‘The Black Death did not, in any strictly economic sense, cause the Peasants’ Revolt or the breakdown of villeinage, but it gave birth, in many cases, to a smouldering feeling of discontent, an inarticulate desire for change…’
Coulton has suggested that the passage would read as well if ‘theological’ were substituted for ‘economic’ and ‘Reformation’ for ‘Peasants’ Revolt’.{517} The comment is a fair one. The Black Death did not cause the Reformation, it did not stimulate doubts about the doctrine of the Transubstantiation; but did it not cause a state of mind in which doctrines were more easily doubted and in which the Reformation was more immediately possible? Did it not break down certain barriers, psychological as well as physical, which otherwise might have impeded its advent? Wyclif was a child of the Black Death in the sense that he belonged to a generation which had suffered terribly and learned through its sufferings to doubt the premises on which its society was based. The Church which he attacked was a victim of the Black Death because of the legion of its most competent and dedicated officers who had perished and, still more, because of the honour and respect which it had forfeited in the minds of men. The Church continued as an immensely potent force in the second half of the fourteenth century but the unquestioned authority which it had been used to exercise over its members was never to be recovered. To this decay the Black Death made a signal contribution.
Matteo Villani, the Florentine historian, devoted a passage to the effects of the Black Death on those who were fortunate enough to survive it:{518}
‘Those few discreet folk who remained alive,’ he wrote
expected many things, all of which, by reason of the corruption of sin, failed among mankind, whose minds followed marvellously in the contrary direction. They believed that those whom God’s grace had saved from death, having beheld the destruction of their neighbours… would become better-conditioned, humble, virtuous and Catholic; that they would guard themselves from iniquity and sin and would be full of love and charity towards one another. But no sooner had the plague ceased than we saw the contrary; for since men were few and since, by hereditary succession, they abounded in earthly goods, they forgot the past as though it had never been, and gave themselves up to a more shameful and disordered life than they had led before. For, mouldering in ease, they dissolutely abandoned themselves to the sin of gluttony, with feasts and taverns and delight of delicate viands; and again to games of hazard and to unbridled lechery, inventing strange and unaccustomed fashions and indecent manners in their garments…
…Men thought that, by reason of the fewness of mankind, there should be abundance of all produce of the land; yet, on the contrary, by reason of men’s ingratitude, everything came to unwonted scarcity and remained long thus; nay, in certain countries… there were grievous and unwonted famines. Again, men dreamed of wealth and abundance in garments… yet, in fact, things turned out widely different, for most commodities were more costly, by twice or more, than before the plague. And the price of labour and the work of all trades and crafts rose in disorderly fashion beyond the double. Lawsuits and disputes and quarrels and riots rose elsewhere among citizens in every land…
Contemporary chronicles abound in accusations that the years which followed the Black Death were stamped with decadence and rich in every kind of vice. The crime rate soared; blasphemy and sacrilege was a commonplace; the rules of sexual morality were flouted; the pursuit of money became the be-all and end-all of people’s lives. The fashions in dress seemed to symbolize all that was most depraved about the generation which survived the plague. Who could doubt that humanity was slipping towards perdition when women appeared in public wearing artificial hair and low-necked blouses and with their breasts laced so high ‘that a candlestick could actually be put on them’. When Langland dated so many of the vices of the age ‘sith the pestilens tyme’ he was speaking with the voice of every moralizer of his generation.
No doubt the rodomontades of the virtuous were often overstated and the plague blamed for much for which it was not responsible. Hoeniger for one has suggested that ‘the low state of morals belonged to the period and was no worse after the epidemic than before’.{519} But this cannot be the whole answer, nor was it only the impressionable contemporary chronicler who has recorded the phenomenon. In her study of Orvieto, Dr Carpentier has found ample evidence that the Black Death was followed by an immediate and sharp decline in public morality. There were many more cases of maltreatment of orphans, more people carried arms, the strict rules governing female dress were relaxed and there was a considerable increase in the number of prosecutions and convictions for every kind of crime.{520}
Such self-indulgence strikes one today as a curiously illogical reaction to the disaster which had been so painfully survived. Medieval man in 1350 and 1351 believed without question that the Black Death was God’s punishment for his wickedness. This time he had been spared but he could hardly hope for such indulgence to be renewed if his contumacious failure to mend his ways stung God into a second onslaught. The situation, with sin provoking plague and plague generating yet more sin, seemed to have all the makings of a uniquely vicious circle, a circle from which he could only hope to escape by a drastic mending of his ways. Yet, undeterred, he continued on his wicked course against a background of apocalyptic mutterings prophesying every kind of doom.
In spite of the diatribes of Matteo Villani and the more prosaic statistics of Dr Carpentier it is difficult to take altogether seriously the sins of the post-plague generation. Laxness there certainly was, but it was the laxness which comes through relief from almost intolerable tension and the enjoyment of more money than one has been used to spending. In a stimulating essay, Mr J. W. Thompson has drawn an interesting if sometimes strained analogy between the reactions of the population after the Black Death and after the Great War of 1914–18.{521} In both cases he finds the same complaints about the immorality and instability of those who survived. The gloomy relish with which their conduct was denounced can be matched in the Naples of 1944, the Paris of 1815 or, indeed, in almost any situation where human beings recuperate from some extensive disaster. The decline in morality should not be ignored but nor should it be imagined that the Europeans who survived the Black Death had any very special attributes in the way of wickedness.
Nevertheless, no society could endure the punishment which the plague had meted out and emerge without serious strains. One sign of this, already mentioned, was the damage done to the relationship between priest and laic; another, the tension that arose between different groups within society, in particular between rich and poor. Renouard has examined the result of this in France.{522} In the country, he says, the landowner was generally impoverished while the lot of the peasant, on the whole, improved. An up-and-coming peasantry clashed with an impoverished ruling class which sought to regain its former prosperity at the expense of its tenants. In the cities the situation was very different. Here the laws of inheritance ensured that those who survived among the rich accumulated still greater fortunes while the poor, with nothing to inherit, were economically no better off. A newly rich bourgeoisie joyfully oppressed a defenceless proletariat. In the countryside the gap between rich and poor narrowed, in the cities it widened; in both cases relations deteriorated as a result. The second half of the fourteenth century in France was peculiarly rich in social disorder and the scars left by the Black Death were at least in part responsible for the rural insurrection of Jacques in 1358 and of Tuchins in 1381, and for the risings of the weavers in Ghent in 1379, of the Harelle at Rouen in 1380 and of the Maillotins in Paris in 1382.