Struck by these undoubted results of the pestilence, some modern writers have persuaded themselves that the Black Death is the one great turning-point in the social and economic history of England, and that nearly all which makes modern England what it is, is due to the effects of this pestilence. A wider survey suggests the extreme improbability of a single visitation having such far-reaching consequences. Moreover the Black Death was not an English but a European calamity, and it is strange to imagine that the effects of the plague in England should have been so much deeper than in France or Germany, and so different. In the fourteenth century there was little that was distinctly insular in the conditions of England, as compared with those of the continent. A trouble common to both regions alike could hardly have been the starting-point of such differentiation between them as later ages undoubtedly witnessed. There was a French counterpart to the statute of labourers.
In truth the Black Death was no isolated phenomenon. There were already in the air the seeds of the decay of the ancient order, and those seeds fructified more rapidly in England by reason of the plague.[1] It is only because of the impetus which it gave to changes already in progress that the pestilence had in a fashion more lasting results in England than elsewhere. The last thirty years of the reign of Edward were an epoch of social upheaval and unrest contrasting strongly with the uneventful times that had preceded the Black Death. It is not right to regard the period as one of misery or severe distress. The war of classes, which was beginning, sprang not so much from material discomfort of the poor, as from what unsympathetic annalists called their greediness, their pride, and their wantonness. The wage-earner was master of the situation and did not hesitate to make his power felt. While the spread of manufactures, the rise of prices, and the opening out of wider markets still secured the prosperity of the shopkeeper, the merchant, or the artisan of the towns, the whole brunt of the social change fell upon the landed classes, and most heavily upon the ecclesiastics and especially upon the monks. Broken down by the heavy demands of the state, unable to share with the layman in the new avenues to wealth opened up by the expanding resources of the country, the monks saw the chief sources of their prosperity drying up. Their rents were shrinking and it became increasingly difficult to cultivate their lands. They never recovered their ancient welfare, and were already getting out of touch with the national life.
[1] See for this W. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. i., p. 330 ff. (ed. 4); T.W. Page, The End of Villainage in England (American Economic Association, 1900); and, above all, P. Vinogradoff in Engl. Hist. Review, xv. (1900), 774-781.
One immediate result of the plague was a renewed activity in founding religious houses. Upon the two plague pits west and east of the city of London, Sir Walter Manny set up his Charterhouse in Smithfield, and Edward III. his foundation for Cistercian nuns between Tower Hill and Aldgate. More characteristic of the times was the foundation of secular colleges, which were established either with mainly ecclesiastical objects or to encourage study at the universities. Both at Oxford and Cambridge there were more colleges set up in the first than in the second half of the fourteenth century; and it is noteworthy that several Cambridge colleges incorporated after the plague were founded with the avowed motive of filling up the gaps in the secular clergy occasioned by it. The riots between the Oxford townsmen and the clerks of the university on St. Scholastica's day, 1354, resulted in the victory of the former because of the recent diminution in the number of the scholars. Yet even as regards the monasteries, it is easy to exaggerate the effects of the plague. Five years after the Black Death, the Cistercians of the Lancashire abbey of Whalley boasted that they had added twenty monks to their convent, and were busy in enlarging their church.[1]
[1] Cal. Papal Registers, Petitions, i., 264. Professor Tait, however, informs me that the monks took a sanguine view of their numbers. After the plague of 1362, we know that they were not much more numerous than in the previous century.
Change was in the air in religion as well as in society. Along with democratic ideas filtering in with the exiles from the great Flemish cities, came a breath of that restless and unquiet spirit which soon awakened the concern of the inquisition in the Netherlands. There brotherhoods, some mystical and quietistic, others enthusiastic and fanatical, were growing in numbers and importance. Some of these bodies, Beguines, Beghards, and what not, were harmless enough, but the whole history of the Middle Ages bears testimony to the readiness with which religious excitement unchastened by discipline or direction, grew into dangerous heresy. The strangest of the new communities, the Flagellants, made its appearance in England immediately after the pestilence. In the autumn of 1349, some six score men crossed over from Holland and marched in procession through the open spaces of London, chanting doleful litanies in their own tongue. They wore nothing save a linen cloth that covered the lower part of their body, and on their heads hats marked with a red cross behind and before. Each of them bore in his right hand a scourge, with which he belaboured the naked back and shoulders of his comrade in the fore rank. Twice a day they repeated this mournful exercise, and even at other times were never seen in public but with cap on head and discipline in hand. Few Englishmen joined the Flagellants, but their appearance is not unworthy of notice as the first concrete evidence of the religious unrest which soon became more widespread. Before long the Yorkshireman, John Wycliffe, was studying arts at the little north-country foundation of the Balliols at Oxford, and John Ball, the Essex priest, was preaching his revolutionary socialism to the villeins. "We are all come," said he, "from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve. How can the gentry show that they are greater lords than we?"[1] In 1355 there were heretics in the diocese of York who maintained that it is impossible to merit eternal life by good works, and that original sin does not deserve damnation.[2]
[1] The sentiment, or its equivalent in Ball's famous distich, was not new; it was employed for mystical purposes in Richard Rolle's
"When Adam delf and Eue span, spir, if thou wil spede,
Whare was then the pride of man, that now merres his mede?"
Library of Early English Writers. Richard Rolle of Hampole and his followers, ed. Horstman, i., 73 (1895).
[2] Cal. Papal Registers, Letters, iii., 565.