The collapse of the medieval farm economy had a very wide impact on European society. Farming had been based on semi-slavery in which tenants owed the landowner certain days of free labor. They weren’t allowed to leave this contract without buying freedom, although I’ve never heard of any problems with runaway serfs being tracked down like slaves. For the most part, the conditions were just good enough to be accepted, and the landowners owed the serfs things like a harvest feast, which made it feel okay.
But the price of labor skyrocketed after the third visitation of the plague. Survivors demanded wages; landowners could not easily pay, since there were also fewer food customers and the price of wheat dropped. There was a long period of social instability in which landowners petitioned the King to control wages, and the peasants refused to cooperate or mounted armed revolts. Inevitably, towns (by definition free of feudal farm duties) grew and manor farms shrank. Landowners had to pay wages; farms had to make do with fewer workers. There were no significant technological leaps in farming at this time, but the progress of the past centuries (horses, harrows and plows, better seed) allowed them to tinker, improve and do more with less.
The political upheaval led directly to modern institutions and was a big part of the later religious wars that shaped modern Europe. But at table, the main effect of all of this change was that old women who survived through several plagues saw unbelievable price changes at market.
Wheat became affordable; there was a surplus of wheat for the first time in Europe’s history. Not only could more people eat bread on a daily basis, but there was even wheat left over for beer. The working classes had always drunk watery ale in preference to contaminated water, but now they could actually afford a pint of beer that contained enough alcohol to feel the effect. Tavern business boomed, and so did the associated cook-shops.
Animal products became affordable, too. Eggs and a lump of hard cheese, previously the highest protein to which a poor man could aspire, became taken for granted. Although cows had been affected by the plague (and murrain, an animal disease, regularly carried off flocks of domestic animals), there were more farm animals per human mouth now. Cheese-making expanded, creating export markets for isolated Swiss and French villages.
Game animals were scarcer than ever, and so was firewood. But pigs (who could and did catch the plague) became plentiful. Europe’s diet began to swing decisively toward pork consumption…