So this guy said that the Black Death was a good thing...

So this guy said that the Black Death was a good thing, because the cut in population made the role of farmers and artisans more important and gave them more power against the nobility.
Is this true? His argumentation seems a bit vague to me

Is he the author of "Why Nations Fail" ?

not as far as I know.
He is Lindybeige, a rather popular youtuber who talks a lot about history

he's a LARPER

he's also said that swords were only used for chopping down trees and not for combat

This isn't really a fringe belief desu

This is a fairly mainstream argument. It's probably true at least to some degree

I just find its an arguemnt that would be very hard to prove.
Same as the whole "war fuels technological progress" argument

>Is this true?

If you're talking about the fact that common people earned more power: yes, it is true. As many people died, the survivors of Plagues would inherit a lot of real estate, goods and lands their family owned. Furthermore, the lack of workers (which is a problem all along the European Middle Age) induced by massive deaths made the survivors very important to land owners, nobles and the clergy.
I'm currently reading a book that comes to the topic and it shows quotes from the 13th century that shows that common people could demand from nobles to wear noble clothes for their weddings, or used the best rooms in the castle and had the best meats.
On a sidenote, but very interesting, the ones who did not die did not want to work and spent their time having fun (drinking, eating, fucking).
Everything I said stands at least for France.

Necessity is the mother of invention

>no one used axes, ever
>swords were not used in combat, people only used spears
>throwing knives are memes
>no one used wrist bands
>battle of Zama didn't happen

basically, no one did anything ever

The average wages of artisans, and the prices of common goods were recorded in the middle ages. There was an increase in buying power after the plague had passed, simply because the supply of workers dropped.

...

Somewhat true, but don't forget that places like a Egypt got hit too and you don't see any technical advancements here. Also,
> good thing
This is too spooky to be taken seriously.

He has this really fucking weird theory that the Irish are descended from the slaves of the anglo-saxons that were left master-less due to the norman take over and banning of slavery

he claims that some anglo-saxon lords created large paedophilic breeding systems (they'd breed post-pubertal slaves to produce new children) in order to persuade the norman lords not to ban slavery (they'd give the normans proto-irish children as sex slaves), but the normans were disgusted by this so they sent all the slaves including the sex-slave children to the then neanderthal inhabitated ireland where they intermixed and created the irish race as we know today

he had a video on this back in the early days of his channel (or on another one of his channels) when he was more into the fringe-theory scene; I don't know if he's deleted it but maybe someone has it archived

>There was an increase in buying power after the plague had passed, simply because the supply of workers dropped.
But didn't the demand for work drop aswell?

Less labour, more capital (workable fields, mills, etc.). It meant higher wages, lower (relative) prices.

Kind of how lots of immigrants cause a relative drop in wages and higher (relative) prices.

Black Death is the reason why ethnic English people still exist. The educated French speaking class (nobility, but most importantly the clergy) in England got so decimated it had to be replaced by English speaking people. If Black Death didn't happen, England would've been thoroughly frenchified.

While I dislike LB, I don't think that statement is entirely wrong. That's an argument that my middle school textbook talked about, and while I'm not saying that those textbooks are even close to perfect, I doubt that they'd bother to just fabricate such a minute argument.

meant for

now now, lets not make this political

Damn lies

>swords were not used in combat, people only used spears
When did he say this? He has a lot of videos on swords. This "swords are shit" meme is from Veeky Forums

not really, no. BD did raise wages etc, though wages lowered again after the population increased. All the """"progress"""" he talks about was non existent. BD did not kill feudalism, feudalism was pretty much dead by the 13th century. The living standards of the agricultural proletariat increased due to many other factors that I will not enumerate here. Feudalism did not "collapse" because of BD.

It is important to stress the explosion of culture, wealth, trade, and thought in the High Middle Ages 1000-1300. These 300 years saw perhaps one of the greatest periods of European history. BD really ruined this. The 14th century is a century of JUST FUCK MY SHIT UP, and it wasn't until after the Renaissance that Europe returned to the level of society as the High Medieval Period.

LB really doesn't know what he's talking about.

Black death sucked ass. It killed off entire cities. It ruined the ones that survived. Everything had to contract because anything else wasn't sustainable. Houses were literally torn down and rebuilt smaller. Just think about it, from one third to half of the population just perished. Just think of all the lost progress. So much crops left to waste, books left unwritten, merchantise left not traded, produce left unproduced.

All of progress essentially took a timeout.

Besides wasn't it only in GB that the serfs gained any rights? As much as I know the situation didn't change in the mainland Europe.

>This "swords are shit" meme is from Veeky Forums
Don't give that literal autist potency by calling his spammed shitposting a "meme".

"the black death was good because it allowed peasants to become more free and form a middle class" is hardly new and is a pretty mainstream historical view. To the point where it was directly challenged in the Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England.

>its a "people only listen to his outrageous first 10 seconds and then run off to bitch on Veeky Forums without waiting for him to actually go into more detail and explaining what he means" episode

It's not a television documentary that needs a hook, it's a Youtube video. There isn't enough time or will in the world to stick with every retarded vlogger in the hope that they were only pretending.

>He has this really fucking weird theory

about everything

dude is nuts

Actually that kind of makes sense, There's an older video of his where he's talking about bronze swords and he says "some people think the design originated in Ireland" and he has the most fucking digusted look on his face that I've ever seen. I think he might have a problem with Paddies.