The Black Death arrived in England in 1348. Within two years, somewhere between a third and a half of the population was dead. The peasants who survived noticed something within a generation. There was nobody left to work the fields. The labour shortage was so severe that landlords, for the first time in English history, had to bid for workers. The peasants, suddenly possessed of leverage, demanded payment partly in meat. Beef, mutton, and bacon began appearing in the manorial accounts of agricultural labourers' wages. Skeletal records from English burials in the late 1300s and 1400s, set against pre-plague remains, show measurable increases in average adult height. Bone density improves. Dental health improves. Iron-deficiency markers decline. The peasants got taller. The peasants got stronger. The peasants started causing political problems on a scale they had previously been too undernourished to attempt. In 1351 Parliament passed the Statute of Labourers, attempting to cap wages back at pre-plague levels. The peasants noticed. In 1381, well-fed, the same peasants marched on London in the largest popular uprising in medieval English history. The nobility, in the centuries that followed, expanded the Forest Laws. Killing a deer in a royal forest was a capital offence. The Game Laws of the 1600s and 1700s extended the principle. Meat available to the peasant shrank back toward what it had been before the plague. By 1850, the average British army recruit from the industrial slums was so short and so undernourished that the height minimum for enlistment had to be lowered repeatedly to keep the regiments staffed. The single greatest improvement in working-class height and health in English history was caused by a plague that made meat affordable for two generations. The single greatest decline was caused, in significant part, by a political decision to make it expensive again. You can see the whole sequence in the skeletons. The skeletons are in the museums. Go and look.