Though the mendicant orders were included in Wadding’s strictures it seems, nevertheless, that they emerged from the plague years with heightened credit. Whether they were really more selfless and courageous than the parish clergy could hardly have been assessed by a contemporary, let alone today. The very fact that they had no territorial responsibility increased their chances of making an impression on the laity. When the parish priest performed his duty he was no more than a familiar figure doing what he had always done. The mendicant friar, descending as from heaven on a beleaguered village, was greeted with an enthusiasm which his better-established colleague rarely knew. But however this may have been, it does seem certain that their way of life precluded the display of materialism and even cupidity which was so marked among the priesthood. It was not only in England but on the mainland of Europe as well that the mendicants gained in authority and wakened the angry jealousy of their rivals.
In 1351 a counter-attack was launched. A petition, signed by a multitude of senior churchmen, was presented to Pope Clement VI, appealing for the abolition of the mendicant orders or, at least, that their members should be forbidden to preach or to hear confession. The Pope’s reply at once defended the mendicants and provided a staggering indictment of the clergy. ‘And if their preaching be stopped,’ he asked, ‘about what can you preach to the people? If on humility, you yourselves are the proudest of the world, arrogant and given to pomp. If on poverty, you are the most grasping and most covetous…. If on chastity – but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts.’ He accused them of wasting their wealth ‘on pimps and swindlers’ and neglecting the ways of God.{511}
If there were any doubt that the Church in Europe was not generally admired or, indeed, deserving of admiration, in the years that followed the Black Death it would surely be settled by this astonishing attack delivered by a Pope on his own priests. Clement VI was himself by no means dedicated to austerity and was generally disinclined to rebuke too harshly the peccadilloes of the flesh. To have been provoked into such invective, he must have felt himself tried very far. That he was doing no more than voice the opinion of the people at large cannot be doubted; that he himself, with his superior sources of information and personal responsibility for the doings of the Church, should have endorsed that opinion is a clear verdict of guilty against the priesthood.
Paradoxically, the decades that followed the plague saw not only a decline in the prestige and spiritual authority of the Church but also a growth of religious fervour. One example of this, to which we have already referred, was the large number of chantry chapels which were opened all over England. There was a spate of church building throughout Europe; the Cathedral of Milan is probably the most conspicuous example but the countrysides of England, France and Italy are rich in village churches begun between 1350 and 1375. In Italy, nearly fifty new religious holidays were created; a move presumably inspired by relief at the end of the plague and fear lest, unless propitiated, the Almighty might once more unleash the whirlwind.{512} The number of pilgrims to Rome and other centres did not fall off even though a third of those who might have made the journey were now dead. In some cases, indeed, the number rose substantially after 1349 and 1350.{513}
In Florence, the Company of Or San Michele, a society with various religious and philanthropic functions, received donations worth 350,000 florins during or immediately after the Black Death. Most of this came in the form of legacies.{514} Though such generosity on the part of the rich could clearly not continue at a panic level once the plague was over, repeated threats that new disasters were imminent ensured that the flow continued at a healthy level.{515} It is easy to portray such charity as no more than the insurance policy of a rich man, well-informed about the dangers of moth and rust and prudently piling up treasure in heaven. So, indeed, it was. But, as Dr Meiss has demonstrated in his brilliant analysis of the impact of the Black Death on the Italian bourgeoisie, the confidence of the wealthy Florentine in the validity of his most fundamental assumptions had been badly shaken. The fortunes which they had amassed seemed more a source of guilt than of security. Their gifts to charity or to the Church were inspired partly by the urge to propitiate the angry god and partly by a shrewd calculation that some minor redistribution of wealth might avert discontent and civil disorders in the future. But they also reflected a strong distaste, a revulsion almost from the prosperity and luxury which they had long been accustomed to cherish as the most indispensable feature of their lives.
Yet, perhaps even more than this, the frenzied charity in which the rich of Europe indulged during and after the Black Death, demonstrated their faith in the one institution where it seemed a proper sense of social discipline survived. Discredited the Church might be in the eyes of many but, to the nobles and the monied élite, it was still the dyke which held back the flood of anarchic insurrection. Unless it were shored up then everything, it seemed, might be swept away. The rich gave eagerly so that the clergy might beautify their buildings and enhance their standing in the world. ‘Their own position seriously threatened, they felt sustained by the assertion in art of the authority of the Church and the representation of a stable, enduring hierarchy.’{516}
The religious revival had therefore a strong element of the conservative. But this was only one strand in a complex which contained at least as much of the violently radical. The second half of the fourteenth century was marked in many countries by resentment at the wealth and complacency of the Church and fundamental questioning of its philosophy and its organization. In England it was the age of Wyclif and of Lollardy, a new and aggressive anti-clericalism to some extent made use of by ambitious men who envied the riches and influence of the Church, but drawing its strength from the discontent and disillusionment of the people at large. In Italy it was the great period of the Fraticelli, dissident Franciscans who believed that poverty was of the essence of Christ and that a rich church must be a bad one. These rebels, having been denounced as heretics by Pope John XXII thirty years before, now declared the Pope himself a heretic and rejected all sacraments except their own. All over Europe the co-fraternities, the confrèries, grew up, as it were, in the shadow of the great religious orders. In essence they were more movements of withdrawal than of protest; lay groups of simple idealists who sought refuge in their own society from a harsh and vicious world. But their very existence was an implied criticism of the system which they rejected and inevitably they began to evolve habits and strike attitudes inimical to the orthodox organizations from which they had evolved.
Once again, as so often in the history of the Black Death, one must remember that post hoc is not necessarily propter hoc. The second half of the fourteenth century was a time of spiritual unrest, of pertinent questioning of the values and of the conduct of the Church, of disrespect for established idols and a seeking for strange gods. Though the tempo of events would have been different, changes would have taken longer to bring about, resistance would have been more intense and reaction more immediate; in the long run things would have followed the same course, even though there had never been a plague. Dr Levett’s judgement has already been quoted: