With the huge drop in population following the Black Death, peasants and laborers were able to take advantage of the labor shortage to demand higher pay and improve their lives. Those who had been at the top of 14th-century society weren’t happy about that — and since they were the ones who were literate, such works as Langland’s Piers Plowman, Gower’s Vox Clamantis, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflected and reinforced their readers’ wish that the social order stay the way it was. – The Conversation