The Black Death.
Edward came back from Calais to England laden with glory and spoil, but all his plunder could not pay for the exhaustion which his heavy taxes and levies of men had brought upon his realm. The nation, however, was blinded to its loss by the glory of Crécy, and the war would probably have been continued with increased energy but for a fearful disaster which befell the land in the year after the fall of Calais. A great plague which men called "the Black Death" came sweeping over Europe from the East, and in the awful havoc which it caused wars were for a time forgotten. England did not suffer worse than France or Italy, yet it is calculated that a full half of her population was stricken down by this unexampled pestilence. Manor-rolls and bishops' registers bear out by their lists in detail the statements which the contemporary chroniclers make at large. We note that in this unhappy year, 1348-9, many parishes had three, and some four successive vicars appointed to them in nine months. We see how, in small villages of 300 or 400 inhabitants, thirty or forty families, from their oldest to their youngest member, were swept away, so that their farms reverted to the lord of the land for want of heirs. We find monasteries in which every soul, from the prior to the youngest novice, died, so that the house was left entirely desolate. And thus we realize that the chroniclers are but telling us sober, unexaggerated facts, when they speak of this as a pestilence such as none had ever seen before, and none is ever like to see again. It seems to have been an eruptive form of that oriental plague which still lingers in Syria and the valley of the Euphrates. It began with great boils breaking out on the groin or under the armpits, culminated in sharp fever and violent retching, and generally carried off its victims within two days.
Rise in wages.—The Statute of Labourers.
It is probable that England did not recover the loss of population which it now sustained for a couple of centuries. But if the nation was dreadfully thinned, the results of the plague were not all in the direction of evil. It certainly raised the position of the lower classes by making labour more scarce, and therefore more valuable. The surviving agricultural labourers were able to demand much higher wages than before, and it was in vain that Parliament, by the foolish Statute of Labourers (1349), tried to prescribe a maximum rate of wages for them, and to prevent employers giving more. Legislation is unable to prevent the necessary working of the laws of political economy, and in spite of the statute the peasant got his advantage.
Renewal of the French war.—The Black Prince.
About the time of the outbreak of the Black Death, the kings of England and France had signed a truce, being moved to turn their thoughts far from war by the terrible havoc that was going on around them. It was six years before they and their peoples could find heart to forget the plague, and once more resumed their reckless struggle. In 1355 Edward made proposals for a definitive peace to King John—Philip VI. had died in 1350—on the terms that he should give up his claims to the French crown, but receive Aquitaine free from all burden of homage to the King of France as suzerain. John refused this reasonable offer, and Edward recommenced his attacks on France. He himself landed at Calais and invaded Picardy, but was ere long recalled home by the news that the Scots also had renewed the war, and were over the Tweed. Edward spent the summer in beating them back and cruelly ravaging the whole of Lothian. Meanwhile, his son, the Black Prince, now a young man of twenty-five, started from Bordeaux and plundered the French province of Languedoc.
In the following year, the Black Prince made a similar incursion into Central France, and swept through the whole country from Limoges to Tours with a small army of 4000 mounted men and 3000 archers. When he turned his face homeward, however, he found that King John with a host of 40,000 men had blocked his road, by getting between him and Bordeaux. Thus intercepted, Prince Edward posted himself on the hill of Maupertuis, near Poictiers, and took up a defensive position. It is probable that the French, with their vastly superior numbers, could have completely surrounded him and starved him into surrender without any need of fighting. But King John, a fierce and reckless prince with none of a general's ability, preferred to take the English by force of arms, and, when they refused to surrender to him, prepared to storm their position.
