There was a century of peasants revolting against the feudal nobility in places like England, France, Germany, and others, not just because of the plague but also because of the nobles' general wastefulness and incompetence stemming from the Hundred Years' War. Sometimes the peasants would even take over cities like London or Paris, but then they would lib the fuck out, beg the king for help, and get destroyed. When it was over, we had capitalism in England, absolutism in France, and another century at least of religious wars to look forward to, which themselves probably only chilled out in the end because of colonialism.

Good books about this: A Distant Mirror, The Origin of Capitalism, Caliban and the Witch, Marx's chapters in capital which deal with capitalism's beginnings (a much easier read than the earlier chapters of Capital). A People's History of the World is also good IMO. I like the author's thesis that history is basically the history of class struggle (heh), meaning that the ruling class is always looking for new ways to extract surplus labor, regardless of whether that's through slavery, feudalism, or capitalism. The book is pretty good until it gets to the Russian Revolution, because the author is a Trotskyist.