Famine eventually followed. Historians believe that the Black Death likely precipitated the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and eventually led to the fall of the feudal system. The class divisions that had, for centuries, bound peasants to land owned by local lords, eroded and collapsed.
The Black Death also provoked social change both good and bad. Religious fanaticism and racism bloomed in the face of fear; Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims, and lepers were persecuted and scapegoated as responsible for the disease.
The Catholic Church profited and grew wealthy as people turned to them for payed assurances that God might spare them of the plague, "God is deaf nowadays and will not hear us. And for our guilt he grinds good men to dust." (William Langland, poem 'Piers Plowman'). The practice of flagellation (self-lashing as a form of religious penance) in ceremonial fashion also re-emerged until the Pope declared the practice to be heretical.
The plague never really went away after the Black Death, resurfacing about every 20 years until the mid-1600's, with a total of 40 more European outbreaks.
In an attempt to contain the spread of the plague, authorities explored various "measures of containment". In 1377, the city-state of Ragusa (in modern-day Croatia) ordered that the crews of all trading ships arriving in port had to spend 30 days (a trentine) on a restricted island awaiting the development (or not) of plague symptoms. In 1448, the Venetians prolonged the waiting period to 40 days (a quarantino). The 40 day quarantine proved to be effective as it had since been discovered that the plague had a 37 day time-line from infection to death. Although the concept of quarantine had been known since biblical times and even practiced to some extent in cases of tuberculosis and leprosy, it was the plague that established quarantine as an effective measure of infectious disease containment.
In 1665, the Great Plague of London devastatingly marked the end of 300 years of recurrent plague pandemics; in less than seven months, over 100,000 Londoners died of the disease.