Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

When the Flagellants entered the town they would hand the citizens a document setting forth God’s anger and determination to destroy mankind, had not the Virgin Mary interceded for them. Some of the crosses carried by the Flagellants are still to be seen at Gross-Glogau, Kaysersberg, and Ammerschweyer in Upper Alsace.

This spirit of religious fanaticism spread like wildfire through Hungary, Germany, Bohemia, Silesia, Poland, and Flanders, and even beyond these countries. In the autumn of 1349 some six-score Flagellants crossed from Holland and paraded the streets of London, but the metropolis had not then acquired the taste for processions, and ejected them as undesirable aliens. At last the movement had alighted on uncongenial soil. So great was the number of the Flagellants that they became a cause of well-founded anxiety to the clergy, whose churches they actually invaded, and whose influence they threatened to supersede. Their hymns were in every mouth, and one of them, the chief psalm of the Cross-bearers, is reproduced by Hecker in his Epidemics of the Middle Ages.

The secular authorities also saw cause for alarm at the growing numbers and power of the brotherhood, bound together by common ritual and common regulations, and capable, under bold and designing leaders, of exerting their influence in the affairs of states. The Emperor Charles IV appealed to the Holy See for protection against the heretics, and Clement VI responded by issuing a bull from Avignon on October 20, 1349, prohibiting the pilgrimages on pain of excommunication. Philip VI forbade altogether their reception in France, and several other ruling princes followed his example. Relentless persecution soon took the place of unthinking homage. The processions were abandoned, but the spirit that animated them was not dead, and the same fanaticism broke out again in Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in Italy even as late as the eighteenth, under the influence of successive plagues.

The Black Death, sweeping throughout England, is believed to have carried off one-half of the total population. Historians have told the tale of the resulting emancipation of the labouring class, but we find that it has also left its mark on the education, the literature, the art, and the architecture of England.

In education, it helped greatly to bring about the revival of English in the schools. After the Norman Conquest French had gradually become the language of education: not of set purpose, for the Conqueror himself tried ineffectually to learn English. But most of the education was in the hands of the clergy, and as many Frenchmen had been put in charge of monasteries and of parochial cures, it was inevitable that French should become the language of education, and so diffuse itself generally through the educated part of the nation, both French and English. About the middle of the fourteenth century Higden, in his Polychronicon, states that French was still the language taught in the schools, and had been so since the Norman Conquest. In a.d. 1385 Trevisa, commenting on Higden’s statement, writes:

‘This maner was myche yused tofore the first moreyn [before the 1349 murrain], and is siththe som dele [since somewhat] ychaungide. For John Cornwaile, a maister of gramer, chaungide the lore [learning] in gramer scole and construction of [from] Frensch into Englisch, and Richard Pencriche lerned that maner teching of him, and other men of Pencriche. So that now, the yere of owre Lord a thousand thre hundred foure score and fyve, of the secunde King Rychard after the Conquest nyne, in alle the gramer scoles of England children leveth Frensch, and construeth an [in] Englisch.’

Despite the adoption of French as the language of the schools, English had survived as a colloquial language side by side with its supplanter. In the conflict between the two prestige and fashion were on the side of French, tradition and nationality on the side of English: and sooner or later the balance was bound to incline to the side of the national language. The fusion of the two had inevitably led to the corruption of each, but the corrupted French, at any rate after the loss of Normandy, had no standard of purity at hand to limit corruption, while the corrupted English was constantly purified by contact with the native tongue, and by the existence of a pre-Norman vernacular literature. National spirit, stimulated by international strife, was ripe for completing the task, that John Cornwall had begun in a single west country school; and the Black Death, by sweeping away the existing teachers and making place for others of native stock, did much to facilitate the change. The triumph of the vernacular operated a mighty revolution in our national literature, paving the way for Langland and Chaucer. Thomas Usk, in the Prologue to his Testament of Love, completed not later than a.d. 1387, alludes to the utter corruption of the imported French, and the Prioress in the Canterbury Tales, although she could speak French ‘ful fayre and festishly’ spoke it only

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenche of Paris was to hire [her] unknowe.

One other immediate effect of the Black Death was to reduce the literary output of the monasteries to its lowest level. No one can fail to be struck by the scantiness and sterility of the contemporary chronicles, which characterize the period following the Black Death, and the reasonable explanation of this abrupt change would seem to lie in the notorious depletion of the monastic households. The tragedy of the Provençal brotherhood, in which Petrarch’s brother and his dog alone survived to tend and guard the monastery, found an echo in a like desolation of many an English monastery. The special incidence on the monasteries was perhaps due to the monks moving freely among the sick, and giving them sanctuary within their cloister. The sick, too, exhibited often an ill-timed gratitude in bequeathing their clothes to the monasteries. Doctors, as Chaucer remarked of his day, were only for the rich.

In England, as in Italy, the Black Death left its mark on architecture in the abrupt arrest of schemes of construction in course of execution. Many such breaks may be detected in the church architecture of the fourteenth century, and a notable example is furnished in the unfinished towers of the church of St. Nicholas at Yarmouth.