A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [131]
Because of its island limits and earlier development of parliamentary power, England was more cohesive than France, with a greater national feeling, enhanced by growing antagonism to the papacy. Now with the ransoms of two kings, Jean of France and David of Scotland, the triumphs in battle and the territorial gains, England had turned the tables on William the Conqueror. Yet beneath the pride and glory and flow of cash, the effects of war were gnawing at the country.
The plunderers of France brought home the habit of brigandage. Many in the invasion forces had been outlaws and criminals to begin with who had joined up for a promised pardon. Others were made lawless and violent by the approved daily practice in France. Returning home, some formed companies in imitation of their fellows who had stayed in France. “Arrayed as for war,” they robbed and assaulted travelers, took captives, held villages for ransom, killed, mutilated, and spread terror. A statute of 1362 instructed justices to gather information “on all those who have been plunderers and robbers beyond the seas and are now returned to go wandering and will not work as they were used to do.”
In the spring of 1361, twelve years since the passing of the great plague, the dreaded black swellings reappeared in France and England, bringing “a very great mortality of hasty death.” An early victim was the Queen of France, Jean’s second wife, who died in September 1360 ahead of the main epidemic. The Pestis Secunda, sometimes called the “mortality of children,” took a particularly high toll of the young, who had no immunity from the earlier outbreak, and, according to John of Reading, “especially struck the masculine sex.” The deaths of the young in the Second Pest halted repopulation, haunting the age with a sense of decline. In the urge to procreate, women in England, according to Polychronicon, “took any kind of husbands, strangers, the feeble and imbeciles alike, and without shame mated with inferiors.”
Because the pneumonic form was absent or insignificant, the death rate as a whole was less than that of the first epidemic, although equally erratic. In Paris 70 to 80 died daily; at Argenteuil, a few miles away where the Oise joins the Seine, the number of hearths was reduced from 1,700 to 50. Flanders and Picardy suffered heavily, and Avignon spectacularly. Through its choked and unsanitary quarters the plague swept like flames through straw. Between March and July 1360 “17,000” were said to have died.
Though less lethal, the Second Pest carried a more terrible burden than the first in the very fact of its return. Thereafter people lived in fear, repeatedly justified, of another recurrence, just as they lived in fear of the brigands’ return. At any time either the phantom that “rises like black smoke in our midst” or the steel-capped horsemen could appear, with death and ruin at their heels. A sense of overhanging disaster weighed on the second half of the century, expressed in prophecies of doom and apocalypse.
The most celebrated of these was the “Tribulation” of Jean de la Roquetaillade, a Franciscan friar incarcerated at Avignon because of his preaching against corrupt prelates and princes. Like Jean de Venette, he sympathized with the oppressed against the mighty, lay and clerical. From his cell in 1356, the year of Poitiers, he prophesied that France would be brought low and all Christendom be vexed by troubles: tyranny and robbers would prevail; the lowly would rise against the great, who “shall be cruelly slain by the commons”; many women would be “defiled and widowed” and their “haughtiness and luxury shall wither”; Saracens and Tatars would invade the kingdoms of the Latins; rulers and peoples, outraged by the luxury and pride of the clergy, would combine