A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [380]
Once again it was said, “The forests came back with the English,” as war and pestilence emptied the land. In Picardy, the invaders’ perennial pathway, villages were left in blackened ruin, fields were uncultivated, disused roads vanished under brambles and weeds, unpeopled lands lay solitary where no cockcrow was heard. In the outskirts of Abbeville, a starving peasant woman was found who had salted down the bodies of two children she had killed. Destruction spread as the English pursued a serious effort to make good the conquest of France. Only the alliance of Burgundy and the exhaustion of a marauded and trampled country enabled them to take hold. No armed force, wrote Charles d’Orléans’ secretary, could take the castle of Coucy during the wars, but by “interior treason” it was delivered for a time to the enemy and its beautiful chapel windows were “in large part stripped by profane hands.”
Peasants fled the countryside to take refuge in the towns, where they hoped to find security and where they imagined people led a better life. In urban alleys and hovels they found the unskilled laboring class no better off than themselves. Among the overcrowded and undernourished, epidemics took a greater toll, and a weakened population became more vulnerable to typhus and leprosy as well as plague. Declining trade and manufacture created unemployment and fostered hostility to the refugees. Some returned to the land to try to rebuild their villages and re-cultivate overgrown fields, some to live in the woods by trapping and fishing.
Statues of St. Roch and other saints invoked against plague and various forms of sudden death multiplied in the churches; the fashion for naked, skeletal effigies spread. Now in the 15th century the cult of death flourished at its most morbid. Artists dwelt on physical rot in ghoulish detail: worms wriggled through every corpse, bloated toads sat on dead eyeballs. A mocking, beckoning, gleeful Death led the parade of the Danse Macabre around innumerable frescoed walls. A literature of dying expressed itself in popular treatises on Ars Moriendi, the Art of Dying, with scenes of the deathbed, doctors and notaries in attendance, hovering families, shrouds and coffins, grave-diggers whose spades uproot the bones of earlier dead, finally the naked corpse awaiting God’s judgment while angels and vicious black devils dispute for his soul.
The staging of plays and mysteries went to extremes of the horrid, as if people needed ever more excess to experience a thrill of disgust. The rape of virgins was enacted with startling realism; in realistic dummies the body of Christ was viciously cut and hacked by the soldiers, or a child was roasted and eaten by its mother. In a 15th century version of the favorite Nero-Agrippina scene, the mother pleads for mercy, but the Emperor, as he orders her belly sliced open, demands to see “the place where women receive the semen from which they conceive their children.”
Associated with the cult of death was the expected end of the world. The pessimism of the 14th century grew in the 15th to the belief that man was becoming worse, an indication of the approaching end. As described in one French treatise, a sign of this decline was the congealing of charity in human hearts, indicating that the human soul was aging and that the flame of love which used to warm mankind was sinking low and would soon go out. Plague, violence, and natural catastrophes were further signals.
With the English occupying the capital, courage had sunk low. Frenchmen did not lack who were ready to accept union under one crown as the only solution to incessant war