CrimsongRaexius666
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Chapter 1: THE URGE TO KILL
In 1347, over a thousand miles from London, the Kipchak Mongols were besieging a walled Genoese trading center on the Crimean coast. Kipchak besiegers were beginning to die in large numbers from a strange disease that appeared to be highly infectious. In what may be the world's first recorded instance of biological warfare, the Kipchaks began to catapult the diseased corpses over the walls.
A few months later, Genoese galleys from the besieged city put in at Messina' in Sicily, with men dying at their oars and tales of dead men who had been thrown over the side all along the way. The sailors ignored the efforts of authorities to prevent their landing, and the Black Death set foot ashore in Europe. Carried by ships' rats, it moved onto the continent through the ports of Naples and Marseilles. From Italy it moved into Switzerland and eastern· Europe, meeting the spread through France into Germany. The plague came to England on ships landing at ports in Dorset and spread from there. Within two years it had killed off an estimated 35 to 40 percent of the population of Europe and Britain.
As in all times and places, famine, malnutrition, and the resultant lower immune defenses put out the welcome mat for the epidemic. A change in climate had produced longer winters and cooler, wetter summers, which had shortened and thwarted the growing season. From 1315 to 1318 torrential summer rains ruined crops, and mass starvation followed. Succeeding harvests were sporadic, but at least the people wouId survive. Then, in
1340, there was almost universal crop failure, and thousands perished in the worst famine of the century.
Even under what they would have considered ideal conditions, the general population was undernourished. Their diet was chiefly of wheat and rye, with few vegetables and a minimum of meat and milk-partially because, even if they could afford them, there was no refrigeration or other means of preservation. Vita· min and mineral deficiencies in winter were a part of life. Hunting could provide fresh meat, but hunting rights belonged to the manor lords. A beating was a light punishment and death not uncommon for taking a deer, or even a rabbit, from the lord's forests. That so many took the risk speaks to the intensity of the biological craving for fresh food.
Disease generally finds its easiest victims among children, who do not develop a mature immune system until about the age of ten or eleven, and among the elderly, whose immune systems decline with advancing years, and so it was with the Black Death. Although people of all ages and all stations died in the tens of thousands, the very young and the very old dominate the statistics. It was the very opposite of a "baby boom," leaving few young people to enter the work force during the next generation.
The Black Death was not a single disease, but three, and the source of all three was a flea. A bacillus in the blood blocks the . flea's stomach. As the flea rams its probe through the skin of its host, preferably the black rat, the bacillus erupts from the flea's stomach and enters the host, introducing the infection. As the rats died off, the fleas took to other animals and to humans.
In one form, the bacilli settle in the lymph glands. Large swellings and carbuncles, called buboes, appear in the groin and armpits, which give this form of the disease the name "bubonic plague." The term "Black Death" comes from the fact that the victim's body is covered with black spots and his tongue turns black. Death usually comes within three days.
In another form-septicemic-the blood is infected, and death may take a week or more. The fastest death comes from the most infectious form, the pneumonic, which causes an inflammation of the throat and lungs, spitting and vomiting of blood, a foul stench, and intense pain.
No scientific identification was made of the plague diseases at the time, nor was anything known of the method of transmission. This permitted all manner of wild theories to be promulgated, of which the most common was that the Black Death was a punishment from God. Some even cursed God for the great calamity, and Philip VI of France took steps to prevent God from getting any angrier than He apparently already was. Special laws were passed against blasphemy, with very specific punishments. For the first offense, the lower lip of the blasphemer would be sliced off. For the second offense, the upper lip would go, and for the third offense the offender's tongue would be cut out.
Groups of penitents sprang up, publicly doing penance for sins that they could not specifically identify, but that were obviously serious enough to anger God to the point of destroying the human race. Only the most severe penance would do to expiate such horrible sin. Self-flagellation turned into group flagellation as penitents walked the streets, often led by a priest, and beat one another with knotted ropes and whips tipped with metal to lacerate their flesh. Some carried heavy crosses or wore crowns of thorns..
Others found their own answers in uninhibited rites and sexual orgies. Some acted on the theory that since the world was ending shortly every possible pleasure should be indulged; others believed an appeal to Satan was the only alternative, now that they had been abandoned by God.
As always in the Middle Ages, some communities put the blame on the only non-Christians in their midst, the Jews. Even though the Jews were dying from the Black Death themselves, they were accused of poisoning wells and causing the plague with secret rites and incantations intended to wipe out Christianity. Bloody pogroms were mounted in France, Austria, and especially-as had been the case during the Crusades-in Germany.
In Strasbourg over two hundred Jews were burned alive. At one town on the Rhine the Jews were butchered, then their remains were sealed in wine barrels and sent bobbing down the river. The Jews at Esslingen who survived the first wave of persecution thought that their own world was coming to an end and gathered in their synagogue. They set the building on fire, burning themselves to death. Those Jews who weren't killed were frequently expelled, leaving their homes to spread their culture, and often the plague, to other areas. Poland saw its own persecutions.
In scattered areas, but that country was generally much safer than Germany, and German Jews streamed into Polish territory. This was the origin of the Ashkenazic (German) Jewish communities in· Poland. They· kept their German language, which gradually evolved· into a vermecuIar called Yiddish.
Because· of their crowded conditions and almost total lack of
sanitation, the towns and cities were hardest hit at first, but as the
townsmen dispersed to avoid the plague, they took it with them into the rural areas. As the farmers died off, fields went to weeds, and untended animals wandered the countryside until many of them died the same way their owners had. Henry Knighton, a canon of St. Mary's Abbey in Leicester, reported five thousand sheep dead and rotting in a single pasture. It has been estimated that the population of England when the plague first crossed the Channel· was 4 million. By the time it subsided, the population had been reduced to less than 2.5 million.
News of the ravages of the plague in England reached the Scots, who concluded that this decimation of their ancient enemy could have come from no source other than an avenging Cod. They decided to assist the Almighty in His divine plan and attack the English in their weakened' state. The call went out for the clans to gather at Selkirk Forest, but before they could begin their march south the plague struck the camp, killing an estimated five thousand Scots in a few days' time. There was nothing to do but abandon the invasion plan, so the still healthy, with the sick and dying, broke camp to return to their homes. Word of the gathering had reached the English, who moved north to intercept the invasion. They arrived in time to intercept and slaughter the dispersed Scottish army.
Incredibly, while the greatest death toll the world had ever known was in progress, the war between England and France kept right on going, each weakened side hoping that the other side was even 'weaker. Armies needed supplies, the products of craftsmen and farmers, of whom over a third had died. Armies needed money, and the population and products usually taxed for that purpose were declining. When the plague died out after a couple of years, the world was different than it had been before. It would never be the same again, because the lowest classes of society suddenly experienced a new power.
What had happened was that the one law that can never be broken without consequences, the law of supply and demand, was in full force and effect - this time to the benefit of the farmer, the common laborer, and the craftsman. In the recollection of the landowning class, there never had been a time when farm labor or farm tenant supply did not exceed the demand for it. Now the foundations of a way of life that had worked for centuries were beginning to crack. In the dark ages of anarchy the individual had been helpless. The preservation of life itself was the major consideration, and men freely pledged themselves in servitude to a stronger man who would provide them with protection. These strong men pledged themselves to even stronger men, and the result was the feudal system. Men at all levels pledged military service, often for a specific campaign or a specific period, such as forty days a year. The warrior class became the nobility, and they required wealth for war-horses, weapons, and armor. They needed still more wealth, partially in the form of labor, to build fortified places where their followers could come for protection. These gradually grew from moated stockades and fortified houses to lofty stone structures requiring an army of stonecutters, masons, carpenters, and smiths. All this had to be paid for, and although some revenue might be generated by the loot of warfare or the ransom of some wealthy captives, the primary source of that wealth was the land, and the labor of the people who worked it.
As the armored horseman came to dominate the field of battle, there came an "arms race" of knights. The pledge of a local baron to his count might now include his obligation to respond to a call to arms by bringing with him anywhere from a single mounted knight to dozens, depending upon the size of his holdings. A knight was expensive to equip and maintain. He needed at least one trained heavy war-horse, a lighter horse for ordinary travel, and more horses for his squire, servants, and baggage. He required personal armor, which was very expensive, as well some armor for his horse. To support him in all this, in exchange for his services he was provided with land, and the people on that land.
The status of serfs had changed over the centuries. Some were gradually able to become tenant farmers, tilling farmland assigned to them on shares while still making payments to the manor lord in fixed terms of service in the manor fields. Customs varied from one manor to another, but generally the tenant farmer paid in many ways for his tenure. On his death, his best farm animal went to the lord as a fee (the "heriot") , and his second best animal to the parish priest. Neither he nor any of his family could marry without permission, which usually required a payment. In addition to his prescribed days of labor for the lord (often two or three days a week), he might be called upon to give extra service without pay, a requirement with the unlikely name of "love boon.". He was subject to restrictions on gathering firewood, taking wood to repair his house, and even collecting the precious manure that would drop in the roads and byways.
If the manor lord owned a mill, the tenant had to use that mill and pay for the privilege. The same applied to manor ovens, frequently creating a monopoly on the baking of bread. In view of his rights and obligations, the tenant was not a serf, who has a man bound almost in slavery, but neither was he totally free. The greatest barrier to his liberty was the old law that took away his freedom of movement. These tenant farmers were required to stay on the manor to which they were attached by birth, where they lived in a cluster of houses called a "vill" (the obvious fore-runner of "village"). For this reason the tenant was called a villein, pronounced almost the same as villain which was sometimes applied to him by his lord.
What most dramatically changed the status of many villeins was the manor lord's need for cash rather than a share of a crop that could not easily be transported to market for sale. There were almost no wagon roads, and grain crops could not be economically transported by packhorse, as was done with wool. The king needed cash to fight his French wars, and the nobles needed cash to pay mercenaries and to acquire transportation and supplies on the continent. Villeins began to make deals in which a ha'penny or penny might be given instead of a day's labor and a fixed cash payment in lieu of a share of crops. Their attitudes changed as they found themselves "renting" the land rather than trading their time and muscles for it. They felt free in the absence or reduction of the old customs of humbling servitude.
By the time of the Black Death, many of the English manors were held by the church. Some had been purchased, and many had been gifted. The extensive manorial holdings of the Knights Templar had been conveyed to the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (the Hospitallers) after the Templars were suppressed by Pope Clement V in 1312. All of the monastic orders had manorial properties with thousands of serfs and villeins attached to them. Even the substitution of cash for villein services often didn't meet the lord's or bishop's need for cash, and a prosperous tenant would be permitted to purchase his freedom for a lump sum. Unfortunately, such men usually did not foresee a need for documentation that would stand up in court and so recorded the manumission improperly, or not at all. The attitude of the church was simple: No manumission was valid unless it was recorded part of a business transaction. Any other act of freeing a villein was treated as embezzlement of valuable church property.
Now the Black Death had taken away a third or more of the work force. With labor shortages, prices went up, especially for the products of a greatly reduced work force of craftsmen. There were far fewer bootmakers, weavers, carpenters, masons, and smiths. There were less money being generated, and it bought less in the face of rising prices.
This was a golden time for the previously oppressed villein. Manors were lying fallow and their owners needed the income. For the first time in his life the tenant farmer's services were in short supply and he could bargain for, and get, a better share of the harvest and generally better living and working conditions. For his spare-time labor he could get double or triple the wages he was used to. Tenants began to leave their vills for better opportunities, much to the anger of their old landlords.
To put a stop to all this and restore things to comfortable normalcy, the English Parliament passed a Statute of Laborers in 1351. Primarily the statue tried to fix prices for labor at their pre-plague levels but it contained several extraordinary provisions. The rates for farm laborers were not just spelled out (two and a half pence for threshing a quarter of barley, five pence per acre for mowing, and so on), but, to enforce the rule, farm workers were to show themselves in market towns with their tools in their hands so that labor contracts would be made in public, not in secret. The statute forbade any extra incentives, such as meals. Farm contracts were to be made by the year and not by the day. Farm workers were to take an oath twice a year before the steward or constable of their vill, swearing that they would abide by the ordinances. They were forbidden to leave their own vills if work was available to them at home at the set prices. If any man refused to take the oath or violated the statute, he was to be put in the stocks for three days, or until he agreed to submit to the new law. For that purpose, the statute ordered that stocks be constructed in every single village in England.
Craftsmen were not overlooked. The statute set wages at three pence per day for a master carpenter, four pence for a master mason, three pence per day for roof tilers and thatchers. All producers of products - saddlers, goldsmiths, tanners, tailors, boot-makers, and so on - were to charge no more than their average price during the four years before the plague, and all were to take oaths that they would obey the law. Breaking the oath, and the law, carried an unusual punishment. For a first offense, the over-charger would be imprisoned for 40 days - with the prison term to be doubled for each subsequent offense. Thus a third offense would mean prison for 160 days (40, 80, 160). Under this provision, if a bootmaker could be convicted on nine counts of selling shoes at too high a price, the ninth offense alone would earn him 10,240 days in jail.
Attempts were made to enforce the Statute of Laborers, some vigorous, but essentially it just didn't work. It was trying to suppress a popular black market filled with eager buyers and eager sellers. Actually, the situation got worse. As farm workers and craftsmen left the market place because of death or old age, a smaller pool of new young workers took their places because of the disproportionate rate of infant and child deaths during the Black Death. Inflation continued to climb. Villeins and serfs with no claim to freedom, or who were too closely watched to be able to move elsewhere, could only go about their daily tasks in ever-reduced circumstances because of higher prices for everything they bought. Just as much victims, because they had no bargaining power, were the lower orders of the clergy. The bishops, in order to maintain themselves in a proper state of luxury and to meet the demands of a papal court whose income had been shattered by a rival claimant to the Throne of Peter, refused to increase the stipends of their ordinary clergy. This left the village priests at near-starvation levels in times of incessant inflation and gave them common ground with their parishioners against great lords, whether temporal or spiritual.
To add to the demand for goods and services, the Hundred Years' War had begun in 1337. This war saw the change from great mobs of people struggling in hand-to-hand combat, stabbing, cutting, and thrusting at each other, to the use of improved missiles - means by which men could kill each other from a distance. Bows and arrows had been around forever, but were comparatively weak and no threat to the armor-plated warrior, nor to his position as the invincible "tank" of the medieval battlefield. Before the improved missiles the most effective weapon on the field may not have been the knight, but rather his war-horse. What today is thought of only as a heavy work-horse was bred to carry a man and his weight of weapons and armor, as well as the weight of the horse's own armor and its massive horseshoes, which were terrible weapons in themselves. No mob of infantry could withstand that massive bulk crashing into it. For the melee following the charge, the war-horse was trained to bite and kick.
Then along came the crossbow, presenting the first material threat to the battlefield superiority of the armored knight. Its short compound bow, made of layered wood, bone, and horn, could propel a short thick arrow (or "quarrel") at a speed that would penetrate light armor. Thus the armored warrior, the aristocrat in war or peace, could be killed by an opponent he could not get his hands on - worse, an opponent from the lower classes. It wasn't fair, and if it wasn't fair for the lords, it probably was not in keeping with God's will. A pope went so far as to ban the use of the crossbow by Christians, but the ban had no noticeable effect. Bans on weapons never work because they are always accompanied by the unspoken caveat, "We won't use it unless we absolutely must in order to win."
The crossbow was not the ideal weapon, because it had two short-comings. First, the range was short. More important, the crossbow was very difficult to draw. Some had a stirrup for the bowman's foot, to hold the bow to the ground, while the bowstring was attached to a hook fastened to a strap around the bowman's waist or shoulders. He would crouch down, hook the string, and then use the entire strength of his legs and back to draw the bow to a locked position for firing. This procedure was not only slow but required strength. It required training to draw and to aim. In addition, the crossbow was relatively expensive to manufacture: A peasant subject to feudal military service would not have one lying about the house. The crossbowman became a mercenary.
It took cash to employ the crossbowman's services, not feudal obligation. At the Battle. of Crecy in 1346, the crossbowmen of the French army were a band of Genoese mercenaries. On the other side, the English were about to demonstrate a weapon that immediately overshadowed the crossbow, the so-called English longbow ("so-called~' because it was actually the product of Welsh ingenuity). The demonstration, that day, of the superiority of the longbow rocked all of Europe. Forget the total death toll; the important item was that over fifteen hundred fully armored French dukes, counts, and knights had fallen in one battle. That single fact changed the course of European society. Previously, knights had expected to be killed, if at all, only by each other. They held the monopoly on warfare, and so on power.
Now hundreds of invincible aristocrats had been done in by a handful of the lowest level of commoner with pieces of wood and string in their hands. It-changed forever the way the two ~lasses .regarded each other. No longer was the feudal levy that called a mob of untrained peasants to war of any account. Archers became professional soldiers, well trained, well paid, and well treated.
They became the heroes of the hour, and they were peasant heroes. It may be impossible for us to evaluate the class distinctions that had existed before that time. The armored knights were, to the peasant, invincible, and on such a lofty plane as to be superior creatures akin to gods from another planet.
One, did not even contemplate standing up to them, and now the gods had dropped a notch. The knight had reason to sit in his hall and stare at the fire with wrinkled brow, and the peasant had an entirely new feeling of his own worth and pride. He might still share that new worth with his fellows in whispers, but the thought once planted continued to grow.
With the changes in the. conduct of war, the king more than ever needed feudal obligations to be fulfilled with money, rather than with service. The new professional soldier worked for pay and needed to be supplied with food, equipment, and baggage
animals, as well as transportation to the continent.. In spite of labor shortages, inflation, and disease, the monarchy would not relent in the pursuit of the Hundred Years' War, which had started in 1337. The only answer was-quite literally-taxes, taxes, and more taxes.
Out of that state of affairs grew a situation that had to cause trouble: The landowners called upon old rights under the law, propounded by lawyers that only they could afford to hire, to take away a man's freedom and that of his descendants. Men who called themselves free were ordered to prove it. Genealogies and parish records were searched to prove that a man's mother or grandmother had been a villein or serf and that he had irrevocably inherited that status. It was the one way to use the law to get cheap and legally bound labor that could not leave for better conditions elsewhere. The only beneficiaries were the landowners. The bigger the landowner, the greater the benefit from the enforcement of villeinage, and the church was the biggest landowner of them all. It had the largest number of serfs and villeins to be held, or forced back from their temporary freedom elsewhere. Bitterness against the church grew among the common people, and the flames of their resentment were frequently fanned by the discontented lower clergy.
An Oxford priest and scholar named John Wycliffe set in motion more, perhaps, than he had intended when he began to preach church reform. He was especially incensed by the corruption of the church and by what he saw as its constant struggle for more power and material trappings, at the expense of the traditional pastoral mission of the church. He saw a direct line of contact between men and God that did not require the services of a priest. He claimed that no one but God had control over men's souls. He said that the king was answerable directly to God and did not need a papal intermediary. One of his most shocking claims, for its day, was that sacraments served by priests who were themselves sinners, and not in a state of grace, were of no effect whatever, and that included the pope. He even went so far as to translate the Vulgate Bible into English, on the grounds that all Christian men and women should have direct access to holy scripture, for in scripture he found perfection and would not question a word of it. However, he pointed out, there is no scriptural mention of a pope.
Such attacks on the church could not go unanswered, and Wycliffe was arraigned on charges of heresy at St. Paul's. That he Was not sentenced to death is probably attributable to the London mob that raged in protest. Wycliffe was merely removed from his post and sent down to live in his parish of Lutterworth. He did not curtail his criticism of the church but redirected that criticism from
the audience-of his-fellow churchmen to the people, who
were of a mind-to listen. His followers became wandering preaching
priests and took Wycliffe's message to the towns and villages.
More immediately effective on the home front' was John Ball,
whom the French chronicler Jean Froissart called "a mad priest
of Kent." Ball preached against class and privilege, including in
the church. He also demanded agrarian reform insisting that the
landholdings of the great barons and of the church be taken away
from the man-distributed among the people.Since1360'Balland
his following of priests had roamed central and southeastern
England,' preaching' doctrines of equality of rights and the redistribution
·or common ownership of property. He was arrested by
church authorities a number of times and finally excommunicated~
In 1381, at the outbreak of the Peasants' Rebellion, he was
in the archbishop's prison at Maidstone in Kent.
There had been hope that the French influence on the papacy
WQuld end when 'Pope' Gregory XI returned the ,Holy See to
Rome in 1377. Unfortunately, a large segment of the church hierarchyhad
not agreed with the move. By that time many' of the
cardinals were French and much preferred the French base at
Avignon. When Gregory XI died the following year, the people of
Rome rioted to secure theirdemand that the new pope be an Italian,
and so ,he was, taking the name of Urban VI. The French cardinals
declared the election invalid. They elected their own
French pope, who would mleas Clement VII, and returned to
Avignon. This was the Great Schism in the church, which was
not healed forimany years. It became a political schism as well,
with the anti-Roman Clement VII at Avignon supported by
France, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, and several German principalities,
while the Roman pope Urban VI was supported by the enemies of France: England, Hungary, Poland, and the German Holy Roman Emperor.
Each pope excommunicated all of the adherents of his rival, barring them from the sacraments, so that all across Europe every single Christian soul of the time had been damned and placed outside God's protection by one pope or the other. This was not a circumstance to be taken lightly. In one instance pro-English forces, supporters of the Roman pope, captured a French convent whose members recognized the pope at Avignon. The soldiers and their clerics had no problem agreeing that these poor misguided sisters were totally outside the protection of either civil or ecclesiastic law. Accordingly, they saw no deterrent to looting all of the possessions of the convent and raping all of the nuns. By the rules of the day, they didn't even have to mention the event at their next confessions.
And all the time, the war between England and France went on, with both sides starved for the tax revenues needed to support the conflict.
In 1377 a poll tax of fourpence per her head had been imposed on all the people in England. In 1379 Parliament came up with a graduated tax based on social status. Both taxes failed, and some of the crown jewels had to be sold to maintain the war in France. In November 1380 the tax was set at one shilling per head, with the extraordinary provision that the rich should help the poor pay the tax. They did not, of course, and the tax failed.
The English Parliament of 1376 became known to the people as the Good Parliament, primarily because it condemned corruption in the king's government. Addressing bribery, it said that the king's counselors should take nothing from any party to business brought before them except presents of little value, such as small items of food and drink. On the subject of taxation, the members asserted that if the king had loyal officers and good counselors he would be rich in treasure without any need for taxation, especially considering the "king's ransoms" exacted for the release of King David II of Scotland after his capture at the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346 and for King John II of France, captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. They suggested that the men who had bled away those fortunes should be accused and punished.
The Good Parliament also impeached a merchant of London named Richard Lyons, finding him guilty of various crimes of extortion and corruption. It was charged that, as a royal tax collector, he had generously helped himself to funds intended for the royal treasury. It was adjudged that all of his lands, goods, and chattels should be seized by the crown and that he should be imprisoned for life. Instead, Lyons's wealth and his friends secured a royal pardon for him.
The name "Good Parliament" may have been descriptive, but equally so would have been the title, "The Ignored Parliament."
So here we have an England in an incessant state of war, with skyrocketing inflation, attempts to return free men to bondage, a Great Schism in the church that found every man in England excommunicated by the Avignon pope, a growing segment of vocally angry priests, and the burden of the highest poll tax ever levied upon the people. The powder keg was filled to the brim. In the spring of 1381, the government accelerated its efforts to collect the tax and the fuse was lit. The explosion of rebellion was just a few days away.
In 1347, over a thousand miles from London, the Kipchak Mongols were besieging a walled Genoese trading center on the Crimean coast. Kipchak besiegers were beginning to die in large numbers from a strange disease that appeared to be highly infectious. In what may be the world's first recorded instance of biological warfare, the Kipchaks began to catapult the diseased corpses over the walls.
A few months later, Genoese galleys from the besieged city put in at Messina' in Sicily, with men dying at their oars and tales of dead men who had been thrown over the side all along the way. The sailors ignored the efforts of authorities to prevent their landing, and the Black Death set foot ashore in Europe. Carried by ships' rats, it moved onto the continent through the ports of Naples and Marseilles. From Italy it moved into Switzerland and eastern· Europe, meeting the spread through France into Germany. The plague came to England on ships landing at ports in Dorset and spread from there. Within two years it had killed off an estimated 35 to 40 percent of the population of Europe and Britain.
As in all times and places, famine, malnutrition, and the resultant lower immune defenses put out the welcome mat for the epidemic. A change in climate had produced longer winters and cooler, wetter summers, which had shortened and thwarted the growing season. From 1315 to 1318 torrential summer rains ruined crops, and mass starvation followed. Succeeding harvests were sporadic, but at least the people wouId survive. Then, in
1340, there was almost universal crop failure, and thousands perished in the worst famine of the century.
Even under what they would have considered ideal conditions, the general population was undernourished. Their diet was chiefly of wheat and rye, with few vegetables and a minimum of meat and milk-partially because, even if they could afford them, there was no refrigeration or other means of preservation. Vita· min and mineral deficiencies in winter were a part of life. Hunting could provide fresh meat, but hunting rights belonged to the manor lords. A beating was a light punishment and death not uncommon for taking a deer, or even a rabbit, from the lord's forests. That so many took the risk speaks to the intensity of the biological craving for fresh food.
Disease generally finds its easiest victims among children, who do not develop a mature immune system until about the age of ten or eleven, and among the elderly, whose immune systems decline with advancing years, and so it was with the Black Death. Although people of all ages and all stations died in the tens of thousands, the very young and the very old dominate the statistics. It was the very opposite of a "baby boom," leaving few young people to enter the work force during the next generation.
The Black Death was not a single disease, but three, and the source of all three was a flea. A bacillus in the blood blocks the . flea's stomach. As the flea rams its probe through the skin of its host, preferably the black rat, the bacillus erupts from the flea's stomach and enters the host, introducing the infection. As the rats died off, the fleas took to other animals and to humans.
In one form, the bacilli settle in the lymph glands. Large swellings and carbuncles, called buboes, appear in the groin and armpits, which give this form of the disease the name "bubonic plague." The term "Black Death" comes from the fact that the victim's body is covered with black spots and his tongue turns black. Death usually comes within three days.
In another form-septicemic-the blood is infected, and death may take a week or more. The fastest death comes from the most infectious form, the pneumonic, which causes an inflammation of the throat and lungs, spitting and vomiting of blood, a foul stench, and intense pain.
No scientific identification was made of the plague diseases at the time, nor was anything known of the method of transmission. This permitted all manner of wild theories to be promulgated, of which the most common was that the Black Death was a punishment from God. Some even cursed God for the great calamity, and Philip VI of France took steps to prevent God from getting any angrier than He apparently already was. Special laws were passed against blasphemy, with very specific punishments. For the first offense, the lower lip of the blasphemer would be sliced off. For the second offense, the upper lip would go, and for the third offense the offender's tongue would be cut out.
Groups of penitents sprang up, publicly doing penance for sins that they could not specifically identify, but that were obviously serious enough to anger God to the point of destroying the human race. Only the most severe penance would do to expiate such horrible sin. Self-flagellation turned into group flagellation as penitents walked the streets, often led by a priest, and beat one another with knotted ropes and whips tipped with metal to lacerate their flesh. Some carried heavy crosses or wore crowns of thorns..
Others found their own answers in uninhibited rites and sexual orgies. Some acted on the theory that since the world was ending shortly every possible pleasure should be indulged; others believed an appeal to Satan was the only alternative, now that they had been abandoned by God.
As always in the Middle Ages, some communities put the blame on the only non-Christians in their midst, the Jews. Even though the Jews were dying from the Black Death themselves, they were accused of poisoning wells and causing the plague with secret rites and incantations intended to wipe out Christianity. Bloody pogroms were mounted in France, Austria, and especially-as had been the case during the Crusades-in Germany.
In Strasbourg over two hundred Jews were burned alive. At one town on the Rhine the Jews were butchered, then their remains were sealed in wine barrels and sent bobbing down the river. The Jews at Esslingen who survived the first wave of persecution thought that their own world was coming to an end and gathered in their synagogue. They set the building on fire, burning themselves to death. Those Jews who weren't killed were frequently expelled, leaving their homes to spread their culture, and often the plague, to other areas. Poland saw its own persecutions.
In scattered areas, but that country was generally much safer than Germany, and German Jews streamed into Polish territory. This was the origin of the Ashkenazic (German) Jewish communities in· Poland. They· kept their German language, which gradually evolved· into a vermecuIar called Yiddish.
Because· of their crowded conditions and almost total lack of
sanitation, the towns and cities were hardest hit at first, but as the
townsmen dispersed to avoid the plague, they took it with them into the rural areas. As the farmers died off, fields went to weeds, and untended animals wandered the countryside until many of them died the same way their owners had. Henry Knighton, a canon of St. Mary's Abbey in Leicester, reported five thousand sheep dead and rotting in a single pasture. It has been estimated that the population of England when the plague first crossed the Channel· was 4 million. By the time it subsided, the population had been reduced to less than 2.5 million.
News of the ravages of the plague in England reached the Scots, who concluded that this decimation of their ancient enemy could have come from no source other than an avenging Cod. They decided to assist the Almighty in His divine plan and attack the English in their weakened' state. The call went out for the clans to gather at Selkirk Forest, but before they could begin their march south the plague struck the camp, killing an estimated five thousand Scots in a few days' time. There was nothing to do but abandon the invasion plan, so the still healthy, with the sick and dying, broke camp to return to their homes. Word of the gathering had reached the English, who moved north to intercept the invasion. They arrived in time to intercept and slaughter the dispersed Scottish army.
Incredibly, while the greatest death toll the world had ever known was in progress, the war between England and France kept right on going, each weakened side hoping that the other side was even 'weaker. Armies needed supplies, the products of craftsmen and farmers, of whom over a third had died. Armies needed money, and the population and products usually taxed for that purpose were declining. When the plague died out after a couple of years, the world was different than it had been before. It would never be the same again, because the lowest classes of society suddenly experienced a new power.
What had happened was that the one law that can never be broken without consequences, the law of supply and demand, was in full force and effect - this time to the benefit of the farmer, the common laborer, and the craftsman. In the recollection of the landowning class, there never had been a time when farm labor or farm tenant supply did not exceed the demand for it. Now the foundations of a way of life that had worked for centuries were beginning to crack. In the dark ages of anarchy the individual had been helpless. The preservation of life itself was the major consideration, and men freely pledged themselves in servitude to a stronger man who would provide them with protection. These strong men pledged themselves to even stronger men, and the result was the feudal system. Men at all levels pledged military service, often for a specific campaign or a specific period, such as forty days a year. The warrior class became the nobility, and they required wealth for war-horses, weapons, and armor. They needed still more wealth, partially in the form of labor, to build fortified places where their followers could come for protection. These gradually grew from moated stockades and fortified houses to lofty stone structures requiring an army of stonecutters, masons, carpenters, and smiths. All this had to be paid for, and although some revenue might be generated by the loot of warfare or the ransom of some wealthy captives, the primary source of that wealth was the land, and the labor of the people who worked it.
As the armored horseman came to dominate the field of battle, there came an "arms race" of knights. The pledge of a local baron to his count might now include his obligation to respond to a call to arms by bringing with him anywhere from a single mounted knight to dozens, depending upon the size of his holdings. A knight was expensive to equip and maintain. He needed at least one trained heavy war-horse, a lighter horse for ordinary travel, and more horses for his squire, servants, and baggage. He required personal armor, which was very expensive, as well some armor for his horse. To support him in all this, in exchange for his services he was provided with land, and the people on that land.
The status of serfs had changed over the centuries. Some were gradually able to become tenant farmers, tilling farmland assigned to them on shares while still making payments to the manor lord in fixed terms of service in the manor fields. Customs varied from one manor to another, but generally the tenant farmer paid in many ways for his tenure. On his death, his best farm animal went to the lord as a fee (the "heriot") , and his second best animal to the parish priest. Neither he nor any of his family could marry without permission, which usually required a payment. In addition to his prescribed days of labor for the lord (often two or three days a week), he might be called upon to give extra service without pay, a requirement with the unlikely name of "love boon.". He was subject to restrictions on gathering firewood, taking wood to repair his house, and even collecting the precious manure that would drop in the roads and byways.
If the manor lord owned a mill, the tenant had to use that mill and pay for the privilege. The same applied to manor ovens, frequently creating a monopoly on the baking of bread. In view of his rights and obligations, the tenant was not a serf, who has a man bound almost in slavery, but neither was he totally free. The greatest barrier to his liberty was the old law that took away his freedom of movement. These tenant farmers were required to stay on the manor to which they were attached by birth, where they lived in a cluster of houses called a "vill" (the obvious fore-runner of "village"). For this reason the tenant was called a villein, pronounced almost the same as villain which was sometimes applied to him by his lord.
What most dramatically changed the status of many villeins was the manor lord's need for cash rather than a share of a crop that could not easily be transported to market for sale. There were almost no wagon roads, and grain crops could not be economically transported by packhorse, as was done with wool. The king needed cash to fight his French wars, and the nobles needed cash to pay mercenaries and to acquire transportation and supplies on the continent. Villeins began to make deals in which a ha'penny or penny might be given instead of a day's labor and a fixed cash payment in lieu of a share of crops. Their attitudes changed as they found themselves "renting" the land rather than trading their time and muscles for it. They felt free in the absence or reduction of the old customs of humbling servitude.
By the time of the Black Death, many of the English manors were held by the church. Some had been purchased, and many had been gifted. The extensive manorial holdings of the Knights Templar had been conveyed to the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (the Hospitallers) after the Templars were suppressed by Pope Clement V in 1312. All of the monastic orders had manorial properties with thousands of serfs and villeins attached to them. Even the substitution of cash for villein services often didn't meet the lord's or bishop's need for cash, and a prosperous tenant would be permitted to purchase his freedom for a lump sum. Unfortunately, such men usually did not foresee a need for documentation that would stand up in court and so recorded the manumission improperly, or not at all. The attitude of the church was simple: No manumission was valid unless it was recorded part of a business transaction. Any other act of freeing a villein was treated as embezzlement of valuable church property.
Now the Black Death had taken away a third or more of the work force. With labor shortages, prices went up, especially for the products of a greatly reduced work force of craftsmen. There were far fewer bootmakers, weavers, carpenters, masons, and smiths. There were less money being generated, and it bought less in the face of rising prices.
This was a golden time for the previously oppressed villein. Manors were lying fallow and their owners needed the income. For the first time in his life the tenant farmer's services were in short supply and he could bargain for, and get, a better share of the harvest and generally better living and working conditions. For his spare-time labor he could get double or triple the wages he was used to. Tenants began to leave their vills for better opportunities, much to the anger of their old landlords.
To put a stop to all this and restore things to comfortable normalcy, the English Parliament passed a Statute of Laborers in 1351. Primarily the statue tried to fix prices for labor at their pre-plague levels but it contained several extraordinary provisions. The rates for farm laborers were not just spelled out (two and a half pence for threshing a quarter of barley, five pence per acre for mowing, and so on), but, to enforce the rule, farm workers were to show themselves in market towns with their tools in their hands so that labor contracts would be made in public, not in secret. The statute forbade any extra incentives, such as meals. Farm contracts were to be made by the year and not by the day. Farm workers were to take an oath twice a year before the steward or constable of their vill, swearing that they would abide by the ordinances. They were forbidden to leave their own vills if work was available to them at home at the set prices. If any man refused to take the oath or violated the statute, he was to be put in the stocks for three days, or until he agreed to submit to the new law. For that purpose, the statute ordered that stocks be constructed in every single village in England.
Craftsmen were not overlooked. The statute set wages at three pence per day for a master carpenter, four pence for a master mason, three pence per day for roof tilers and thatchers. All producers of products - saddlers, goldsmiths, tanners, tailors, boot-makers, and so on - were to charge no more than their average price during the four years before the plague, and all were to take oaths that they would obey the law. Breaking the oath, and the law, carried an unusual punishment. For a first offense, the over-charger would be imprisoned for 40 days - with the prison term to be doubled for each subsequent offense. Thus a third offense would mean prison for 160 days (40, 80, 160). Under this provision, if a bootmaker could be convicted on nine counts of selling shoes at too high a price, the ninth offense alone would earn him 10,240 days in jail.
Attempts were made to enforce the Statute of Laborers, some vigorous, but essentially it just didn't work. It was trying to suppress a popular black market filled with eager buyers and eager sellers. Actually, the situation got worse. As farm workers and craftsmen left the market place because of death or old age, a smaller pool of new young workers took their places because of the disproportionate rate of infant and child deaths during the Black Death. Inflation continued to climb. Villeins and serfs with no claim to freedom, or who were too closely watched to be able to move elsewhere, could only go about their daily tasks in ever-reduced circumstances because of higher prices for everything they bought. Just as much victims, because they had no bargaining power, were the lower orders of the clergy. The bishops, in order to maintain themselves in a proper state of luxury and to meet the demands of a papal court whose income had been shattered by a rival claimant to the Throne of Peter, refused to increase the stipends of their ordinary clergy. This left the village priests at near-starvation levels in times of incessant inflation and gave them common ground with their parishioners against great lords, whether temporal or spiritual.
To add to the demand for goods and services, the Hundred Years' War had begun in 1337. This war saw the change from great mobs of people struggling in hand-to-hand combat, stabbing, cutting, and thrusting at each other, to the use of improved missiles - means by which men could kill each other from a distance. Bows and arrows had been around forever, but were comparatively weak and no threat to the armor-plated warrior, nor to his position as the invincible "tank" of the medieval battlefield. Before the improved missiles the most effective weapon on the field may not have been the knight, but rather his war-horse. What today is thought of only as a heavy work-horse was bred to carry a man and his weight of weapons and armor, as well as the weight of the horse's own armor and its massive horseshoes, which were terrible weapons in themselves. No mob of infantry could withstand that massive bulk crashing into it. For the melee following the charge, the war-horse was trained to bite and kick.
Then along came the crossbow, presenting the first material threat to the battlefield superiority of the armored knight. Its short compound bow, made of layered wood, bone, and horn, could propel a short thick arrow (or "quarrel") at a speed that would penetrate light armor. Thus the armored warrior, the aristocrat in war or peace, could be killed by an opponent he could not get his hands on - worse, an opponent from the lower classes. It wasn't fair, and if it wasn't fair for the lords, it probably was not in keeping with God's will. A pope went so far as to ban the use of the crossbow by Christians, but the ban had no noticeable effect. Bans on weapons never work because they are always accompanied by the unspoken caveat, "We won't use it unless we absolutely must in order to win."
The crossbow was not the ideal weapon, because it had two short-comings. First, the range was short. More important, the crossbow was very difficult to draw. Some had a stirrup for the bowman's foot, to hold the bow to the ground, while the bowstring was attached to a hook fastened to a strap around the bowman's waist or shoulders. He would crouch down, hook the string, and then use the entire strength of his legs and back to draw the bow to a locked position for firing. This procedure was not only slow but required strength. It required training to draw and to aim. In addition, the crossbow was relatively expensive to manufacture: A peasant subject to feudal military service would not have one lying about the house. The crossbowman became a mercenary.
It took cash to employ the crossbowman's services, not feudal obligation. At the Battle. of Crecy in 1346, the crossbowmen of the French army were a band of Genoese mercenaries. On the other side, the English were about to demonstrate a weapon that immediately overshadowed the crossbow, the so-called English longbow ("so-called~' because it was actually the product of Welsh ingenuity). The demonstration, that day, of the superiority of the longbow rocked all of Europe. Forget the total death toll; the important item was that over fifteen hundred fully armored French dukes, counts, and knights had fallen in one battle. That single fact changed the course of European society. Previously, knights had expected to be killed, if at all, only by each other. They held the monopoly on warfare, and so on power.
Now hundreds of invincible aristocrats had been done in by a handful of the lowest level of commoner with pieces of wood and string in their hands. It-changed forever the way the two ~lasses .regarded each other. No longer was the feudal levy that called a mob of untrained peasants to war of any account. Archers became professional soldiers, well trained, well paid, and well treated.
They became the heroes of the hour, and they were peasant heroes. It may be impossible for us to evaluate the class distinctions that had existed before that time. The armored knights were, to the peasant, invincible, and on such a lofty plane as to be superior creatures akin to gods from another planet.
One, did not even contemplate standing up to them, and now the gods had dropped a notch. The knight had reason to sit in his hall and stare at the fire with wrinkled brow, and the peasant had an entirely new feeling of his own worth and pride. He might still share that new worth with his fellows in whispers, but the thought once planted continued to grow.
With the changes in the. conduct of war, the king more than ever needed feudal obligations to be fulfilled with money, rather than with service. The new professional soldier worked for pay and needed to be supplied with food, equipment, and baggage
animals, as well as transportation to the continent.. In spite of labor shortages, inflation, and disease, the monarchy would not relent in the pursuit of the Hundred Years' War, which had started in 1337. The only answer was-quite literally-taxes, taxes, and more taxes.
Out of that state of affairs grew a situation that had to cause trouble: The landowners called upon old rights under the law, propounded by lawyers that only they could afford to hire, to take away a man's freedom and that of his descendants. Men who called themselves free were ordered to prove it. Genealogies and parish records were searched to prove that a man's mother or grandmother had been a villein or serf and that he had irrevocably inherited that status. It was the one way to use the law to get cheap and legally bound labor that could not leave for better conditions elsewhere. The only beneficiaries were the landowners. The bigger the landowner, the greater the benefit from the enforcement of villeinage, and the church was the biggest landowner of them all. It had the largest number of serfs and villeins to be held, or forced back from their temporary freedom elsewhere. Bitterness against the church grew among the common people, and the flames of their resentment were frequently fanned by the discontented lower clergy.
An Oxford priest and scholar named John Wycliffe set in motion more, perhaps, than he had intended when he began to preach church reform. He was especially incensed by the corruption of the church and by what he saw as its constant struggle for more power and material trappings, at the expense of the traditional pastoral mission of the church. He saw a direct line of contact between men and God that did not require the services of a priest. He claimed that no one but God had control over men's souls. He said that the king was answerable directly to God and did not need a papal intermediary. One of his most shocking claims, for its day, was that sacraments served by priests who were themselves sinners, and not in a state of grace, were of no effect whatever, and that included the pope. He even went so far as to translate the Vulgate Bible into English, on the grounds that all Christian men and women should have direct access to holy scripture, for in scripture he found perfection and would not question a word of it. However, he pointed out, there is no scriptural mention of a pope.
Such attacks on the church could not go unanswered, and Wycliffe was arraigned on charges of heresy at St. Paul's. That he Was not sentenced to death is probably attributable to the London mob that raged in protest. Wycliffe was merely removed from his post and sent down to live in his parish of Lutterworth. He did not curtail his criticism of the church but redirected that criticism from
the audience-of his-fellow churchmen to the people, who
were of a mind-to listen. His followers became wandering preaching
priests and took Wycliffe's message to the towns and villages.
More immediately effective on the home front' was John Ball,
whom the French chronicler Jean Froissart called "a mad priest
of Kent." Ball preached against class and privilege, including in
the church. He also demanded agrarian reform insisting that the
landholdings of the great barons and of the church be taken away
from the man-distributed among the people.Since1360'Balland
his following of priests had roamed central and southeastern
England,' preaching' doctrines of equality of rights and the redistribution
·or common ownership of property. He was arrested by
church authorities a number of times and finally excommunicated~
In 1381, at the outbreak of the Peasants' Rebellion, he was
in the archbishop's prison at Maidstone in Kent.
There had been hope that the French influence on the papacy
WQuld end when 'Pope' Gregory XI returned the ,Holy See to
Rome in 1377. Unfortunately, a large segment of the church hierarchyhad
not agreed with the move. By that time many' of the
cardinals were French and much preferred the French base at
Avignon. When Gregory XI died the following year, the people of
Rome rioted to secure theirdemand that the new pope be an Italian,
and so ,he was, taking the name of Urban VI. The French cardinals
declared the election invalid. They elected their own
French pope, who would mleas Clement VII, and returned to
Avignon. This was the Great Schism in the church, which was
not healed forimany years. It became a political schism as well,
with the anti-Roman Clement VII at Avignon supported by
France, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, and several German principalities,
while the Roman pope Urban VI was supported by the enemies of France: England, Hungary, Poland, and the German Holy Roman Emperor.
Each pope excommunicated all of the adherents of his rival, barring them from the sacraments, so that all across Europe every single Christian soul of the time had been damned and placed outside God's protection by one pope or the other. This was not a circumstance to be taken lightly. In one instance pro-English forces, supporters of the Roman pope, captured a French convent whose members recognized the pope at Avignon. The soldiers and their clerics had no problem agreeing that these poor misguided sisters were totally outside the protection of either civil or ecclesiastic law. Accordingly, they saw no deterrent to looting all of the possessions of the convent and raping all of the nuns. By the rules of the day, they didn't even have to mention the event at their next confessions.
And all the time, the war between England and France went on, with both sides starved for the tax revenues needed to support the conflict.
In 1377 a poll tax of fourpence per her head had been imposed on all the people in England. In 1379 Parliament came up with a graduated tax based on social status. Both taxes failed, and some of the crown jewels had to be sold to maintain the war in France. In November 1380 the tax was set at one shilling per head, with the extraordinary provision that the rich should help the poor pay the tax. They did not, of course, and the tax failed.
The English Parliament of 1376 became known to the people as the Good Parliament, primarily because it condemned corruption in the king's government. Addressing bribery, it said that the king's counselors should take nothing from any party to business brought before them except presents of little value, such as small items of food and drink. On the subject of taxation, the members asserted that if the king had loyal officers and good counselors he would be rich in treasure without any need for taxation, especially considering the "king's ransoms" exacted for the release of King David II of Scotland after his capture at the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346 and for King John II of France, captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. They suggested that the men who had bled away those fortunes should be accused and punished.
The Good Parliament also impeached a merchant of London named Richard Lyons, finding him guilty of various crimes of extortion and corruption. It was charged that, as a royal tax collector, he had generously helped himself to funds intended for the royal treasury. It was adjudged that all of his lands, goods, and chattels should be seized by the crown and that he should be imprisoned for life. Instead, Lyons's wealth and his friends secured a royal pardon for him.
The name "Good Parliament" may have been descriptive, but equally so would have been the title, "The Ignored Parliament."
So here we have an England in an incessant state of war, with skyrocketing inflation, attempts to return free men to bondage, a Great Schism in the church that found every man in England excommunicated by the Avignon pope, a growing segment of vocally angry priests, and the burden of the highest poll tax ever levied upon the people. The powder keg was filled to the brim. In the spring of 1381, the government accelerated its efforts to collect the tax and the fuse was lit. The explosion of rebellion was just a few days away.
