Essay | The Black Catalyst

It is well known that behind every significant social and/or economic change exist multiple factors. Such a change occurred in Europe, specifically England, during the 14th century. Many ascribe this momentous revolution of social and economic conditions in medieval Europe solely to the plague known as The Black Death. However, as shown through the research of various historians reported in Philip Ziegler's The Black Death, the plague of 1348 acted as more of a "catalyst" instead of a "reactant" of this socio-economic change. Ziegler explains that there were three simple and plausible errors made in various early works especially Thorold Rogers that deduced The Black Death as the cause and not an accelerant of this change.

The first of these three observed errors, according to Ziegler, is that Rogers failed to understand that "the damage done by the epidemics of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century was cumulative"(Ziegler...
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