The Black Death

One of the more popular subjects in post-plague literature and the arts was the Dance of Death which, in reminding its viewers of Death’s equalizing sweep, always carried with it at least an element of social protest. And, in the longue durée, it was probably in the encouragement of new aspirations in the deprived and disadvantaged that the Black Death’s legacy was most enduring. On those aspirations and their outcome, see the collected papers in Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Francis X. Newman (Binghamton, 1986). Christopher Dyer summarizes the main arguments in ‘The English medieval village community and its decline’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), pp. 407–29, and S. H. Rigby recently gave them a new sociologial twist in his English Society in the Late Middle Ages. Class, status and gender (London, 1995), while protest is again the main concern of E. B. Fryde in Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England c. 1380 – c. 1525 (Stroud, 1996), a development on his chapter on ‘Peasant rebellion and peasant discontents’ in The Agrarian History of England and Wales. Volume III 1348–1500, ed. Edward Miller (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 744–819. For valuable contributions on different aspects of the Great Revolt, see The English Rising of 1381, eds. R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (Cambridge, 1984), which follows Rodney Hilton’s Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: essays in medieval social history (London, 1985), and his earlier monographs on Bond men made free. Medieval peasant movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London, 1973) and The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975). Steven Justice’s Writings and Rebellion. England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994) investigates the literature, while R. B. Dobson’s The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London, 1983) publishes a useful selection of the relevant documents in translation. Mavis Mate has studied the circumstances of later rural discontent in ‘The economic and social roots of medieval popular rebellion: Sussex in 1450–1451’, Economic History Review, 45 (1992), pp. 661–76. And Isobel Harvey’s Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford, 1991) is the first full-length modern study of that middle-class revolt, led by the comfortably-off farmers of mid-Kent.

By that time, it was less social protest that roused the men of Kent than the mid-century recession, largely the result of bullion shortages, which John Hatcher discusses in his ‘The great slump of the mid-fifteenth century’, in Progress and Problems in Medieval England, eds. R. H. Britnell and J. Hatcher (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 237–72. And the Black Death was no longer the first thing on their minds. Yet plague, for another two centuries, remained endemic in the West, its still mysterious departure in the early 1700s exercising A. B. Appleby in ‘The disappearance of plague: a continuing puzzle’, Economic History Review, 33 (1980), pp. 161–73, and au Paul Slack in ‘The disappearance of plague: an alternative view’, ibid., 34 (1981), pp. 469–76, where Appleby favours the biological explanation and Slack the medical response. The argument continues in The Decline of Mortality in Europe, eds. R. Schofield, D. Reher and A. Bideau (Oxford, 1991); and plague, one might assume, is now contained. But as Montaigne once wrote: ‘The world runs all on wheels. All things therein move without intermission… Constancy itself is nothing but a languishing and wavering dance.’ (Essays, 3:2) And with bubonic plague reported in Southern India just a few years ago, we may not have heard the last of it yet.

INDEX

A

Abergavenny 1

Abergwiller 1

Albert, Duke 1

Albert, Master 1

Albi 1

Alfonso XI, King of Castile 1

Allison, K. J. 1

Almeria 1, 2

America, South 1

Amiens 1

Amounderness 1

Appledram 1

Arabia 1

Aragon 1, 2, 3, 4

Arezzo University 1

Ash well 1

Aston 1

Augsburg 1

Avesbury, Robert of 1, 2, 3

Avignon 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

B

Baehrel, M. 1

Baker, Geoffrey the 1, 2, 3

Balearic Islands 1

Banstead 1

Barcelona, 1, 2, 3

Baron, H. 1

Basle 1, 2

Bassetbury 1

Bateman, Bartholomew 1

Bateman, William, see Bishop of Norwich

Bath, B. H. Slicher Van 1

Bath and Wells, Bishop of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Bath and Wells, Diocese of 1, 2, 3

Battle Abbey 1

Bavaria 1, 2

Bayeux 1

Bede 1, 2

Bedford 1

Bergen 1

Berkeley, family of 1

Berkshire 1, 2

Beveridge, W. 1

Bicester 1

Billingham 1

Bircheston, Simon de 1

Birchington, Stephen 1, 2

Black Death:

effect on:

agriculture 1

architecture 1

the church 1, 2, 3

education 1

manorial system 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

mobility of labour 1, 2, 3, 4

morality 1, 2, 3

painting 1

prices 1, 2

wages 1, 2, 3

in:

Asia 1

Asia Minor 1

England 1

France 1

Germany 1

Ireland 1

Italy 1

Scotland 1

Sicily 1

Spain 1

for other places see separate index items)

mortality caused by:

overall 1

among young and old, 1, 2

among clerics – see clerics

in Paris etc. see under respective entries

name, 1

origins and causes 1, 2, 3

treatment 1, 2

Blackpool 1

Blickling Homilies 1

Blomefield, F. 1

Boccaccio 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Bohemia 1, 2, 3, 4

Bologna 1

Bologna, Chronicler of 1

Boniface VIII, Pope 1

Bordeaux 1, 2, 3

Boucher, C. E. 1

Bourchier, Robert 1

Bowsky, W. 1

Brabant 1

Brabant, Duke of 1

Bradwardine, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury 1

Brandenburg, Margaret of 1

Brandon 1

Bransford, Wulstan de, see Bishop of Worcester

Bremen 1, 2

Bridget, St 1

Bridgewater Castle 1

Bridlington, John of 1, 2

Bridport 1

Bristol 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Brittany 1, 2

Bruges 1, 2

Brussels 1

Buckinghamshire 1, 2

Burgundy 1, 2, 3

Burgundy, John of (À la Barbe) 1