Here's a fun study for an economic historian to do: Right after the Black Death, in 1351 workers' wages were capped by law. Those who exceeded the cap were fined. The collected fines were then set against each community's tax obligations, giving us all sorts of juicy records. The figures are usually used to show enforcement levels. BUT the number of workers paying these fines was HUGE. So what if they were simply treating the fines as a tax to pay so that they could access higher wages? If so, the fines might actually serve as an indicator of where demand for higher wages was at its strongest, and so where post-plague labour shortages were most acute. For example, the fines levied in Essex seem to have been much greater than in Yorkshire's North Riding.