cent pay rise. In September hundreds of nurses marched through central London with placards reading "stop clapping, start paying" and "priceless but penniless". Their fury comes from being left out of a pay raise for 900,000 public sector workers in July. However, Boris Johnson and his team are yet to implement any policy change. After all, the marches are merely an attempt to ‘beg in idleness’ aren’t they?
The Black Death also caused the UK population to lose faith in its leaders. Then, religion was the main form of control, but many began to move away from the church due to its failure to respond effectively to the pandemic. People were further angered by the apparent corruption of Catholic priests, who were thought to be abandoning the common people and instead seeking benefits from rich families needing burials. The dissatisfaction led to anti-clericalism and the rise of John Wycliffe, an English priest whose ideas paved a path for the Christian reformation.
It remains to be seen if Sir Keir Starmer will emerge as the Covid equivalent of Wycliffe. A recent poll by YouGov revealed that 34 per cent of voters believed Sir Keir would be the best prime minister, compared with 32 per cent backing Boris Johnson. During the first lockdown, the Conservative Party took a Catholic priest-like approach to alienating the common people when Dominic Cummings took that infamous trip to Durham.
In ordinary times, the Conservatives' coronavirus response would have created an opening for the Labour Party to bemoan mismanagement, yet Sir Keir has so far failed to stir up political controversy – fair enough, during a pandemic, political fighting is not the done thing. Indeed, the same YouGov poll that backed Sir Kier, asked participants who they would vote for if there was a sudden election and it was the Conservatives who came out on top with 42 per cent of the backing as opposed to 36 per cent for Labour. It seems the British public doubt the effectiveness of either party when it comes to coronavirus.
As English shops emerge from another long month of lockdown, an increasing amount of the population are looking longingly over at Sweden. While the Scandinavian country has been the subject of global criticism due to high virus transmission rates, the government’s insistence that the pandemic is “a marathon not a sprint” is starting to attract more favourable opinion. Epidemiologists have suggested Sweden has been more successful in developing herd immunity, while countries that enforce repeated lockdowns are simply delaying the problem.
The arrival and mass roll-out of a vaccine has brought with it an optimism that Britain might return to a semblance of normality some time next year. But lessons should certainly be learned from post-Plague planning of the 14th century; Britons do not take kindly to ongoing restrictions on their finances or liberty.
