CHAPTER VII
There is no need to rewrite the history of the Black Death: that has been admirably accomplished by Hecker and by Abbot Gasquet. It is still profitable, however, to investigate its by-effects in the domains of literature and art, and to consider its broad morbid features, as a contribution to the medical history of the time. The Black Death was the first great pandemic that left in its wake a complete and continuous succession of literary and historical records, in most points complementary, in some frankly contradictory, but for all that none the less instructive.
As to the starting-point of the pandemic there is a diversity of voices. Russian records place it in India, Greek in Scythia, English in India and Asiatic Turkey, Arabian in Tartary and the land of darkness. According to Italian tradition it originated in Cathay, to the north of China, and spread in every direction from that focus; northward by Bokhara and Tartary to the Black Sea; to India and the towns south of the Caspian, and to Asia Minor; and by way of Baghdad through Arabia and Egypt to the north of Africa. The leading contemporary Italian authority is Gabrielle de Mussi, a notary of Piacenza, who himself saw its outbreak in Upper Italy. In his ‘Ystoria de morbo seu mortalitate qui fuit a 1348’, first printed by Henschel in Haeser’sArchiv für die gesammte Medicin, he describes how the plague was brought by ship from Caffa; a Genoese settlement in the Crimea. The Tartar city Tana (Port Azov), that had been appropriated by Italian merchants, was besieged ina.d.1346 by an army of Tartars and Saracens. The Tartars expelled them, and followed them to Caffa, whither they had fled.Plague broke out fiercely among the besieging Tartars, who, in the hope of infecting the garrison, threw their dead bodies into the city by means of engines of war. The garrison in turn cast them into the sea, but the city became infected and almost completely depopulated, a few survivors taking ship and carrying the disease with them to Italy in the autumn ofa.d.1347. Speaking of the infection of Caffa, de Mussi says ‘the air became tainted and the wells of water poisoned, and in this way the disease spread rapidly in the city’. So the old idea of poison still prevails, but it is a virus derived from infected corpses, and not some extraneous poison compounded by a maleficent enemy. The poison was communicable also from man to man, for he says of the sailors coming from Caffa to Venice and Genoa that ‘as if accompanied by evil spirits, as soon as they approached the land, they were death to those with whom they mingled’.
These ships seem to have infected Constantinopleen route, and an account of its ravages there survives from the pen of the Emperor Cantacuzenus.[147]It is a mistake to regard his record as worthless material, because of its plagiarism of much of the language of Thucydides. In what is not appropriated from this source he gives a valuable clinical description of the disease. He notes the early low delirium, and distinguishes pneumonic, bubonic, and carbuncular types of the disease. He mentions cervical and axillary, but not inguinal buboes, and also the dark patches on the skin, that later came to be termed ‘tokens’. He also asserts the incidence of the disease on the domestic animals.
In making for Genoa these ships put in at Messina in Sicily and left the infection there. Michael Platiensis (of Piazza), a Franciscan friar, has given an account of its course in this city. He refers to infection by means of the breath, and by contact with the belongings of, the infected. Gabrielle de Mussi seems to hold a similar belief.‘We’ [i. e. the Genoese sailors], he says, ‘reach our homes: our kindred and our neighbours come from all parts to visit us. Woe to us, for we cast at them the darts of death! Whilst we spoke to them, whilst they embraced us and kissed us, we scattered the poison from our lips. Going back to their homes, they soon infected their whole families.’
De Mussi explicitly asserts that the plague was carried from the seaport of Genoa by some Genoese to Bobbio, and to his city of Piacenza. Here such was the mortality that ‘no prayer was said, no solemn office sung, nor bell tolled for the funeral of even the noblest citizen: but by day and night the corpses were borne to the common plague pit without rite or ceremony’.
So Italy had been primarily infected at Venice and at Genoa, and from these sea-coast cities the disease spread itself over the whole Italian peninsula.
At Venice the example of Galen had sunk deep into the hearts of her physicians. They fled before the advancing enemy and shut themselves up in their houses, leaving the surgeons, led by Andrea di Padova, to fill their place. Physicians would do well to bear this occasion in mind, when they complain of the encroachments of surgery into the domain of medicine. On March 30,a.d.1348, the Grand Council of Venice appointed three men to act as a Committee of Public Safety. These men had large burial-pits dug in one of the islands of the lagoon, and organized a service of boats to transport the bodies to them.
Rome was not so hard hit as some of the cities of Italy. Nevertheless, there remains to this day a monument of this plague in the flight of marble steps leading up to the church of Ara Coeli. These were set up by Giovanni de Colonna in October 1348, out of the spoils of the temple of the Sun on the Quirinal, and were designed for the use of the citizens, who with ropes round their necks and with ashes on theirheads climbed the hill barefooted, to implore from the Blessed Virgin the cessation of the plague. The thirteenth-century mosaic of the Madonna and Child may still be seen above the side entrance of Ara Coeli at the head of the well-worn stairs leading up from the Capitoline Piazza. The object of worship remains, but the worshippers are no more.
Lanciani[148]has reproduced an old engraving showing women ascending the marble stairs on their knees. This staircase would seem to be indicated both in Delaunay’s picture and in the fresco by which it was inspired.
There is a legend in Rome, that as the panic-stricken people were carrying an effigy of the Madonna from the Ara Coeli to St. Peter’s, the statue of the angel on the Castel S. Angelo bowed its head to do homage to it.
Plague was not the only enemy in Rome ina.d.1348, for a terrible earthquake on September 9 and 10 wrought havoc among the remaining monuments of ancient Rome. Those citizens, who had escaped the plague and from death among the falling ruins, lived for weeks in the open Campagna with no shelter from the inclemency of the weather. Perhaps it was this accident that served to bring the visitation to an end at Rome more rapidly than elsewhere.
Agnolo di Tura, in hisCronica Senese, edited by Muratori, gives a graphic picture of the Black Death in Siena. A large uninteresting picture in the church of S. Maria dei Servi depicts St. Catharine attending the plague-stricken, and there is an ugly, almost ludicrous, fresco of the same subject in the House of St. Catharine of Siena. The painter brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti were both carried off by plague. But it is in the Duomo itself that the mark of the Black Death is most apparent. Begun ina.d.1339, on the site of an older cathedral dedicated to the Madonna of the Assumption, the transepts were built, the foundations of the nave and choir were laid, and their walls partly raised according to the designs of LandoOrefice, when the Black Death broke out in the city ina.d.1348. The money collected for the building was diverted to urgent public purposes, and the work, once suspended, has never been completely accomplished. The present cathedral, splendid as it is, is a mere fragment of the magnificent fabric, in which Orefice purposed to enshrine a memorial to the glory of fourteenth century Siena.
The little Cappella di Piazza, attached as a loggia to the Palazzo Publico of Siena, was set up in gratitude for the cessation of the plague that carried off no less than thirty thousand persons. It was commenced ina.d.1352 and completed ina.d.1376. Hard by Siena the citizens of San Gimignano vowed an altar to St. Fabian and St. Sebastian as the price of their protection, and set it up between the doors of the Pieve or Collegiata. Above the place where once it stood is now the fresco of Benozzo Gozzoli, commemorating the plague ofa.d.1464.
No less a man than Petrarch[149]has chronicled this plague at Parma. His letter is in no sense descriptive, but rather a long-drawn-out wail over the devastation, the loss of friends and relations, and the magnitude of the destruction, that seemed to him to threaten the utter extinction of the human race. Affectation is the key-note of his lamentations, that are freely interspersed with allusions to the ancient classics. Laura had died of plague at Avignon ina.d.1348, and Petrarch in sadness of soul wrote these lines on the manuscript of his beloved Vergil, now in the Ambrosian Library at Milan:
‘Laura, illustrious by her virtues, and long celebrated in my songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth, the 6th April, 1327, at Avignon; and in the same city, at the same hour of the same 6th April, but in the year 1348, withdrew from life, whilst I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss. The melancholy truth was made known to me by letters, which I received at Parma on the 19th May.’‘Her chaste and lovely body was interred on the evening of the same day in the Church of the Minorites: her soul, as I believe, returned to heaven, whence it came.’‘To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in it something of a cruel sweetness, but I forget that nothing more ought in this life to please me, which by the grace of God need not be difficult to one who thinks strenuously and manfully of the idle cares, the empty hopes, and the unexpected end of the years that are gone.’
‘Laura, illustrious by her virtues, and long celebrated in my songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth, the 6th April, 1327, at Avignon; and in the same city, at the same hour of the same 6th April, but in the year 1348, withdrew from life, whilst I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss. The melancholy truth was made known to me by letters, which I received at Parma on the 19th May.’
‘Her chaste and lovely body was interred on the evening of the same day in the Church of the Minorites: her soul, as I believe, returned to heaven, whence it came.’
‘To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in it something of a cruel sweetness, but I forget that nothing more ought in this life to please me, which by the grace of God need not be difficult to one who thinks strenuously and manfully of the idle cares, the empty hopes, and the unexpected end of the years that are gone.’
The Florentines, by way of rehabilitating their city after the Black Death, founded a university, and offered Petrarch a professorial chair, which he declined.
Matteo Villani[150]wrote a plain unvarnished account of the state of Florence during the Black Death, but it has found little favour beside the lighter sketch that stands as a prelude to theDecameron. His brother Giovanni, the Florentine historian, was one of the early victims, and Matteo takes up his history at the point at which he left it, and begins with a description of the epidemic. Famine had preceded the plague, and like it was regarded as sent by Heaven for the punishment of sin. But the energy of the government, in importing corn and distributing it to the destitute, had done much to relieve the distress, when this worse enemy presented itself at the gates.
Both Villani and Boccaccio enlarge on the futility of all measures, preventive and remedial alike, and the intense infectiveness of the disease. They believed that it could be communicated by a look, as well as by contact with the person or belongings of an infected subject. Boccaccio mentions the speedy death of two pigs from rooting among some infected clothing. Some pinned their faith on strict seclusion: some on temperate living, some on intemperance: others sought safety in the carrying of aromatic substances. Both Villani and Boccaccio lay stress on the utter depravity and demoralization engendered by the plague.Great uncertainty of life has never failed to generate corresponding recklessness. It has always been the same tale in every desperate city; it was so when Jerusalem, panic-stricken at the threatened attack of Sennacherib, gave itself over to wild revelry: ‘And in that day did the Lord God of Hosts call to weeping and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth: but behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ Matteo Villani traces to the Black Death the social and moral degeneracy and the political anarchy, that were rampant in Florentine life, in the centuries that followed close upon it. Family affection is apt to reach its lowest ebb in the houses of a plague-stricken city. Villani and Boccaccio echo the language of Thucydides when they tell of parents deserting children, and husbands wives, in their hour of need, and the neglect of the sacred rites of sepulture. The plague raged in Florence from April to September, and Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, computes the mortality within the city at 60,000 persons, two-thirds of the total population. Boccaccio actually raises the figure to 100,000 between March and July only, but this figure, if correct, must comprise also the surrounding district, which suffered only less severely than the city itself. One bright record stands out against this dark background of social demoralization in the devotion of the Compagnia della Misericordia to their self-appointed task. Instituted ina.d.1244 for the service of the sick, they now also lent themselves to the transport of the dead. A picture by Cigoli (a.d.1559-1613), now in the church of the Misericordia, shows the brotherhood in red robes—now changed to black—gathering up the dead and dying at the foot of Giotto’s Tower. The bearers may be seen to this day in the streets of Florence in the same robes and hoods masking the whole face but the eyes, but thehand-litters and sedans of Cigoli’s picture have now been slung on wheels and sanctified to modern use with the addition of a motor ambulance. Great wealth flowed into the coffers of the guild from men who desired to crown a vicious life with a comfortable death and a decent burial.
The horrors of the plague-stricken city, with which Boccaccio has prefaced hisDecameron, stand out in striking contrast to the gay frivolity of the young men and women round whom his romance ranges. Plague and pleasure jostle each other in jarring juxtaposition. Boccaccio of set purpose chose this dark background for the staging of his brighter theme. Thucydides had done the same before him, in setting the panegyric of Pericles side by side with the plague of Athens: and Manzoni has done so after him in the romance ofPromessi Sposi. Perhaps also he had learnt, amid the fierce realities of the plague, to envisage life as it is, and so present it to his readers.
Niebuhr, in tracing the decadence of Roman literature to the Antonine plague, cites as a parallel illustration the influence of the Black Death on early Florentine literature. In the latter case, at any rate, it is difficult to bring his dictum into line with the actual circumstances. It would seem rather that the break in the vernacular Florentine literature after Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, was deliberate, and in no sense accidental. What Petrarch perceived, and perceived unerringly, was the poverty of the material on which the vernacular had maintained a starved existence; and he saw in the ancient classics, in their mythology, in their speculative freedom, in the principles of their art, liberation from the bondage that the Church had laid on literature. What he did not perceive was that in reverting to ancient modes of thought it was needless, nay even harmful, to adopt also the language of the ancients. It was not open to him to see, as it is to us, that no great work of literature has everbeen produced in any language but that in which the writer speaks and feels and thinks: any tongue but the tongue of his daily life must needs be artificial and inanimate. Petrarch himself little guessed that with posterity his fame would rest on hisRimein the vernacular, and not on his epistles and multifarious dissertations in a lifeless Latin language. It is this mistaken teaching of Petrarch that explains the abrupt break of a century or more in vernacular Florentine literature, to which the Black Death can have been at most a trivial contributory cause. As soon as this mistake came to be recognized Florentine literature flows on again in its old channel in the full stream of the fifteenth and sixteenth century masterpieces of Ariosto, of Tasso, and the rest. It was the advice of Petrarch that turned Boccaccio from the vernacular to Latin, after he had completed in hisDecamerona masterpiece of Italian prose. The influence of the classical revival that Petrarch had brought to life was destined also slowly to secularize Florentine art, but the time of its complete emancipation was not yet.
The Black Death first touched French soil at Marseilles, brought thither, it was thought, by ships from Genoa. Simon de Covino, a doctor, described the features of the disease as he witnessed it at the neighbouring town of Montpellier, in Latin hexameter verse. He clearly recognized its contagious character, for he says, ‘By a single touch or a single breath of the plague-stricken they perished.’
Of the plague at Avignon both lay and medical accounts survive. A full description is contained in a letter from an anonymous canon to his friends in Bruges. He remarks on the virulence of the contagion, and describes both pneumonic and bubonic types of the disease. He says that Clement VI ordered bodies to be examined after death, in the hope of discovering the origin of the disease. This fact should be noted by those who assert that the Church interpreted theDe Sepulturisbull of Boniface VIII (a.d.1300) as prohibiting the anatomyof human bodies. The autopsies disclosed no more than inflammation of the lungs in the pneumonic cases. Similar examinations, previously undertaken in Italy, had also yielded no better result. Clement also ordained expiatory processions and penitential litanies. Within the precincts of his palace, to which his medical attendant, Gui de Chauliac, confined him, he lent his own presence to the whole ceremonial that he prescribed. But he did not neglect to keep large fires alight in his apartments, as Pope Nicholas IV (a.d.1288-92) had done at Rome in a previous visitation. Only those who have been at Avignon at midsummer can appreciate the price that Clement was ready to pay for immunity.
Clement’s physician, Gui de Chauliac, says that the plague began at Avignon in January, and lasted for seven months.[151]In his view the causes of the pandemic were twofold: universal, consisting in a conjunction of the planets: and special, dependent on the feeble constitution of the individual, whereby it came about that labouring men were chiefly attacked. But then as now the scared populace was proof against pontifical pronouncements from the Chair of Medicine. They saw in it the handiwork of Jews spreading poison throughout the world, so they put them to death. They saw in it malevolence of lepers, so they drove them out. They saw in it a plot of feudal overlords for their extinction, so they remained within their houses. And for completer security they set a guard around the towns and villages, who accosted each newcomer and compelled him to swallow any ointments or powders found upon him.
De Chauliac describes two prevalent types of the disease. The one type, the pneumonic, prevailed only for the first two months, and was characterized by spitting of blood, extreme infectiousness, and death in three days. The second type, the bubonic, prevailed throughout thefive succeeding months, and was characterized by boils, by buboes chiefly in the armpits and groins, by slight infectiousness, and death in five days. The mortality extended to no less than three-fourths of the total population, so that to get rid of the bodies they were driven to throw them into the Rhone, after Clement had pronounced a blessing on its waters.
To Gui de Chauliac the best of all preservatives was flight, aided, or perhaps we should say embarrassed, by the free use of aloetic purgatives.
He did not fly himself, for he says, with thenaïvetéof a Pepys, ‘As for me, to avoid infamy, I did not dare absent myself, but still I was in continual fear.’ (Et moy pour euiter infamie, n’osay point m’absâter: mais auec continuelle peur me preseruay tant que ie peux, moyennant les susdicts remedes.) His hesitancy was to prove his undoing, for he was himself infected towards the end of the epidemic—but recovered after six weeks. Among other preservatives he reckons venesection, purification of the air by means of fires, comforting the heart with treacle and apples and things of savoury flavour, consoling the humours with Galen’s Armenian bole, and the prevention of putrefaction by the use of bitter things. Should the disease defy all these precautions, then he commends, as curative measures, bleedings and evacuations, with electuaries and cordial syrups. Buboes should be ripened with poultices of figs and boiled onions, pounded and mixed with leaven and butter: then they should be opened and treated like ulcers. Carbuncles are to be leeched, scarified, and cauterized—an improvement on the disastrous treatment meted out to Felix, bishop of Nantes, on a previous occasion.
Raymond Chalin de Vinario, another practitioner in Avignon during the plague, adds but little to what Gui de Chauliac has to say. He describes a solid cord, red or variously discoloured, which appeared in some cases on the body surface, with a carbuncle at one end and apestilential tubercle at the other. This can hardly have been anything else than an acute lymphangitis.
It is clear from the descriptions of the various writers that a large proportion of the cases in this pandemic were of pneumonic type: hence its virulence and its infectiousness.
Amid all the panic of the Black Death, persecution of the Jews broke out with even greater ferocity than during the Crusades in the twelfth century. Some victim was needed to appease the maddened populace: so the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, and even of infecting the air. Circumstantial accounts were circulated throughout Europe of secret operations directed from Toledo. The concoction of poisons from spiders, owls, and other supposed venomous animals was described, and its mode of distribution made known. So well did their accusers deceive themselves that in many places the springs and wells were sealed, so that no one might use them, and the inhabitants of many cities had to rely on rain and river water. If confirmation of poison were ever needed, the rack could be trusted to procure it: or, failing that, men could be found vile enough to deposit poison in places in which circumstances demanded its presence. Those who escaped the fury of the mob fell into the clutches of an inexorable justice. In the case of the Jews the suspicion of poisoning was prompted by the fact that at this time the practice of medicine, at any rate in southern Europe, was chiefly in the hands of Jewish physicians. Hideous massacres of Jews had taken place in southern France and Spain in the previous epidemics ofa.d.1320 and 1333, as we know from the writings of Rabbi Joshua.
The first outbreak of murderous ferocity seems to have occurred at Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, in September and October,a.d.1348. Here it was merely the culmination of an accusation of poisoningthe wells so long previously as the epidemic ofa.d.1320. In face of the common danger, high and low bound themselves together by a solemn oath to extirpate the Jews by fire and the sword. Chillon summoned Bern, and Bern sent on the summons to Basle, Freyburg, and Strasbourg to join them in their righteous task. The record of confessions extracted from the Jews by the ordeal of torture within the Castle of Chillon has been rescued from oblivion by the vigilance of Hecker.[152]In Basle and Freyburg the Jews were seized, one and all, and without form of trial were burnt to death in a wooden building, specially constructed for the purpose, while at Strasbourg no less than two thousand Jews were immolated on a wooden scaffold, erected in their own burial-ground. Such as escaped were ruthlessly murdered in the streets, saving a few only to whom freedom was granted on submission to baptism. But for these the respite from renewed accusation and death was only temporary. Faithlessness to their own religion, or physical charms sufficient to assuage the blood-lust of their Christian persecutors, constituted the only acceptable claims to a passing mercy. Strasbourg betrayed the true ground of its hatred of the Jews in an order of its senate that all pledges and bonds should be returned to the debtors and the money divided among the working-people. Those who were unwilling to soil their hands with blood-money presented their share of the spoils to monasteries, at the prompting of their confessors. At Spires, Mayence, and Eslingen, voluntary immolation in their own houses alone saved the Jews from more inhuman tortures. Some were murdered in the open streets and their dead bodies thrown into the Rhine in empty casks, so that they might not infect the air. Now and again banishment was substituted for burning, only for the outcasts to perish at the hands of a savage and blood-thirsty countryfolk.
When the houses of the Jews were burnt a ban was set on entry into the ruins of their habitations: the site was accursed, as the site of Jericho of old. But the bricks of the destroyed dwellings and the tombstones of the victims were in due time rendered as an acceptable thank-offering to God in the repair of Christian churches. In Austria the same accusations were brought against the Jews as elsewhere, and numbers were burnt to death in Vienna and throughout the country. Where there were no Jews, as in Leipsic, Magdeburg, and other places, the grave-diggers were accused of propagating the plague for their own sordid ends.
It should be set to the credit of Clement VI that he extended his personal protection to the Jews at Avignon, issuing two bulls, asserting their innocence, and calling on Christians to refrain from persecution. The Emperor Charles IV did what lay in his power, short of drawing the sword, to check the outrages perpetrated by the Bohemian nobles. Duke Albert of Austria exacted from the persecutors punishments only less cruel than they themselves had inflicted, but even so did not avail to save hundreds of Jews from the flames, in his own fortress of Kyberg. Other lesser princes, more often for bribes than for pity, extended some measure of protection to the wretched Jews, earning for themselves thesobriquetof ‘Jew-masters’. It was no light matter for a private person to shelter a Jew, for the penalty was often exacted on the rack or at the stake.
Basnage[153]states that the large number of Jews in modern Poland may be traced to the fact that King Casimir the Great (a.d.1333-70), yielding to the entreaties of a favourite Jewess, Esther, granted sanctuary to such Jews as sought it. But actually Casimir only confirmed an edict of protection promulgated ina.d.1264, and Poland had then already afforded ahaven of refuge to the Jews, who had fled from the cruel massacres perpetrated in the enthusiasm of the first Crusade.
In England the Black Death served to revive the perennial charges brought against the Jews—that they stole Christian children and killed them, especially at Easter-time, a charge that Chaucer, mindful of Hugh of Lincoln, has enshrined in the pathetic verse of his Prioress. They were charged also with outraging the Host, as well as with spreading poison.
The Black Death seems to have fallen with greater violence on Austria than on Germany,[154]perhaps on account of its close contact with Italy. It devastated Vienna from Easter to Michaelmas ofa.d.1349, carrying off thirty thousand out of a population of less than one hundred thousand persons. The excited populace personified it as the Pest-Jungfrau, who had only to raise her hand to infect a victim. She was to be seen flying through the air in the form of a blue flame, and also proceeding out of the mouths of dead and dying. Some saw the plague poison descend in the form of a ball of fire. One such was seen hovering over the town, but a bishop exorcised it by prayer, so that it fell harmless to earth. A stone effigy of the Madonna was set up in the street, where it fell. All medical aid proved useless, and amulets, potions, and preservative electuaries were in general use. Segregation of the sick was attempted, by nailing up doors and windows of infected houses, but even so dead bodies littered the streets. Huge plague pits were dug for the reception of the dead. Flagellant processions sought to excite divine compassion by the ritual of peripatetic penitence.
The genesis of the Flagellant movement must be looked for further back in the history of pestilence than the Black Death. The idea of mortifying the flesh by the penance of scourging is of ancient origin, and at least as early as the eleventh century brotherhoods were devotedto this ritual. The processions of theseDevoti, as they were termed in Italy, were originated by St. Anthony ina.d.1231, and we hear of them under the name of Flagellants in Vienna during the plague ofa.d.1261.
One Monachus Paduanus, quoted by Hecker, has left a record of the early days of theDevoti.
‘When the land was polluted by vices and crimes, an unexampled spirit of remorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians. The fear of Christ fell upon all: noble and ignoble, old and young, and even children of five years of age, marched through the streets with no covering but a scarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge of leather thongs, which they applied to their limbs, amid sighs and tears, with such violence that the blood flowed from the wounds. Not only during the day, but even by night, and in the severest winter, they traversed the cities with burning torches and banners, in thousands and tens of thousands, headed by their priests, and prostrated themselves before the altars. They proceeded in the same manner in the villages: and the woods and mountains resounded with the voices of those whose cries were raised to God. The melancholy chaunt of the penitent alone was heard. Enemies were reconciled: men and women vied with each other in splendid works of charity, as if they dreaded that Divine Omnipotence would pronounce on them the doom of annihilation.’
Before this mediaeval pageant of penitence the mind insensibly reverts to the ancient ritual of the Salii on this same Italian soil, to their choric hymn of expiation, to thesupplicationes, and to the love-feast of thelectisterniumof later days.
Under the stimulus of the Black Death, the Brotherhood of the Cross, or Cross-bearers, arose out of the ranks of the Flagellants, first in Hungary, and afterwards in Germany. Ditmar[155]has left the following account of their processions:
‘Their heads covered as far as the eyes: their look fixed on the ground, accompanied by every token of the deepest contrition and mourning. They were robed in sombre garments, with red crosses on the breast, back and cap, and bore triple scourges, tied in three or four knots, in which points of iron were fixed. Tapers and magnificent banners of cloth of gold were carried before them: wherever they made their appearance they were welcomed by the ringing of the bells: and the people flocked from all quarters, to listen to their hymns and to witness their penance, with devotion and tears.’
When the Flagellants entered the town they would hand the citizens a document setting forth God’s anger and determination to destroy mankind, had not the Virgin Mary interceded for them. Some of the crosses carried by the Flagellants are still to be seen at Gross-Glogau, Kaysersberg, and Ammerschweyer in Upper Alsace.
This spirit of religious fanaticism spread like wildfire through Hungary, Germany, Bohemia, Silesia, Poland, and Flanders, and even beyond these countries. In the autumn of 1349 some six-score Flagellants crossed from Holland and paraded the streets of London, but the metropolis had not then acquired the taste for processions, and ejected them as undesirable aliens. At last the movement had alighted on uncongenial soil. So great was the number of the Flagellants that they became a cause of well-founded anxiety to the clergy, whose churches they actually invaded, and whose influence they threatened to supersede. Their hymns were in every mouth, and one of them, the chief psalm of the Cross-bearers, is reproduced by Hecker in hisEpidemics of the Middle Ages.
The secular authorities also saw cause for alarm at the growing numbers and power of the brotherhood, bound together by common ritual and common regulations, and capable, under bold and designing leaders, of exerting their influence in the affairs of states. The Emperor Charles IV appealed to the Holy See for protection against the heretics, and Clement VI responded by issuing a bull from Avignon on October 20,1349, prohibiting the pilgrimages on pain of excommunication. Philip VI forbade altogether their reception in France, and several other ruling princes followed his example. Relentless persecution soon took the place of unthinking homage. The processions were abandoned, but the spirit that animated them was not dead, and the same fanaticism broke out again in Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in Italy even as late as the eighteenth, under the influence of successive plagues.
The Black Death, sweeping throughout England, is believed to have carried off one-half of the total population. Historians have told the tale of the resulting emancipation of the labouring class, but we find that it has also left its mark on the education, the literature, the art, and the architecture of England.
In education, it helped greatly to bring about the revival of English in the schools. After the Norman Conquest French had gradually become the language of education: not of set purpose, for the Conqueror himself tried ineffectually to learn English. But most of the education was in the hands of the clergy, and as many Frenchmen had been put in charge of monasteries and of parochial cures, it was inevitable that French should become the language of education, and so diffuse itself generally through the educated part of the nation, both French and English. About the middle of the fourteenth century Higden, in hisPolychronicon, states that French was still the language taught in the schools, and had been so since the Norman Conquest. Ina.d.1385 Trevisa, commenting on Higden’s statement, writes:
‘This maner was myche yused tofore the first moreyn [before the 1349 murrain], and is siththe som dele [since somewhat] ychaungide. For John Cornwaile, a maister of gramer, chaungide the lore [learning] in gramer scole and construction of [from] Frensch into Englisch, and Richard Pencriche lerned that manerteching of him, and other men of Pencriche. So that now, the yere of owre Lord a thousand thre hundred foure score and fyve, of the secunde King Rychard after the Conquest nyne, in alle the gramer scoles of England children leveth Frensch, and construeth an [in] Englisch.’
Despite the adoption of French as the language of the schools, English had survived as a colloquial language side by side with its supplanter. In the conflict between the two prestige and fashion were on the side of French, tradition and nationality on the side of English: and sooner or later the balance was bound to incline to the side of the national language. The fusion of the two had inevitably led to the corruption of each, but the corrupted French, at any rate after the loss of Normandy, had no standard of purity at hand to limit corruption, while the corrupted English was constantly purified by contact with the native tongue, and by the existence of a pre-Norman vernacular literature. National spirit, stimulated by international strife, was ripe for completing the task, that John Cornwall had begun in a single west country school; and the Black Death, by sweeping away the existing teachers and making place for others of native stock, did much to facilitate the change. The triumph of the vernacular operated a mighty revolution in our national literature, paving the way for Langland and Chaucer. Thomas Usk, in the Prologue to hisTestament of Love, completed not later thana.d.1387, alludes to the utter corruption of the imported French, and the Prioress in the Canterbury Tales, although she could speak French ‘ful fayre and festishly’ spoke it only
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,For Frenche of Paris was to hire [her] unknowe.
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,For Frenche of Paris was to hire [her] unknowe.
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,For Frenche of Paris was to hire [her] unknowe.
One other immediate effect of the Black Death was to reduce the literary output of the monasteries to its lowest level. No one can fail to be struck by the scantiness and sterility of the contemporary chronicles, which characterize the period following the Black Death,and the reasonable explanation of this abrupt change would seem to lie in the notorious depletion of the monastic households. The tragedy of the Provençal brotherhood, in which Petrarch’s brother and his dog alone survived to tend and guard the monastery, found an echo in a like desolation of many an English monastery. The special incidence on the monasteries was perhaps due to the monks moving freely among the sick, and giving them sanctuary within their cloister. The sick, too, exhibited often an ill-timed gratitude in bequeathing their clothes to the monasteries. Doctors, as Chaucer remarked of his day, were only for the rich.
In England, as in Italy, the Black Death left its mark on architecture in the abrupt arrest of schemes of construction in course of execution. Many such breaks may be detected in the church architecture of the fourteenth century, and a notable example is furnished in the unfinished towers of the church of St. Nicholas at Yarmouth.
Prior[156]indicates a similar break of continuity in the building of York Minster. The west front and the nave were in course of construction, when the Black Death appeared, and the result is a makeshift wood vaulting to the nave. Then the building of the choir was delayed for twelve years, tilla.d.1361, and in its structure the flowing lines of the Decorated style, seen in the west front, have given place to the formal stiffness of the Perpendicular.
In London the effect is much less conspicuous than in the northern parts of England, perhaps because it was easier to replenish the supply of masons in the metropolis than elsewhere. The building of St. Stephen’s Chapel in Westminster and the completion of the Abbey cloisters seem to have proceeded continuously, and with no change of style, throughout the Black Death and the following years: and the same is the case with Gloucester Cathedral.
Prior considers that the Black Death played a leading part in thesuperseding of the Decorated by the Perpendicular type, and in the diffusion of the latter from its Gloucester home throughout England. The lack of builders led to masons passing from one district to another, removing them from the conditions of local stone favourable to their best work and to originality of style. The inevitable result was that the architectural style easiest of expression in any form of stone was bound to prevail, and that style was the Perpendicular. Examples of this transformation in the years following close on the Black Death are numerous, in the nave and cloisters of Canterbury Cathedral, in the west front of Winchester Cathedral, and elsewhere.
The same stereotyped monotony, the same continuous decline in the skill of execution, the same obvious diminution of interest in the craft of the artificer, as is seen in the building construction, are manifest also in the figure-sculpture and traceries of the period. The variation of artistic expression, that in the two preceding centuries had progressed steadily from strength to strength, comes to an abrupt cessation, and is content with the incessant repetition of inanimate models.
‘The figure-sculpture[157]of the later mediaeval church under such conditions grew to be especially of the shop, according to pattern and not of fresh adventure. It no longer took its place in the business of the building-yard, but was provided for—not worked—in the building. The constructing mason left niches for statues, and on occasion worked bosses with subject relief, cornices with ‘angel’ sculpture, and gargoyles with ‘devil’ sculpture. But this figure work was not essential, and a whole majestic piece of architecture in Perpendicular style might rise from the ground and never ask for the craft of the figure-sculptor at all. The works of the imager were now in effect furniture, which could be bought in the city and added to the buildingat any time. Accordingly statues and reliefs ceased, in fifteenth century practice, to be carved immediately by the mason upon the building: they became outside works conceived in no intimate relation to it.’
Gasquet maintains that a similar breach of continuity may be observed in the manufacture of stained glass, and that there is a noticeable change in style after the Black Death. Speaking broadly, the styles of stained glass correspond to the styles of architecture, but in each case are a little later: so that the contention comes to this, that there is an unbridged gap between the late Decorated and early Perpendicular. Yet one cannot but recall the ante-chapel windows of New College, Oxford, and the east window of Gloucester Cathedral, in each of which the transition from Decorated to Perpendicular is apparent.