The Black Death (40 page)

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We have already referred to Mr Thompson’s analogy between the after-effects of the Black Death and the Great War of 1914–18.
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In both cases, he says, complaints of contemporaries were the same: ‘economic chaos, social unrest, high prices,
profiteering
, depravation of morals, lack of production, industrial
indolence
, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice, maladministration, decay of manners.’ In both the immense loss of life and ‘psychophysical shock’ made it a long time before the vitality and the initiative of the survivors was regained. In both the ‘texture of society’ was modified; new openings were created; the old
nobility
largely passed away and parvenu upstarts took their place; chivalry and courtesy vanished, manners became uncouth and brutal, refinement in dress disappeared. In both the
administrative
machine and the Church were almost crippled. Thousands of ignorant, incompetent, dishonest men were thrust abruptly into positions of authority far beyond their merit. In both, in a word, the whole population was ‘shell-shocked’, a state from which they were not fully to emerge for many years.

There is, of course, much which is exaggerated or unacceptable in this thesis. Neither after 1918 nor after 1350 did the ‘old
nobility
’ pass away; chivalry and courtesy did not vanish; dress and manners evolved, perhaps more dramatically than usual, but certainly not with the drastic absoluteness suggested by
Thompson.
But the analogy is still of value in that it conveys an
impression
, expressed in contemporary terms, of the magnitude of the experience in which medieval man had been involved. The two experiences are properly comparable but comparison can only show how much more devastating the Black Death was for its victims than the Great War for their descendants. Their chances of death were of course immeasurably higher; even the front-line infantry man had a better chance of surviving the war than the medieval peasant the plague. Another distinction
perhaps
even more important for the morale of those involved, was the omnipresence of the Black Death. The First World War was
more or less confined to contending armies on fixed battle lines; the second cast its net more widely but still left great areas
virtually
untouched. The Black Death was everywhere; in every hamlet and in every home. No escape was possible.

And then, in the Great War, the warring nations knew their enemies and knew, too, that they were merely mortal. They had a defined target to hate and to contend with. The plague victim could hate only his God or himself, with occasional not wholly convincing forays in persecution of Jews, lepers or other even less substantial surrogates. For the rest his affliction was totally
mysterious
and far the more dreadful for being so. And finally the Great War was spread over more than four years; for each
locality
the great pestilence worked its mischief in a tenth the time. It can be argued that protracted agony is worse than a sudden and explosive shock, but if one is considering the impact on the mind of the survivor then it is surely the second which will
produce
the graver consequences.

The ‘shell-shock’ which Mr Thompson finds in the survivors of the two catastrophes should therefore have been more violent and more lasting among those who endured the Black Death. But is this not particularly striking generalization of any value? What form did the ‘shell-shock’ take? Was it the kind of shock which galvanized into action or which stunned into apathy? Is it possible to detect any significant and consistent change in the attitude of medieval man between the first and second halves of the fourteenth century? Does the statement that modern man was forged in the crucible of the Black Death have any real
validity
? Does it, indeed, mean anything at all?

To some at least of these questions this book may provide a tentative answer. But it is only necessary to pose them to see how far we are, and will always be from a definitive solution. In a field so amorphous any attempt at the precise or the categoric would be futile. But if one were to seek to establish one
generalization
, one cliché perhaps, to catch the mood of the Europeans in the second half of the fourteenth century, it would be that they were enduring a crisis of faith. Assumptions which had been taken for granted for centuries were now in question, the very framework of men’s reasoning seemed to be breaking up.
And though the Black Death was far from being the only cause, the anguish and disruption which it had inflicted made the greatest single contribution to the disintegration of an age.

Jusserand’s classic description of the European in the second half of the fourteenth century captures admirably the twin
elements
of scepticism and timorous uncertainty. The generation that survived the plague could not believe but did not dare deny. It groped myopically towards the future, with one nervous eye always peering over its shoulder towards the past. Medieval man during the Black Death, had seemed as if silhouetted against a background of Wagnerian tempest. All around him loomed
inchoate
shapes redolent with menace. Thunder crashed, lightning blazed, hail cascaded; evil forces were at work, bent on his destruction. He was no Siegfried, no Brunnhilde heroically to defy the elements. Rather, it was as if he had wandered in from another play: an Edgar crying plaintively, ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold; poor Tom’s a-cold!’ and seeking what shelter he could against the
elements
.

Poor Tom survived, but he was never to be quite the same again.

T
HERE
are remarkably few full-length studies dealing with the Black Death as a whole or even in a country or group of countries. The most important of these is still that by Cardinal Gasquet though many of his facts have now been disproved and his conclusions shown to be invalid. Sticker’s study gives the widest coverage for Europe as a whole and Hoeniger’s for Germany. The others are of slight
importance.

More useful material on a national or international scale is often to be found in books not dealing exclusively with the Black Death (Coulton’s
Mediaeval
Panorama,
for instance, contains more of value than his monograph mentioned above) or in more recent essays and articles. In this and subsequent sections I have marked with an asterisk sources of particularly valuable information.

Among works on epidemiology, medical history or bubonic plague, those of particular relevance to the Black Death are:

Innumerable studies exist dealing in whole or in part with the Black Death or its effects in specific towns or areas. Some of these, for instance Dr Carpentier’s study of Orvieto, are of the greatest
importance
;
others contain little except an odd anecdote or two and some inaccurate statistics. All those cited below have contributed something of value to this book. The Victoria County Histories, though varying greatly in quality from county to county, are in general a source of much valuable material for England.