“The idea, the basic narrative of the Black Death, is that it makes that system less tenable because these formerly enserfed, formerly semi-free people now do not have to do that labor service. They can just run off; they can go somewhere else. They can go to a town, they can get a job working in a trade, something like that. So that’s kind of the broad long-term shifts that people talk about with the Black Death and its impact on the European economy. The Black Death comes at the end of what we call the commercial revolution. So the couple of century period leading up to the Black Death season, enormous expansion of the European economy.”