What would happen to the land if most people die from the black death?

Answer 1

Large numbers of peasants were killed by the black death, making it impossible to do all the farm work. In some places, farm animals died because there were no one left to tend them.

This is not simply a problem of raising food. What food was raised was sufficient for the population that remained. Instead, it was a problem of infrastructure support. There were jobs that had to be done that did not contribute to farming. Upkeep work on the manors had to be done by taking peasants off the fields, or abandoned. In many cases the lords of manors had died, and the new lords were not well equipped to keep things going.

Lords competed for peasants. Those who had the money to tempt them, lured peasants away from the manors of lords who did not. And so many manors were abandoned altogether. The land on those manors was untended, and quickly reverted to woodland.

Most of those manors that survived did recover. The populations on these manors grew to what they had been. But there were fewer of them.

The changes in the economic condition of the peasants meant that the land on the manors was eventually managed differently. Landlords, as part of luring serfs onto their manors, gave them more freedom than they had previously had, and this eventually meant that, where there had been a day or two of labor due the lord every week, peasants paid rent in money and worked a day or two for the lord for pay. Communal farming was reorganized so the peasants had larger fields of their own, with communal only activities being done where it was difficult not to continue with them, such as common grazing of cattle and sheep. And so the layout and use of fields was also altered.

There is a link below to the economic section of an article dealing with the consequences of the Black Death. There is a bit about this there.