The English ordinance of 1349 was established at his time to keep prices reasonable. In addition, labor laws were established to ensure that lords were not paying the serfs higher wages than allowed, which, in essence, were trying to "attempt to turn back the economic clock to a time before the Black Death" (Aberth 69). However, such regulations and laws were bound to result in only one thing, protest. The tensions caused by the regulation of pay resulted in the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (Aberth 70). The most important outcome of this struggle between the government and the citizens was a change in system. In the fifteenth century, Europe's economy experienced a "complete transition from serfdom to a rent-paying class" (Aberth 70). As a result, emancipation as well as higher wages and living standards came to be obtainable for the common citizen throughout Europe.
During the time of the plague, church and state were not separate entities as they are in the societies of most countries today. As it happens, Roman Catholicism was the religion of choice for the government in the fourteenth century. According to religion, a priest must administer a person's last rites before death, or the person's soul will spend the rest of eternity in purgatory. As the plague raged, no individual group of peoples were immune; it affected the serfs and lords, as well as the priests and friars. Due to this, priests of the day were more than often scared to go into the houses of the ill, as many of the priest who did so ended up contracting the disease themselves (Aberth 95). As a result of such, priests started charging to visit and give last rites. This limited their contact with people to the wealthy aristocrats of the populace. As many people were denied the opportunity to be administered their last rites, mass discontent resulted against the church. Although it did not happen in the same time, this discontent was one of the steps toward Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.