This chapter addresses ways in which those excluded from the dominant institutions and cultures of discourse made themselves heard in England during the period after the Black Death. The excluded, who comprised the vast majority of people, rarely left written statements disclosing their projects and assumptions, their motives, their hopes and fears. We tend to encounter the excluded only as they affect the perceptions, needs and goals of those who sought to govern them, to rule their bodies and souls. The governing classes, together with those who directly served their interests, tended only to take note of plebeian communities and individuals as those on whom their own forms of life depended, those whom they had to coerce into yielding up rents, fines, taxes, labour-power and tithes. Most of the ruled lived in self-governing, self-policing rural communities which had customarily sought to resist these extractions through a wide range of strategies. In the later fourteenth century customary struggles were pursued in radically changed circumstances.

These were shaped by the Black Death and ensuing plagues which probably killed up to half the population. This human catastrophe led to unprecedented opportunities for wage-labourers and servants to improve their standards of living, for villeins to challenge their customary status and services, and for more substantial agriculturists, free or bond, to improve the conditions on which they rented land, and to accumulate holdings. These new opportunities encouraged increasing self-confidence and determination on the part of the ruled, while the governing classes inevitably met this threat to their incomes with the full range of resources at their disposal – political, legal and ideological.