A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [132]
These were the concerns and real currents of the time. Like most medieval doom-sayers, however, Roquetaillade predicted debacle as the prelude to a better world. In his vision, the Church, purified by suffering, chastisement, and true poverty, would be restored, a great reformer would become Pope, the King of France against all custom would be elected Holy Roman Emperor and rule as the holiest monarch since the beginning of time. He and the Pope together would expel the Saracens and Tatars from Europe, convert all Moslems, Jews, and other infidels, destroy heresy, conquer the world for the universal church, and, before they died, establish a reign of peace that would last a thousand years until the Day of Judgment and the End.
The hostages did not escape the plague. A high-ranking victim was Count Guy de St. Pol, a knight of great virtue, “very devout and merciful to the poor,” who abhorred the lusts and corruptions of the world, fasted unsparingly, and had maintained virginity until agreeing to marriage. The bourgeois hostages of Paris, Rouen, and several other towns were likewise victims. The great Duke of Lancaster, probably the richest man in the kingdom, was not proof; he too died of the plague, leaving his title and vast inheritance to his son-in-law, John of Gaunt, third son of King Edward. How and where the hostages were housed and whether chivalric courtesy allowed them escape to country retreats is not recorded. In 1357, eight years after the first plague, London was reported still one-third empty, but, though uncrowded, its sanitation was still careless enough to elicit repeated ordinances requiring citizens to clean their premises. Though it was against the law to empty chamber pots into the streets, their contents and kitchen garbage were often flung out of windows, more or less aimed at the gutters, which carried a steady current of water. Barns for keeping horses, cattle, pigs, and chickens were located inside the walls as well as outside, causing many complaints about accumulating piles of manure. At about this time London’s aldermen organized a system of hired “rakers” to carry the piles away in dump carts or in dung boats on the Thames.
For the hostages, prospects were not carefree. Their hope of return depended on regular payments of the King’s ransom, which already lagged. Collection of money was slowed by the plague and was anyway hard to come by in the ashes left by the companies. The case of Buxeaul, a town in Burgundy, was typical of many. According to a royal ordinance of 1361, plague and massacre had reduced its fifty or sixty hearths to ten and these “have been pillaged and ruined by our enemies so that little or nothing remains to them wherefore some of the inhabitants have left the place and are still leaving from day to day”; and because of these things, the survivors if required to pay customary taxes “would have to flee and leave the place and become poor beggars”; therefore it was ordained that the town should pay one tax a year instead of two and be freed of all heriot.
The desolation of churches sacked by the enemy was a subject of constant appeals to the bishops. Candles cannot be lit at mass because the winds blow through for lack of window glass; collapse threatens without funds for maintenance; roofs leak, rain falls on the altar. Abbots and abbesses wander in search of subsistence; prelates who would have blushed to appear in public without retinues of horsemen and servants “are now under the necessity of going on foot in humiliation followed by a single monk or valet and subsisting on the most frugal diet.” Universities suffered from lack of attendance and fees. Montpellier declared itself “destitute of lecturers and auditors because in the said Studium where formerly a thousand