The Black Death.
The famous Order of the Garter had been established. Men were feasting
and carousing, and were spending their days in brilliant festivals,
while the shadow of a great calamity was creeping over the land. A
terrible plague had broken out in the interior of Asia. It spread
rapidly to Europe, devastated Greece and Italy, and passed on through
France to England. Its coming is said to have been heralded by the most
frightful signs. A stinking mist seemed to advance from the East and
spread over Europe. Numerous earthquakes shook the Continent, and
meteors of great size were seen. It was in August, 1348, that the plague
first reached the shores of England. Three months afterwards it reached
London.
We can hardly imagine the terror which the plague must have spread over
the country. No one could feel himself safe from its ravages. Before the
plague the population of England is supposed to have been 5,000,000; it
is calculated that at least 2,500,000 persons perished of it.
The disease seemed to be a poisoning of the blood. It began with
shivering, which was followed by a burning internal fever, and then
boils of a black colour appeared upon the skin, whence it gained its
name the "Black Death." Death often ensued after a few hours' illness.
The terror of death only increased the danger, and gave rise to utter
selfishness and recklessness. Men deserted those dearest to them when
they were stricken by the plague; brothers deserted their sisters,
husbands their wives, mothers their children. Some shut themselves up in
utter solitude, and hoped, by living moderately and avoiding all contact
with men, to escape the danger. Others indulged in the wildest
dissipation, and strove to drown their anxiety by reckless drinking, and
excitement of all kinds. The mere sight of a stricken person was
supposed to be sufficient to communicate infection. No one ventured to
walk abroad without bearing in their hands some pungent herb, the smell
of which was believed to disinfect the pestilential air.
The rich shut themselves up in their castles, and in many cases
succeeded in escaping infection. It was amongst the poor that the
mortality was greatest. From the large number of parish priests who are
known to have died of the plague, we are led to hope that they at least
did not shun the danger, but went boldly amongst the sick and dying to
administer the last comforts of religion. We know that seventeen out of
twenty-one of the York clergy died during the pestilence. It was in the
eastern counties that the mortality was the greatest. They were at that
time the most thickly populated part of England. For many years there
had been a slow and constant immigration of Flemings, who had been
encouraged by the English kings to settle in England, that they might
there establish their industries. From them the English had learnt
weaving and commercial enterprise. The east, not the west, of England
was then the centre of manufactures and industry. Norwich was a thriving
manufacturing city, possessing sixty parish churches and sixteen
chapels. There exists a record, stating that 57,374 persons died there
of the plague. Norwich never recovered its prosperity. At the present
day it has only thirty-six parish churches, in place of sixty before
1348. Yarmouth was of great importance as a station for the herring
fishery; out of 10,000 inhabitants, it lost 7,000 by the plague. In
Bristol, then one of the chief towns in England, the plague raged to
such an extent that the living were scarcely able to bury the dead, and
grass grew several inches high in the principal streets.
In London its ravages were terrible. The churchyards were filled to
overflowing, and no longer sufficed. Sir Walter Manny bought a piece of
land in West Smithfield to bury the dead, and built a chapel where
masses should be said for the souls of the departed. This was the
origin of the Charterhouse. Other persons also bought pieces of land for
the same purpose, and fields were set apart where the dead were buried
in large pits. Two successive Archbishops of Canterbury died of the
plague, John de Ufford, and Thomas Bradwardine, one of the most learned
men of his time. One of the king's daughters, the Princess Joan, died of
it at Bordeaux, on her way to marry Don Pedro of Castile.
By many people the Black Death was looked upon as a scourge sent by God
for the sins of mankind. A sect of fanatics, called the Flagellants,
arose and wandered over all parts of Europe. There appeared in London,
in 1349, a band of men and women, 120 in number, whose object was to
expiate in their own persons the sins of the world. They wandered from
town to town clad in sackcloth, with red crosses on their caps, chanting
penitential hymns. From time to time they prostrated themselves upon the
ground in the form of a cross, and took it in turns for one of their
number to scourge their naked backs and shoulders. This process was
repeated every morning for thirty-three days, the number of the years of
Christ's life upon earth. Then the fanatics, having fulfilled the
appointed penance, returned to their own homes, having in many cases
inspired others to follow their example. So great was their enthusiasm
that they seemed not to feel the stroke of the scourge, and sang their
wild hymns only with greater exultation as the blood streamed from
their shoulders. The following is a translation of a verse of one of
their hymns:
"Through love of man the Saviour came,
Through love of man He died;
He suffered want, reproach, and shame,
Was scourged and crucified.
Oh think, then, on thy Saviour's pain,
And lash the sinner, lash again!"
In England they found no response to their enthusiasm. The people only
gazed and wondered, and they departed without having gained any
followers. In Germany their success was much greater.
The result of the Black Death in England was a social revolution, which
changed the whole course of English history. It disturbed the existing
relations of land and labour, by increasing suddenly the value of labour
whilst it diminished the value of land. We cannot follow in detail the
course of this revolution, but we can trace some of the causes which
produced it. So large a number of the labourers had died of the plague,
that there were none left to till the land. Flocks and herds wandered
over the country with no one to tend them. The labourers, being few in
number, demanded wages which the farmers were not able to pay and make a
profit. Land consequently fell in value, and it became possible for one
man to hold a large quantity of it. The small farms were broken up, as
it was easier for a small farmer to gain his livelihood by working for
another man than by attempting to get others to work for him, and make
a profit out of his own land. Arable land was largely converted into
pasture land, because pasture land required fewer labourers.
The immediate consequence of the plague was the outbreak of the first
great conflict in the history of England between capital and labour. The
free labourer at that time can hardly be said to have had a position
recognised by law. According to the system of land tenure which had
prevailed in England since its colonization by German tribes, the serf
was bound to the land. He was not a slave in the sense that he could be
bought or sold; but he was his lord's property, for he could not move
from the soil on which he had been born: he was an outlaw if he
attempted to leave it without his lord's permission. As time went on the
serf had gained certain rights. The amount of service due by him to his
lord had been limited by custom; he had a legal right to the piece of
land on which his hut was built; the labour which he owed to his lord
was, as it were, the rent he paid for his land.
In the twelfth century the custom began to be common for the lord, who
was frequently for long periods absent on the Crusades or at war, to
lease some of his land to tenants, instead of farming it all through
bailiffs. This was found to be both easier and more profitable; and thus
arose the farmer class. A still greater change was the gradual rise of
the free labourer. The Church had long used its influence to urge men to
give freedom to their serfs. It was possible also for a serf to gain
freedom by living a year and a day within the walls of a chartered town.
The tenants, as they increased in wealth and social importance, found
the labour-rent more and more burdensome. On the other hand, the lords,
owing to the increasing luxury of the time and to the expenses of
chivalry and war, were continually in want of money. It became,
therefore, the custom for the serfs to buy their freedom from their
lords. Edward III. himself used to raise money by selling manumissions
to his serfs. In time the labourer became detached from the soil, and
could pass from one farm to another.
The scarcity of labour after the Black Death made the landholders feel
how disadvantageous this system was to them. Formerly they could compel
their serfs to work. Now they had to pay the labourers the wages which
they asked, or allow their land to remain untilled, and the harvests to
rot upon the fields. Government was, of course, in those days entirely
in the interests of the landlords. To remedy the evil of high wages, the
King assembled his council on the 14th June, 1349. The country was not
yet sufficiently recovered from the plague to allow of Parliament being
summoned. The council issued a royal ordinance, which was afterwards
embodied in the Statute of Labourers.
The preamble of this statute gives us in a few words a vivid picture of
the times. It states that "a great part of the people, and especially of
workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence. Many, seeing the
necessity of masters and the great scarcity of servants, will not serve
unless they may receive excessive wages; and some are rather willing to
beg in idleness than by labour to get their living." It then proceeds to
ordain that all men and women who do not live by merchandise or by the
exercise of any craft are to work for the same wages as they had
received before the plague. They were to work first for their own lord,
though he was not to retain more than he wanted. The statute went on to
say that, "seeing that many sturdy beggars, as long as they can live by
begging and charity, refuse to labour, no one, under pain of
imprisonment, shall presume to nourish them in their idleness." Thus the
law ordered that all men were to work; giving alms to beggars was
forbidden; the scale of wages was fixed, and men were once more bound,
at least in the first place, to work for their lord.
The fixing of the scale of wages by law could have no permanent effect.
With the high price of provisions, which had resulted from the Black
Death, it was impossible for men to live on the same wages as before the
plague. We see by the repeated reinforcements of the statute during the
reign of Edward III. how unsuccessful it was in obtaining the desired
result. Still more galling to the labourer was the attempt made by this
statute to bind him once more to the soil, and thus to rob him of his
newly-acquired freedom. We cannot wonder that the Statute of Labourers
produced a growing discontent amongst the labour class, which at last
broke out in the peasants' revolt under Richard II.
The horrors of the Black Death had rudely disturbed the joy and
prosperity of the English people. No greater contrast can be imagined
than that between the condition of England in 1347, when the people
revelled in the enjoyment of peace and of a luxury unknown before, and
England in the beginning of 1350. More than half the people had died of
the plague; even amongst the cattle the mortality had been very great.
The looms stood silent for want of weavers; the harvests lay rotting on
the fields for want of labourers; sheep and oxen wandered half wild over
the country because there was no one to tend them. The country pulpits
remained silent. The people as well as their sheep were without
shepherds. All suits and pleadings in the King's Bench, and all sessions
of Parliament, ceased for two years. War was impossible. France was
decimated by the plague as much as England, and a truce for two years
was concluded between the two countries.
The population soon recovered its losses. The nobles had suffered
comparatively little by the plague, and soon returned to their luxurious
amusements. Preachers and moralists might declaim against the
extravagances of fashion and dress, and say that the plague had been
sent as a scourge from God, but the nobles clung to their fashions all
the same. It was the people who had suffered by the plague, and felt its
effects. Wheat was scarce, the price of provisions was exorbitantly
high, and yet the law was striving to diminish wages. The life of the
agricultural labourer in those days was at best very wretched. The
articles of diet were few. The people lived on salt meat half the year.
They had neither potatoes, carrots, nor parsnips; their only vegetables
were onions, cabbages, and nettles. Spices were quite out of the reach
of the common people. Sugar was a costly luxury. We can hardly realize
the dreariness of the long winter nights in the dark and ill-ventilated
huts, from which the smoke escaped as best it could. The people must
have spent much of their time in darkness, as candles were too dear for
them to buy.
But wretched as his surroundings might be, the labourer was not without
intelligence. It was his ambition to send one of his sons to the
university, that he might become a priest. So general was this custom
that Parliament petitioned Edward III. to prohibit it, because the
landlords feared that thus they might lose useful labourers. The
distress of the peasantry under the Statute of Labourers, and the
tyranny and oppression of their landlords, soon led them to form
combinations among themselves for the defence of their own rights.
These combinations were maintained by subscriptions of money. We learn
that the labourers gathered themselves together in "great routs, and
agreed by such confederacy to resist their lords." These combinations
paved the way for the revolt under Richard II. The agricultural
labourers throughout the country could communicate with one another by
means of preachers who wandered over the country, and who, being men of
the people themselves, shared the interests of their class.
In attempting to form any true idea of the condition of the lower orders
of society in those times, of their hardships and grievances, we are
much aided by the poem of William Langland, called the _Vision of Piers
the Plowman_. Langland himself was an obscure man, of whom little
certain is known. He seems to have been born about 1332, and to have
been a secular priest. Three versions of his poem exist, the first
written in 1362, the last about 1380. It is a long poem written in the
old alliterative metre, that is, the rhyme is at the beginning, not at
the end of the words. From a literary point of view the poem possesses
little charm; its great interest lies in the light it throws on the
social condition of the times.
Langland is an austere reformer. He is not like Chaucer, who likes to
look on the bright side of things, and to take a genial view even of
men's failings and sins, and make fun of them. He wishes to make men
better by showing them their sin in its darkest colours, and pointing
out the contrast between it and the virtue they ought to attain to. The
poem is one long testimony against the sins of the rich, against the
sins of all who do not _work_. If Chaucer has any distinct wish at all
to make men better, he only tries to do it by making their sins
ludicrous. In Langland's poem we never lose sight of the moral; the poet
has no other purpose in writing than moral teaching. What he wishes to
teach is simply this, that all men must work, though the work must
differ in kind according to the rank of the worker. The knight's duty is
to guard the Church from "wasters," and help the farmer by killing the
hares, foxes, and wild birds. The ladies are to sew chasubles, to spin
wool and flax, to clothe the naked, and to help all those who work
worthily. If men will not work otherwise, hunger must make them do so.
There are to be no beggars; even hermits must seize their spades and
dig.
The dinner provided for the labourers after they have worked, shows us
what the peasants had to live on in those days. Piers says he had no
geese nor pigs, only cheese, curds, cream, oatcake, and loaves of beans
and bran; and for vegetables, parsley, leeks, and cabbages. Besides
these the poor people bought peascods, beans, apples and cherries, to
feed hunger with. These were the things on which they must subsist till
harvest time; then they would have better food, and good ale too.
Langland tells us that the people were beginning to be discontented with
this kind of food. The beggars would eat only the finest bread; the
labourers grew dainty, and were not content even with penny ale and a
piece of bacon, but wanted fresh flesh and fried fish, and grumbled
about their low wages.
Langland is very bitter against the indulgences granted by the priests
for men's sins. A man can only obtain pardon by good works. The
merchants must trade fairly, must repair hospitals and broken bridges,
must dower maidens and aid poor scholars. He is more severe upon the
lawyers than upon almost any other class; they take bribes, and will
never speak unless you give them money first; only those who plead the
cause of the poor, and do not need to be bought, can be saved. With
crushing severity he dwells continually upon the sins of the clergy,
and, like Wiclif, wishes for the return of the apostolical purity of the
Church. The pestilence, he says, came simply as a punishment for men's
sins. The whole poem is full of allusions to the questions of the day,
and the severity of its criticisms is relieved by no playfulness, hardly
by a single touch of humour.
In the form of his poem, Langland has followed the fashionable poets of
his day, and has adopted the machinery of a dream. All that he tells us
passed before him in a vision. Some few touches show that he too was not
wanting in some growing sense of the beauties of nature, particularly in
the opening of the poem, when he tells us that he wandered on the
Malvern Hills on a May morning. When weary of wandering, he laid himself
down
"Under a broad bank, by a burn's side;
And as I lay, and leaned, and looked in the waters,
I slumbered in a sleeping, it sounded so merrily."
It is only the form, however, that Langland has taken from the
fashionable poets of his day; of their spirit he has nothing. The
beautiful side of chivalry was quite lost to him. He saw only its dark
side, the luxury and selfish idleness to which it had led. He is a voice
from the people, and as such is doubly interesting to us, since most of
the chroniclers and writers of those times entirely disregarded the
people, and spoke only of the upper ranks of society.