Effects of the Black Plague: DBQ

As the Black Plague ravaged Great Britain, the majorities turned the mass confusion to their advantage when laborers tried to obtain more rights and violently rebelled against their authorities, and when they needed someone to blame the pestilence of the disease on, they looked toward the Jews.

With the death toll staggering from the sever contagion of the plague, the supply and demand went up not only for commodities, but also for hard labor. The people of the working class attempted to take advantage of this by asking for more money for their services. Even if their potential employers did not want to pay anything extra, their were plenty of others who would, so they did not really have a choice. The wealthier people who were higher up in the hierarchy tried to prevent the working class from rising up, but when it all came down to it, they needed these people were indispensable, and the rich needed them. Whether the wealthier liked it or not, the hierarchy was changing, and the peasants were getting wise.

The peasants were rising up in more than just the economy; the plague had wreaked havoc on both the lives of the poor and the lives of the rich, causing their entire way of life to be turned upside down. As a result of the sheer panic that came from this, many of the peasants went crazy. They banded together and even more ruined the lives of the knights and other wealthy people of the nation, harming them, torturing them, and even killing many of them. This peasant rebellion was caused much destruction during the two years of the plague, in addition to the sickness.

When the people realized how devastating the Black Plague was to them and the world in which they lived, they strove to find a scapegoat on which to place the blame. Some people of the Jewish religion had already been previously charged with poisoning well water, and because of this, everyone turned against them and held them accountable for the plague. Jews were a minority, so it was very easy for the rest of Great Britain to overpower them when it came down to it. Many Jews were burned for this apparent crime, and only in cities such as Avignon were they protected by people of authority like the pope.

In this time of bedlam that resulted from the Black Plague, all of these groups -- the employers, the knightly people, and the Jews -- were shoved to the wall as the peasants and the working class were able to collaborate against the peoples they thought were opposing them; though in the end the main thing that resulted from the ruinous plague was not the power of teamwork, but an extreme decrease in Europe's population.