Europe: A History (84 page)
Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed
Or to victorie.
14
‘We are resolved never to submit to English domination,’ the Scots lords informed the Pope in the Declaration of Arbroath (1320); ‘we are fighting for freedom, and freedom only.’
15
Their cause was finally vindicated in 1328.
The wars of England and Scotland had direct repercussions in Ireland. In 1297, Edward I’s viceroy in Dublin, Sir John Wogan, had set up an Irish parliament in imitation of the ‘model parliament’ in London. But the English defeat at Bannockburn gave the Irish lords the opportunity to rebel, and for three years, 1315–18, they accepted a Scottish Bruce as king. Subsequent decades of turmoil were not brought to an end until the Statute of Kilkenny (1366) limited English rule and the English language to Dublin and to a surrounding Pale of Settlement.
The ‘Black Death’ of 1347–50 stopped Europe’s petty troubles in their tracks. Here was a pandemic of plague such as the world had not seen since the sixth century and was not destined to see again till the 1890s. It was fuelled by a devastating brew of three related diseases—bubonic plague, septicaemic plague, and pneumonic or pulmonary plague. The first two variants were carried by fleas hosted by the black rat; the third, airborne variant was especially fast and lethal. In its most common bubonic form, the bacillus
pasteurella pestis
caused a boil-like nodule or bubo in the victim’s groin or armpit, together with dark blotches on the skin from internal haemorrhage. Three or four days of intolerable pain preceded certain death if the bubo did not burst beforehand.
Medieval medicine, though generally conscious of infection and contagion, did not comprehend the particular mechanisms of the plague’s transmission. Doctors watched in anguish. Crowded tenements and poor sanitation, especially in the towns, provided excellent encouragement for the rats. The result was mass mortality. Boccaccio wrote that 100,000 died in Florence alone. Eight hundred corpses a day had to be buried in Paris. ‘At Marseilles,’ wrote the cynical English chronicler, Henry Knighton, ‘not one of the hundred and fifty Franciscans survived to tell the tale. And a good job too.’
16
The pandemic, which began in central Asia, spread with frightening speed. Initially it had turned east, to China and India; but it was first reported in Europe in the summer of 1346, at the Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea, which was under siege by the Tartars. The besiegers catapulted plague-ridden corpses into the city to break its resistance; whereupon the defenders took to the galleys, and rowed for safety. In October 1347 the plague reached Messina in Sicily. In January 1348 it reached Genoa, by way of a well-authenticated galley from Caffa. Expelled from its home port by the terrified citizens, the stricken galley sailed on to Marseilles and to Valencia. That same winter the plague struck Venice and other Adriatic cities, before moving on to Pisa, Florence, and central Italy. By the summer it was in Paris, and by the end of the year it had crossed the English Channel. 1349 saw it march northwards across the British Isles, eastwards across Germany,
and south-eastwards into the Balkans. 1350 saw it entering Scotland, Denmark, and Sweden and, via the Hansa cities of the Baltic, Russia. There were few places which stayed inviolate—Poland, the county of Béam in the Pyrenees, Liège.
MONTAILLOU
B
ETWEEN
1318 and 1325 Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers in the Pyrenean county of Foix, conducted a campaign of inquisition into the revival of heresy in his diocese. In 370 sessions he examined 114 suspects, 48 of whom were women, and 25 from the village of Montaillou. All the questions and all the answers were recorded in the Bishop’s Register.
Montaillou was a community of some 250 souls drawn from 26 main clans known as
ostal
or
domus
, living in perhaps 50 separate households. It sprawled down the hillside from the castle at the top to the church at the bottom. Its inhabitants were mainly peasant farmers and craftsmen. There was also a strong contingent of transhumant shepherds, who were organized into
cabanes
or ‘folds’ working the pastures and trails leading into Catalonia. Though officially Catholic, they were in large part secret Cathars, who hid the itinerant
Perfecti
in their barns and cellars. Their natural feuds and rivalries were intensified by fears of the Inquisition, whose arrests during the last visitation in 1308 had turned the village into ‘a desert for sheep and children’. The Register has served as a sort of ‘historical microscope’, revealing every detail of the villagers’ lives. ‘Montaillou is only a drop in the ocean,’ wrote its celebrated historian, ‘but we can see the protozoa swimming about in it.’
1
The twenty-two members of the
ostal
of the Clergues dominated the village. Old Pons Clergue, a die-hard heretic, had four sons and two daughters. One son, Pierre, the priest of Montaillou, was a flagrant womanizer who died in prison. Another son, Bernard, the
bayle
or manorial bailiff, eventually suffered the same fate after elaborate attempts to save his brother by suborning witnesses. Pons’s widow, Mengarde, the matriarch of Montaillou’s heretics, was none the less buried under the altar of the parish church. One of the priest’s many lovers, Béatrice de Planissoles, a noblewoman, was first married to Bérenger de Roquefort, the castellan and agent of the Count of Foix. Twice widowed, she became the accepted concubine of the priest’s bastard cousin, Pathaud, who had once raped her. She took numerous bed-partners, even as an old lady, bore four daughters, and revealed all to the Inquisition. In 1322 she was condemned to wear the double yellow cross of the repentant heretic,
[
CONDOM
]
The religious practices of the Cathars were heatedly discussed during the long fireside talks of the winter, and during long, intimate delousing sessions. They betrayed a two-tier system of morality—extremely severe for the
Perfecti
and extremely lax for the laity. At the end of their lives the former submitted to the
endura
, a last act of suicidal ritual fasting. The laity sought to be ‘hereticated’, that is, to receive the ritual
consolamentum
or ‘absolution’.
The dilemmas inherent in a part-Cathar and part-Catholic community were illustrated by the incident of Sybille Pierre’s infant daughter, who had been administered the
consolamentum
. The
Perfectus
forbade the sick baby to receive milk or meat. ‘When [they] had left the house, I could bear it no longer,’ the mother related, ‘I could not let my daughter die before my eyes. So I put her to the breast. When my husband came back … he was very grieved.’
2
Everyday life in medieval Occitania exuded a special emotional climate. People could weep quite openly. They saw no sin in sexual liaisons that were mutually pleasurable; they were not driven by any developed work ethic; and they had a marked distaste for conspicuous wealth. They had large numbers of children to compensate for high infant mortality; but they were not indifferent to their losses. They lived in a complicated world of belief where magic and folklore mingled with Catholicism and heresy. And they were frequently visited by death.
Bishop Fournier’s career was not damaged by his zeal at Pamiers. He rose to Cardinal in 1327, and Pope, as Benedict XII, in 1334. His Register found its way into the Vatican Library. His most lasting monument is the Palais des Papes at Avignon.
One of the best attempts to describe the plague was made by a Welsh poet, Ieuan Gethin, who saw the outbreak in March or April 1349:
We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling of the armpit … It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion, a small boil that spares no-one. Great is its seething, like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of ashy colour … They are similar to the seeds of the black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea-coal … cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries …
17
Popular reactions to the plague varied from panic and wild debauchery to dutiful fortitude. Many who could flee, fled. Boccaccio’s
Decameron
is set among a company of men and women incarcerated in a country castle for the duration of the plague. Others, losing the sense of restraint, indulged in orgies of drink and lechery. The clergy often suffered disproportionately from tending their flock. Elsewhere they left the sick to shrive themselves, the black flag flapping forlornly from the abandoned parish churches. The conviction reigned that God was punishing mankind for its sins.
Calculating the losses is a difficult, and highly technical, task. Contemporary estimates are often, and demonstrably, exaggerated. Boccaccio’s report of 100,000 dead in Florence exceeded the total known population of the city; 50,000 may be nearer the mark. Generally speaking, the towns were hit more severely than the countryside, the poor more than the rich, the young and fit more than the old and infirm. No pope, no kings were stricken. In the absence of anything resembling a census, historians have to base their calculations on fragmentary records. In England they use the court rolls, the payment of frank-pledge dues, post mortem inquisitions, or the episcopal register. Specific studies can suggest very high rates of mortality: the manor of Cuxham in Oxfordshire lost over two-thirds of its inhabitants;
18
the parish priests of England were reduced by 45 per cent. But it is hard to extrapolate any general conclusions. Cautious estimates suggest overall losses of one-third. ‘That one European in three died during the Black Death … cannot be wildly far from the truth.’
19
This works out at 1.4–2 million deaths in England: 8 million in France, perhaps 30 million for Europe as a whole.
The social and economic consequences of such gigantic losses must have been very far-reaching. Indeed, the Black Death was conventionally seen by historians as the decisive point in the decline of the feudal system in Western Europe. The second half of the fourteenth century was clearly a period of manorial dislocation, of languishing trade, of labour shortages, of urban distress. Yet nowadays specialists tend to argue that many of the changes were visible before 1347. Even basic demographic decline had set in at least thirty years before. This means that the Black Death was the accelerator of existing processes rather than their originator. At all events, serfs were increasingly commuting their labour dues for money rents, thereby creating a more mobile, and less dependent, labour force. Feudal vassals were increasingly commuting their military and judicial obligations for cash payments, thereby creating a phenomenon which in England has been called ‘bastard feudalism’. Above all, in a labour market deprived at a stroke of manpower, wages were sure to rise with rising demand. The money economy was expanded; social barriers were threatened,
[
PROSTIBULA
]
The psychological trauma ran deep. Though the Church as an institution was weakened, popular religiosity increased. Charity foundations proliferated. Intense piety came into fashion: people felt that God’s wrath must be placated. In Germany, huge companies of flagellants flourished until suppressed on orders from Avignon. Communal scapegoats were sought. In some places lepers were picked on; elsewhere the Jews were charged with poisoning the water. In September 1348 a trial of Jews at Chillon was supported by evidence extracted by torture. It was the signal for wholesale pogroms: in Basle, all the Jews were penned into wooden buildings and burned alive; similar scenes occurred in Stuttgart, Ulm, Speyer, and Dresden. Two thousand Jews were massacred in Strasbourg: in Mainz as many as 12,000. The remnants of German Jewry fled to Poland—henceforth the principal Jewish sanctuary in Europe,
[ALTMARKT] [USURY]
PROSTIBULA
T
HE
terminal period of medieval Europe, from 1350 to
c
.1480, ‘was a golden age of prostitution’.
1
Prostibula publica
, public brothels, were licensed to operate in most towns. A small place like Tarascon, with 500 or 600 households, supported ten municipal whores. The Church did not protest: since the evil existed, it had to be channelled. Licensed fornication tempered street disorder, diverted young men from sodomy and worse, and broke them in for conjugal duty. After 1480, practice changed. Expensive courtesans served the rich, but many whorehouses were closed down. In Protestant countries, fallen women were liable to re-education.
2
Throughout history, prostitution circulates through phases of licensed control, futile proscription, and unofficial toleration.
Popular risings were a prominent feature of the period following the Black Death. Demands on the surviving peasants soared, and a decimated labour force resented attempts to hold down wages, as in England’s Statute of Labourers (1351). A peasant
jacquerie
ravaged the castles and families of the nobility in the lle de France and Champagne before being cruelly suppressed. But the rash of risings in the years 1378–82, exactly one generation after the plague, does seem symptomatic of some general social malaise. Marxist historians have seized on the events as evidence of the ‘timeless characteristics’ of class warfare. Others have dismissed them as ‘outbursts of anger without a future’.
20
Yet contemporaries had good reason to take fright when the endemic disorders of the towns were fused with more widespread violence in the countryside. In 1378, during the revolt of the
ciompi
or wool-carders, Florence was taken over for several months by riotous elements. In 1379 the weavers of Ghent and Bruges rose against the Count of Flanders in a vicious outbreak reminiscent of an earlier episode in the 1320s. Both culminated in pitched battles with the royal army, and once again, Ghent held out for six years. In 1381 several counties of England were drawn into the Peasants’ Revolt; in 1382 it was the turn of Paris:
