Long ago, during the middle of the ages in Europe, the social and economic fabric (feudalism) of the times existed mostly on manors. You know, the land estates where lords and the ladies (nobles), knights, serfs, and peasants lived.
Towns and cities? They were small and of lesser importance, but existed with craftsmen and workers plying their occupations.
As we know, at some point towns and cities returned. Why? Wasn’t feudalism effective enough to last, if not forever, then for many centuries on end?
In the mid 1300s, a plague of sickness hit the continent of Europe that makes our Covid epidemic look like the nighttime sniffles.
Really? Yeah, about one-third or continental Europe’s population (24 million Europeans) died from this horrible monstrosity called The Bubonic Plague.
And all this was essentially caused by rats that scurried off of arriving ships arriving into Italian seaports from Asia. The small lice that had attached themselves to the vermin could easily jump onto a person’s clothes (or their animals), and considering the severity of the disease they carried, and it was pretty much “game over” for any poor, unsuspecting person ending up as a “host.” You simply did not want to get bitten at all costs. But over half of the time the pesky little boogers could not even be seen.
Major, major death ensued.
This was such a fatal blow to the population that what trade and commerce did exist came to a complete halt. There simply was nobody to do the work.
Nobody was immune to this deathly plague. Town or country. City or manor.
The nobles of the manor had always had their peasants to keep their own livelihood going, However, they increasing lost their long-standing, hierarchal grip on their “help.”
Henceforth, there became a shortage of workers left (alive) to keep the economy of a town going.
So the serfs and peasants stepped in. Not only that, they had the proverbial “upper hand” now. There was nobody left alive to do the work that needed to continue being done.
A big shift in power had occurred. Now the “little guy” had the social and economic advantage, and the lord of the manor was left to wonder who would now work his land. Him? Not hardly.
So the manor system was weakened and never, ever returned to its successful entity that the lords and ladies had enjoyed for so many centuries.
Towns and cities grew and grew into the same ones we know about today.
