16
The Black Death has often been seen as heightening the conflict between lords and the peasant and laboring masses. Some historians stress the potency of what is termed the “seigneurial reaction,” when landlords, backed by the government (which was, of course, composed of landlords), strove not merely to reassert control over the lower orders but to impose new restrictions and burdens on them in order to bolster their weakening authority and reverse falling revenues. For other historians it is the success of peasants and laborers in winning substantial concessions on rents and conditions of tenure and large increases in their wages and perquisites that is paramount.
However, the problems caused to the ruling elites by plunging population were far from being solely demographic and economic. The increased availability of land and work, beyond simply putting more money in the pockets of the lowly, massively enhanced their bargaining power. In turn this new power fostered self-confidence among people who had formerly been servile, which then helped to promote a robust questioning of authority and lordship, first at local level and then more widely. Nor did potentially fatal threats to the venerable social order come from recalcitrant rustics and artisans alone. The scale and diversity of the forces set in train by the pestilence impacted almost all areas of life to a greater or lesser extent. In the eyes of contemporaries, the new world stimulated equally selfish and sinful behavior from members of the other two estates, the clergy and the lords. The rapid response of the king and his barons signaled the depth of their concern about the way things were deteriorating. On September 5, 1349, before the pestilence had finally departed all regions of the realm, the king sent a letter to his bishops expressing alarm that lessons had not been learned. The recent evil tribulations, he wrote, had been inflicted by a just God who was offended by the guilt of mankind. But rather than reforming their behavior, sinfulness and pride were constantly increasing in the people. As a result, he warned, an even greater calamity might be inflicted.
We can see clearly in William Langland ’s great allegorical poem, Piers Plowman, the first version of which dates from the early 1360s, the intense hostility displayed toward those who used conditions after the plague to pursue their own interest and thereby threaten the cherished social order. Langland was a devoted priest and a charitable defender of the poor, but in the poem he repeatedly castigates those who refuse to work, demand excessive rewards, and refuse to be disciplined. In a striking passage, Piers calls on Hunger to chastise such delinquents and takes great delight in observing the salutary effects that a dose of starvation has on their willingness to labor and conform. Langland, in keeping with so many of his educated or elite contemporaries, was at pains to distinguish between the deserving poor—those who were entitled to alms because they were unable to support themselves—and the plethora of false beggars and idlers who sprang up in the aftermath of the great pestilence. The narrator of this book is from the same social strata and of the same mind.
As the lords prayed that the world would soon return to normal, the common folk celebrated their good fortune and followed their self-interest, insofar as they were able to determine what it was. Peasants, laborers, tenants, and artisans, especially the smallest and least worthy of people, were courted by their betters, and daily existence became for them less miserable and more bearable. Men and women who had spent most of their lives desperately seeking poorly paid work in competition with scores of their fellows, hoping without expectation one day to acquire a piece of land or a cottage, or even the ability to keep themselves and their families moderately well fed, clothed, and warm, now found themselves sought after by employers and landlords.
For the first time, lowly folk were enjoying a sense of their own worth, and it gave them satisfaction and confidence. Increasingly, the old ways of doing things, the old levels of rents and wages, and the old customs were no longer accepted without question. Instead there was a feeling that matters should be decided on their merits rather than precedent. Some even argued that rents and fines should be set at whatever anyone was willing to pay, and that if a farmer was prepared to offer 3d per day and food, and a man was prepared to sell his labor at that price, then no one should interfere in this free contract. It mattered little to such people whether or not Lady Rose or Edmund de Welles had custom supporting their demands.
Since time out of mind, the village and the manor had been run according to custom and precedent. What had always been was the prime means of deciding what should be—who should inherit, what rent and dues should be paid, how much wood could be collected from the manor’s woodlands, how many animals could be grazed on its communal pastures, how long a labor service on the lady’s demesne should last, and even how large the loaf given to harvest workers should be. But in the new world custom was proving irksome and restrictive. While the peasant community had always been resolute in defending custom when lords and ladies were threatening to breach it and increase their burdens, now they had every interest in breaching it themselves. People of all sorts, richer tenants as well as landless laborers, wanted the freedom to pick and choose, negotiate, and refuse if it suited them.
Nor was it only former troublemakers who evaded their time-honored obligations. Time and again folk who had previously been law-abiding or even subservient now needed much persuasion to continue to render all the payments, services, fines, and duties that they, and their fathers and grandfathers before them, had rendered all their lives. Naturally, others viewed the rising fortunes of the rustics in a different light, for the improved benefits the lowly now enjoyed had invariably been won at the expense of their betters. This made the elites both angry and fearful, and the new state of affairs was bewailed in the houses of gentlemen and in sermons from the pulpit. Much to the surprise of Master John, he was invited to Ixworth to hear the prior of the abbey preach against the evils of the present times, and though he was loath to admit it to himself, John found there was much in the sermon with which he agreed.
“When they were held low by many travails and woes,” the prior began, “and forced to labor hard for scarcely enough beans and water to keep them alive, the rustics were deserving of our charity. But today their hearts are waxing stout and rebellious and they will neither work nor listen to reason. They have got the upper hand, and instead of sympathy they are deserving of harsh discipline and punishment. If they are not soon brought to heel they will cause chaos and destruction, and bring down further scourges from an angry God.”
The prior, who was a learned man, despite being foolish and worldly, knew his Aelfric and his Bartholomew Anglicus well, and he went on to proclaim how those who were born to govern knew that the world was ordained by God to be divided into three permanent estates—bellatores, oratores, laboratores—warriors, prayers, laborers—the barons and knights who defended and ruled society, the clergy who prayed and attended to the cure of souls, and those who labored for a living. Few in his audience could doubt that it was essential to the well-being of the world that the great mass of rustics at the base of society performed the work and paid the rents and other dues that provided the sustenance and wealth needed to maintain the other two estates, the clergy and the nobility and gentry. “How could it be otherwise?” he asked without fear of dissent. “If they did not do so, knights and bishops, priors and squires, lawyers and monks would have to become plowmen and herdsmen in order to survive, and so would be forced to abandon their higher vocations. These are the commandments of God. But now, instead of being turned from their sinful ways in fear and penitence, as God wished when he unleashed the terrible pestilence that we have just suffered, the common people are setting their hearts against his commandments, and by their selfishness, arrogance, and immorality they are putting the world in grave danger of another terrible punishment delivered by his anger” (see figure 38).
The prior’s audience, consisting largely of senior clerics, gentry, lawyers, burgesses, and merchants, nodded in agreement with his diagnosis of the ills of time. But the common folk saw it differently. They had no desire to rise up against their lords but simply wanted to be free to choose the most attractive among the opportunities which presented themselves. During their lives they had been taught harsh lessons that beggars could not be choosers, but in the space of a few months they had ceased to have to beg for work and subsistence. Instead, those set above them now had to beg them for their services and their compliance. Since they were no longer bullied by hardship and poverty, they would no longer allow themselves to be bullied by bailiffs and lords. As they frequently told each other, and when emboldened, the officials of their lord and lady as well, they would choose when and whether to work, and when and whether to take on the lease of a property; and they would haggle over their wages, their rents, and their services if they wanted to.
In Walsham, as elsewhere throughout the realm, the lords were uncomfortably aware that the common people were becoming less docile and more questioning of authority. In these days, when lowly rustics should have been working, Master John, as well as John Blakey and Edmund de Welles, observed that they could be found spending much of their time and money drinking in the alehouses, hanging around in groups, gossiping and plotting to thwart their betters, idling in local markets and fairs, playing unsuitable and immoral games of chance such as dice, cards, and alpenyprick, poaching rabbits, fowl, and fish, and organizing football matches, which were an excuse for riotous behavior. What is more, shame to say, it was now becoming fashionable for some villagers to pretend they were gentlemen by hunting with dogs and sometimes with horses as well.
It was because this lamentable situation prevailed throughout the realm that King Edward spent long hours during the summer in pious meditation with his spiritual advisers. The king was anxious to provide the leadership that a good monarch ought to offer in such a time of turmoil and danger, so he sought advice on what should be done, not just from his nobles but from the leading churchmen of his realm. His counselors expressed themselves both amazed and appalled that sinners who had been spared from the lashings of the pestilence had not been humbled by the terrible judgments and lessons of God. Instead of being cowed, most had emerged unchastened, ungrateful, and obstinately recalcitrant. Everywhere one looked, sinfulness and pride was constantly increasing in the people, and charity was growing unusually cold. Fearing that an even greater disaster was sure to be visited on the world by a God offended by the guilt of the people, the king decided to write to all bishops in the realm entreating them to do all they could to ensure that the flocks of every priest in every parish repented of their sins, in the hope that the penances and prayers of the faithful might pacify a furious God.
The king’s letter was duly dispatched in early September, when the plague had departed into the far north of England and the borders of Scotland. A few weeks later a copy was passed to Master John by the prior of Ixworth, with the admonition that he should pay close heed to its content and act swiftly on it. As John read the letter, he was pleased that the king was greatly disturbed by the persistence, and indeed the increase, of sinfulness. John was impressed that the king showed himself to be a faithful Christian by proclaiming that “there is nothing that prayer cannot achieve when accompanied by entreaty, humility, fasting, and the other defenses of virtue.” He was also a humble man, since he wrote “we have little trust in our own merits,” and finally he was a wise man when he beseeched the clergy, “who have been chosen to make offerings and sacrifices for sins on behalf of mankind, to offer God devout prayers and sacrifices for our salvation and that of our people.”
The king’s letter was a comfort for Master John, and he was determined to act on it. As required, he would spare no effort in persuading his parishioners to follow the exhortation of the king and repent their sins and give themselves up to prayer, fasting, and the exercise of virtue, and turn away from evil. He would also promise his flock that if they were able to drive out spiritual wickedness from their hearts, God would give them peace, tranquility, and health of body and soul, and that the malignancy of the air and of the other elements would also depart and not return. But there were doubts in his heart that the clergy alone could save mankind, since all their efforts had failed to halt the advance of the pestilence. What is more, he noted ruefully, since the pestilence even more churchmen of high and low status were displaying clear signs of sinfulness themselves, by acting in just such a greedy and selfish fashion as the common people they so derided.
Master John hoped his parishioners would be impressed by the grave concerns of the king, but he decided to force the message home by delivering a sermon reminding them of the transience of life and their recent narrow escape from death. Before the great pestilence, time and again, he had seen how the sight of corpses and weeping made men and women think on their own death, and he had often marveled how death could serve as a very effective spur to put away sin. But the pestilence had been so dreadful and the numbers of corpses so huge that the survivors appeared less sensitive to the threat of death, and instead gave themselves over to pride, luxury, and lechery. He would therefore ask them from the pulpit of St. Mary’s, “Where now are the evil lovers of the world, who a little time ago were with us? Where are the haughty, where the envious, the lustful, the gluttonous?” And he would tell them, when they had looked to him for an answer, “For all their love of riches, their delicacies and luxuries, they now have nothing, and the worms have their bodies.”
On Sunday, at the main Mass, Master John duly read the king’s letter about the obstinacy of the sinful in the face of God’s wrath, and he reminded all who attended of the other message that King Edward had sent them a little while ago, against the malice of idle servants who would not work without taking outrageous wages. Such selfish and destructive behavior was certain to be severely punished by God as well as by the king. He had been asked many times by Lady Rose, and by Sir Edmund and Margery de Welles, to preach against the excesses of workmen and to urge parishioners to obey the king’s ordinance, or suffer the pains of Hell for their sins. Now he needed no further prompting, for it was his own loathing of disorder and the disruption caused by people who did not know their place in God’s hierarchy which drove him to berate his congregation for sloth, greed, and arrogance.
“The sins of pride and avarice can be found everywhere about, within Walsham and without. In case there are any among you who believe that God is offended only by the misbehavior of the rich and powerful, I tell you that your own misdeeds and the sinfulness which abounds among you in this very parish offends him just as deeply. The poor man can be as guilty in his heart of the vices of pride and avarice as the rich man. Every villager in Walsham, by forgetting how lowly he or she is, threatens the well-being of the whole of society and with it the divine order that God imposed on the world. You risk provoking him into sending us all another chastisement. The king and his highest counselors sought to restore order, but his ordinance has been ignored, and servants serve their masters worse from day to day. How can we doubt that God is angered by every slothful workman, who scarcely does in two days what he could do in one? They are laggards who think only of their wages, and the food and drink that their master will give them, rather than of completing the job well which they have contracted to do. As the goat does not know how to stay in one place, so many servants do not know how to stay loyal in good service, but change from master to master in order to hide their bad qualities.”
Then, to drive his message even further into their hearts, he chose an example much closer to home: “Are you too obstinate to learn from the awful lessons God has so recently taught you within your own parish and within your own families? Have you so soon forgotten how God dealt with those among us who refused to perform their divinely allotted role in society, and defied their earthly lords along with their heavenly savior? I remind you, then, of the harvest before the pestilence when eleven men out of selfishness and arrogance refused to work for Lady Rose and Sir Hugh, of blessed memory, in the fields of their great farm, as custom and the manor law requires, by helping to reap their lords’ corn, bind it into sheaves, and cart it into the barns. These men all swore oaths of fealty when they accepted their lands and were obliged to do their lords’ bidding, yet out of pure rebelliousness, they conspired together to deprive their lord and lady of what was theirs by right. They abused the reeve and ignored his lawful summons. But they could not ignore the summons of the Lord of Heaven. His commands cannot be defied. His punishment, more awful than any torture on earth, cannot be avoided. Of those eleven rebels, only John Rath and William Warde are alive today. For our Lord struck dead with pestilence fully nine for their sinfulness. You will do well to remember their names: Walter Osbern, Robert Lene, Robert Springold, Peter Jay, William Cranmer, William Hawys, Thomas Fuller, Thomas Dormour, and Stephen Cooper. We will now remember their souls in our prayers, that they may be speedily delivered from torment.
“Nor should the sinful and the idle among you here believe that you have escaped just punishment. This time of plenty will not last forever, and Hunger will soon haste himself hitherward to chastise wasters who ruin the world. Just think on the sparseness of this year’s harvest, destroyed by the rain sent by God. Just look in the barns of Lady Rose and Sir Edmund, and in the prior’s tithe barn, and you will see stocks of grain as meager as any I have ever seen. When you go to market you will find that prices are already a little more than they were last year, and listen to the dealers and you will find them predicting that they will rise even higher. When food is dear and your wages fall back to their former levels, then you will work hard and be respectful to your betters. When hunger returns you will regret your present excesses.”
Master John was deeply saddened that he had to chastise his parishioners in this manner. All his life he had felt sympathy and compassion for the heavy oppressions that the poor and lowly had to endure, and he had never previously shared the hostile sentiments of those preachers who believed that rustics had to be held low by fear and dread to make them subservient. But now he lamented how irreverently they behaved when they were not cowed by hunger. Those who had little or nothing of substance were displaying disrespect for those of a higher estate. All around he saw parishioners, who only a few months before had led industrious and dutiful lives, refusing to work unless they received excessive payments. What is more, when they deigned to take on a job, they were lazy and inefficient. However, when it came to taking pleasures, many of which were sinful, the villagers gave themselves wholeheartedly to gratification. Laborers, smallholders, and beggars complained loudly about the rich but, to Master John’s mind, they were now showing that they would behave just as badly as their betters if they were advanced to riches and possessions.
Master John had always taught his flock that charitable giving is one of the finest acts of mercy. He led by example, and many times from his own meager resources he supported those who had fallen on bad times with money, food, and shelter. These unfortunate folk, he had always believed, were fully deserving of alms. But of late, he had become concerned that there were many men and women in Walsham, strangers as well as residents, who deliberately chose a life of idleness and begging rather than honest labor. When offered a job they pretended to be sick or disabled, and pleaded for alms despite being fit enough to work for a living. They preyed upon the kindness of their fellows who, anxious to perform good works, seemed willing to give their money away too freely.
He recalled that the king’s ordinance was concerned not only with avaricious laborers but with ridding the realm of the sturdy beggars who had appeared since the pestilence, who lived in idleness and sin, and sometimes by theft and other crimes. So Master John read again the copy of the royal ordinance he had kept, and his eyes alighted on a passage that proclaimed imprisonment “for any person who under the color of pity or alms gave anything to anyone who was able to labor for a living, and thereby cherished them in their sloth.” He was shocked, for he did not feel that this was a just penalty for Christians who acted out of kindness, even if they did so without sufficient care. So, remembering what he had been taught at school, he weighed Cato’s advice against that of Gregory, and he found much to favor in Cato’s view that we should take care who we give alms to, so that the genuinely needy are not deprived by undeserved gifts to those able to support themselves. Gregory’s injunction to give to all who asked seemed unsuitable to the present times, for almsgivers must choose carefully between those who deserved charity and those who undermined the law of Christ and the law of the king by pretending to be what they were not. Nowadays, there was a duty to distinguish between deserving folk who were too old or too young to work, and those who did not wish to work; between those burdened with too many children, those who were genuinely sick or with twisted limbs or unseeing eyes, and those who were able but slothful.
Master John spent much time pondering the problem of whether guilt should attach to those who gave to a false beggar, and he concluded that it should not. Except, that is, when the giver acted stupidly or out of a reckless and selfish desire for indulgence. In most cases, the blame and the sin should attach to the false beggar. But try as he might, he was unable to resolve the more difficult question of whether compassionate almsgivers who were tricked by clever idlers should derive any spiritual reward for the gifts they made. It was when faced with issues like these that he longed for the intellectual support and companionship of his lifelong friend Richard, the infirmarer of Bury abbey. But Richard had perished three months earlier along with forty of his brethren, and the dormitory of the famous monastery was now barely half full, despite recently taking in numerous boys scarcely old enough to be away from their mothers.
In late September, a flurry of excitement swept through the parish over news that a band of followers of the Brotherhood of Flagellants had landed for the first time in England. Master John knew that these zealots had arisen like a flood across Europe in the chaos and hysteria caused by the pestilence, and he had often reflected in a scholarly fashion on stories of their frenzied activities. Their name, he had discovered, came from the whips, flagella, with which they scourged themselves. They were also known as “cross bearers” on account of the crosses they carried on their travels and the cross-like manner in which they lay prostrate on the ground with their arms outstretched. Master John had listened intently to fascinating accounts of how innumerable large bands of flagellants, including women as well as men and drawn from all ranks of society, had traversed through many countries overseas, threatening the authority of the Church and calling for the death of Jews and other unbelievers. Gripped by extreme penitential fervor and beseeching God to stay his anger, these bands processed through towns and villages along their way, chanting in unison and whipping themselves and each other until the blood ran freely down their backs and shoulders (see figure 39). It was said that many had died in a state of ecstasy from their beatings. Wherever they went hundreds flocked to join them, and thousands welcomed them into their communities, singing with them the flagellants’ hymn and hoping that their abasement and suffering would ensure their town or village exemption from God’s pitiless scourge:
Your hands above your head uplift
That God the plague may from us shift
And now raise up your arms withal
That God ’s mercy on us fall
But as far as Master John was aware, nothing so hysterical or so violent had yet occurred anywhere in England. Now, however, a group of agitated villagers stopped him by the church door soon after the feast of Michaelmas and told him that more than a hundred devout men of the Brotherhood of Flagellants had arrived in London on ships from Flanders. Excitedly they ushered the priest toward a nearby alehouse where, they assured him, he would find a carter who had seen these holy people processing in and around St. Paul’s church in the city of London. As John hurried along, he tried desperately to order his thoughts. On the one hand, he knew for certain that God was favorably influenced by penitential processions. What is more, the young clerk had told the monks at Bury abbey that Pope Clement himself had joined with a group of flagellants on a number of occasions while the plague raged in Avignon in the spring of 1348. On the other hand, John had also heard that the pope had subsequently changed his mind and was now thinking of banning the movement, because he and other Church leaders were alarmed at the huge numbers that had flocked to join and the fanaticism of some adherents. Flagellants were unlicensed laypeople who were challenging the power of the Church by public preaching and praying. Some claimed that they and their brotherhood could save mankind from the death-dealing pestilence, whereas the Church had failed.
As they drew near, Master John could see a stranger regaling a large group of villagers outside Alice Pye’s alehouse. When he caught sight of the priest, the carter announced that he would begin his story again. This he did, but not before stooping to pick up a fresh jug of ale which one of his audience had bought for him. “I was going about my business near the huge river in the center of the great city, picking up goods from this merchant and that, loading up my cart with the things you like to buy in these parts when I kept bumping into people who urged me to go to St. Paul’s to see a band of strange pious folk, including many noblemen, who had come from the Low Countries, to take the sins of you and me on their shoulders and save us from the plague. So I hurried to that huge church and stood in the massive crowd of people gathered outside. All went silent as we heard the faint sound of beating drums and mournful chanting. As the drumming and chanting grew louder, I saw in the distance a host of brightly colored banners held aloft. And as they drew nearer I could see that those who bore them were followed by men carrying crosses, dressed in strange hoods and white cloth, and behind them the wondrous sight of a long procession of men of the brotherhood. The brethren were all dressed alike, and they marched in lines, moving in time with each other and with their chanting. As they drew close, I could see that each was barefoot and stripped to the waist, and wore a white cloth which hung down from loins to ankle. On their heads they had hats with a red cross painted on the front and back, and in their right hands they carried a whip with three thongs in it. The thongs were tied into a knot, and I saw that some of these whips had sharp needles inserted through the knots. They walked slowly, and as they did they whipped themselves with these scourges on their naked, bloody bodies. Four of the leaders chanted in their native tongue, and the rest answered as in a litany. Then, as we were crossing ourselves and praying, the procession stopped, and everyone in the procession threw themselves down on their faces on the street, making with their arms and bodies the shape of the cross. Then, still singing, beginning with the man at the end of the line, they each in turn stepped forward over the others, giving a stroke of the scourge to each man lying beneath, as they did so. And they did this until all those lying down had got up and performed the same ritual. This they repeated twice until, bloodied and weakened, they finally put on their usual clothes and retired to their lodgings.”
When the carter had finished his description, a dozen or more of his audience turned to Master John and demanded, “What does this mean? Is this what God wants us to do here in Walsham to stop the plague returning?” The priest could only answer, “These people cannot know the will of God better than the clergy and the highest leaders of the Church. They do these things ill-advisedly.”