[374] The Greeks had this idea.—E. B.
[375] I do not think this is just. The Anglo-Saxons were not anti-monastic. They were converted by Benedictine monks in 600; just after 700 they sent out monks to convert Germany; about 960, under Dunstan and Edgar, they experienced a monastic revival. The Normans after 1066 introduced the Cluniac and Cistercian orders, and spread monasticism, while the earlier Northmen, after 900, were quite favourable to the Church in England.
Note that Gregory’s imposition of celibacy on the clergy was accepted, and willingly accepted, by the contemporary lay world. William the Conqueror, through Archbishop Lanfranc, enforced celibacy in England.—E. B.
[376] Wycliffe believed in a real presence—but he held that it was spiritual and not substantial. The host was two things—bread, and at the same time a spiritual Christ. This is not the “memorial” view.—E. B.
[377] Lützow’s Bohemia.
[378] Dr. C. O. Stallybrass says that this plague reached China thirty or forty years after its first appearance in Europe. Ibn Batuta, the Arab traveller, who was in China from 1342 to 1346, first met with it on his return to Damascus. The Black Death is the human form of a disease endemic among the jerboas and other small rodents in the districts round the head of the Caspian Sea.
[379] The seeds of conflict which grew up into the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 were sown upon ground which is strangely familiar to any writer in 1920. A European catastrophe had reduced production and consequently increased the earnings of workers and traders. Rural wages had risen by 48 per cent in England, when an unwise executive endeavored to enforce in the Ordinance and Statute of Labourers (1350-51) a return to the pre-plague wages and prices of 1346, and aimed a blow in the Statute of 1378 against labour combinations. The villeins were driven to desperation by the loss of their recent increase of comfort, and the outbreak came, as Froissart saw it from the angle of the Court, “all through the too great comfort of the commonalty.” Other ingredients which entered into the outbreak were the resentment felt by the new working class at the restrictions imposed on its right to combine, the objection of the lower clergy to papal taxes, and a frank dislike of foreigners and landlords. There was no touch of Wycliffe’s influence in the rising. It was at its feeblest in Leicestershire, and it murdered one of the only other Liberal churchmen in England.—P. G.
[380] See article “Typography” in the Encyclo. Brit.
[381] Standard Italian dates from Dante (1300); standard English from Chaucer and Wycliffe (1380); standard German from Luther (1520).—E. B.
[382] But Nonconformity was stamped out in Germany. See § 11 B of this chapter.