The famous Order of the Garter had been established. Men were feasting and carousing, and were spending their days in brilliant festivals, while the shadow of a great calamity was creeping over the land. A terrible plague had broken out in the interior of Asia. It spread rapidly to Europe, devastated Greece and Italy, and passed on through France to England. Its coming is said to have been heralded by the most frightful signs. A stinking mist seemed to advance from the East and spread over Europe. Numerous earthquakes shook the Continent, and meteors of great size were seen. It was in August, 1348, that the plague first reached the shores of England. Three months afterwards it reached London.

We can hardly imagine the terror which the plague must have spread over the country. No one could feel himself safe from its ravages. Before the plague the population of England is supposed to have been 5,000,000; it is calculated that at least 2,500,000 persons perished of it.

The disease seemed to be a poisoning of the blood. It began with shivering, which was followed by a burning internal fever, and then boils of a black colour appeared upon the skin, whence it gained its name the "Black Death." Death often ensued after a few hours' illness. The terror of death only increased the danger, and gave rise to utter selfishness and recklessness. Men deserted those dearest to them when they were stricken by the plague; brothers deserted their sisters, husbands their wives, mothers their children. Some shut themselves up in utter solitude, and hoped, by living moderately and avoiding all contact with men, to escape the danger. Others indulged in the wildest dissipation, and strove to drown their anxiety by reckless drinking, and excitement of all kinds. The mere sight of a stricken person was supposed to be sufficient to communicate infection. No one ventured to walk abroad without bearing in their hands some pungent herb, the smell of which was believed to disinfect the pestilential air.

The rich shut themselves up in their castles, and in many cases succeeded in escaping infection. It was amongst the poor that the mortality was greatest. From the large number of parish priests who are known to have died of the plague, we are led to hope that they at least did not shun the danger, but went boldly amongst the sick and dying to administer the last comforts of religion. We know that seventeen out of twenty-one of the York clergy died during the pestilence. It was in the eastern counties that the mortality was the greatest. They were at that time the most thickly populated part of England. For many years there had been a slow and constant immigration of Flemings, who had been encouraged by the English kings to settle in England, that they might there establish their industries. From them the English had learnt weaving and commercial enterprise. The east, not the west, of England was then the centre of manufactures and industry. Norwich was a thriving manufacturing city, possessing sixty parish churches and sixteen chapels. There exists a record, stating that 57,374 persons died there of the plague. Norwich never recovered its prosperity. At the present day it has only thirty-six parish churches, in place of sixty before 1348. Yarmouth was of great importance as a station for the herring fishery; out of 10,000 inhabitants, it lost 7,000 by the plague. In Bristol, then one of the chief towns in England, the plague raged to such an extent that the living were scarcely able to bury the dead, and grass grew several inches high in the principal streets.

In London its ravages were terrible. The churchyards were filled to overflowing, and no longer sufficed. Sir Walter Manny bought a piece of land in West Smithfield to bury the dead, and built a chapel where masses should be said for the souls of the departed. This was the origin of the Charterhouse. Other persons also bought pieces of land for the same purpose, and fields were set apart where the dead were buried in large pits. Two successive Archbishops of Canterbury died of the plague, John de Ufford, and Thomas Bradwardine, one of the most learned men of his time. One of the king's daughters, the Princess Joan, died of it at Bordeaux, on her way to marry Don Pedro of Castile.

By many people the Black Death was looked upon as a scourge sent by God for the sins of mankind. A sect of fanatics, called the Flagellants, arose and wandered over all parts of Europe. There appeared in London, in 1349, a band of men and women, 120 in number, whose object was to expiate in their own persons the sins of the world. They wandered from town to town clad in sackcloth, with red crosses on their caps, chanting penitential hymns. From time to time they prostrated themselves upon the ground in the form of a cross, and took it in turns for one of their number to scourge their naked backs and shoulders. This process was repeated every morning for thirty-three days, the number of the years of Christ's life upon earth. Then the fanatics, having fulfilled the appointed penance, returned to their own homes, having in many cases inspired others to follow their example. So great was their enthusiasm that they seemed not to feel the stroke of the scourge, and sang their wild hymns only with greater exultation as the blood streamed from their shoulders. The following is a translation of a verse of one of their hymns:

In England they found no response to their enthusiasm. The people only gazed and wondered, and they departed without having gained any followers. In Germany their success was much greater.

The result of the Black Death in England was a social revolution, which changed the whole course of English history. It disturbed the existing relations of land and labour, by increasing suddenly the value of labour whilst it diminished the value of land. We cannot follow in detail the course of this revolution, but we can trace some of the causes which produced it. So large a number of the labourers had died of the plague, that there were none left to till the land. Flocks and herds wandered over the country with no one to tend them. The labourers, being few in number, demanded wages which the farmers were not able to pay and make a profit. Land consequently fell in value, and it became possible for one man to hold a large quantity of it. The small farms were broken up, as it was easier for a small farmer to gain his livelihood by working for another man than by attempting to get others to work for him, and make a profit out of his own land. Arable land was largely converted into pasture land, because pasture land required fewer labourers.

The immediate consequence of the plague was the outbreak of the first great conflict in the history of England between capital and labour. The free labourer at that time can hardly be said to have had a position recognised by law. According to the system of land tenure which had prevailed in England since its colonization by German tribes, the serf was bound to the land. He was not a slave in the sense that he could be bought or sold; but he was his lord's property, for he could not move from the soil on which he had been born: he was an outlaw if he attempted to leave it without his lord's permission. As time went on the serf had gained certain rights. The amount of service due by him to his lord had been limited by custom; he had a legal right to the piece of land on which his hut was built; the labour which he owed to his lord was, as it were, the rent he paid for his land.

In the twelfth century the custom began to be common for the lord, who was frequently for long periods absent on the Crusades or at war, to lease some of his land to tenants, instead of farming it all through bailiffs. This was found to be both easier and more profitable; and thus arose the farmer class. A still greater change was the gradual rise of the free labourer. The Church had long used its influence to urge men to give freedom to their serfs. It was possible also for a serf to gain freedom by living a year and a day within the walls of a chartered town. The tenants, as they increased in wealth and social importance, found the labour-rent more and more burdensome. On the other hand, the lords, owing to the increasing luxury of the time and to the expenses of chivalry and war, were continually in want of money. It became, therefore, the custom for the serfs to buy their freedom from their lords. Edward III. himself used to raise money by selling manumissions to his serfs. In time the labourer became detached from the soil, and could pass from one farm to another.

The scarcity of labour after the Black Death made the landholders feel how disadvantageous this system was to them. Formerly they could compel their serfs to work. Now they had to pay the labourers the wages which they asked, or allow their land to remain untilled, and the harvests to rot upon the fields. Government was, of course, in those days entirely in the interests of the landlords. To remedy the evil of high wages, the King assembled his council on the 14th June, 1349. The country was not yet sufficiently recovered from the plague to allow of Parliament being summoned. The council issued a royal ordinance, which was afterwards embodied in the Statute of Labourers.

The preamble of this statute gives us in a few words a vivid picture of the times. It states that "a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence. Many, seeing the necessity of masters and the great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages; and some are rather willing to beg in idleness than by labour to get their living." It then proceeds to ordain that all men and women who do not live by merchandise or by the exercise of any craft are to work for the same wages as they had received before the plague. They were to work first for their own lord, though he was not to retain more than he wanted. The statute went on to say that, "seeing that many sturdy beggars, as long as they can live by begging and charity, refuse to labour, no one, under pain of imprisonment, shall presume to nourish them in their idleness." Thus the law ordered that all men were to work; giving alms to beggars was forbidden; the scale of wages was fixed, and men were once more bound, at least in the first place, to work for their lord.

The fixing of the scale of wages by law could have no permanent effect. With the high price of provisions, which had resulted from the Black Death, it was impossible for men to live on the same wages as before the plague. We see by the repeated reinforcements of the statute during the reign of Edward III. how unsuccessful it was in obtaining the desired result. Still more galling to the labourer was the attempt made by this statute to bind him once more to the soil, and thus to rob him of his newly-acquired freedom. We cannot wonder that the Statute of Labourers produced a growing discontent amongst the labour class, which at last broke out in the peasants' revolt under Richard II.

The horrors of the Black Death had rudely disturbed the joy and prosperity of the English people. No greater contrast can be imagined than that between the condition of England in 1347, when the people revelled in the enjoyment of peace and of a luxury unknown before, and England in the beginning of 1350. More than half the people had died of the plague; even amongst the cattle the mortality had been very great. The looms stood silent for want of weavers; the harvests lay rotting on the fields for want of labourers; sheep and oxen wandered half wild over the country because there was no one to tend them. The country pulpits remained silent. The people as well as their sheep were without shepherds. All suits and pleadings in the King's Bench, and all sessions of Parliament, ceased for two years. War was impossible. France was decimated by the plague as much as England, and a truce for two years was concluded between the two countries.

The population soon recovered its losses. The nobles had suffered comparatively little by the plague, and soon returned to their luxurious amusements. Preachers and moralists might declaim against the extravagances of fashion and dress, and say that the plague had been sent as a scourge from God, but the nobles clung to their fashions all the same. It was the people who had suffered by the plague, and felt its effects. Wheat was scarce, the price of provisions was exorbitantly high, and yet the law was striving to diminish wages. The life of the agricultural labourer in those days was at best very wretched. The articles of diet were few. The people lived on salt meat half the year. They had neither potatoes, carrots, nor parsnips; their only vegetables were onions, cabbages, and nettles. Spices were quite out of the reach of the common people. Sugar was a costly luxury. We can hardly realize the dreariness of the long winter nights in the dark and ill-ventilated huts, from which the smoke escaped as best it could. The people must have spent much of their time in darkness, as candles were too dear for them to buy.

But wretched as his surroundings might be, the labourer was not without intelligence. It was his ambition to send one of his sons to the university, that he might become a priest. So general was this custom that Parliament petitioned Edward III. to prohibit it, because the landlords feared that thus they might lose useful labourers. The distress of the peasantry under the Statute of Labourers, and the tyranny and oppression of their landlords, soon led them to form combinations among themselves for the defence of their own rights. These combinations were maintained by subscriptions of money. We learn that the labourers gathered themselves together in "great routs, and agreed by such confederacy to resist their lords." These combinations paved the way for the revolt under Richard II. The agricultural labourers throughout the country could communicate with one another by means of preachers who wandered over the country, and who, being men of the people themselves, shared the interests of their class.

In attempting to form any true idea of the condition of the lower orders of society in those times, of their hardships and grievances, we are much aided by the poem of William Langland, called the Vision of Piers the Plowman. Langland himself was an obscure man, of whom little certain is known. He seems to have been born about 1332, and to have been a secular priest. Three versions of his poem exist, the first written in 1362, the last about 1380. It is a long poem written in the old alliterative metre, that is, the rhyme is at the beginning, not at the end of the words. From a literary point of view the poem possesses little charm; its great interest lies in the light it throws on the social condition of the times.

Langland is an austere reformer. He is not like Chaucer, who likes to look on the bright side of things, and to take a genial view even of men's failings and sins, and make fun of them. He wishes to make men better by showing them their sin in its darkest colours, and pointing out the contrast between it and the virtue they ought to attain to. The poem is one long testimony against the sins of the rich, against the sins of all who do not work. If Chaucer has any distinct wish at all to make men better, he only tries to do it by making their sins ludicrous. In Langland's poem we never lose sight of the moral; the poet has no other purpose in writing than moral teaching. What he wishes to teach is simply this, that all men must work, though the work must differ in kind according to the rank of the worker. The knight's duty is to guard the Church from "wasters," and help the farmer by killing the hares, foxes, and wild birds. The ladies are to sew chasubles, to spin wool and flax, to clothe the naked, and to help all those who work worthily. If men will not work otherwise, hunger must make them do so. There are to be no beggars; even hermits must seize their spades and dig.

The dinner provided for the labourers after they have worked, shows us what the peasants had to live on in those days. Piers says he had no geese nor pigs, only cheese, curds, cream, oatcake, and loaves of beans and bran; and for vegetables, parsley, leeks, and cabbages. Besides these the poor people bought peascods, beans, apples and cherries, to feed hunger with. These were the things on which they must subsist till harvest time; then they would have better food, and good ale too.

Langland tells us that the people were beginning to be discontented with this kind of food. The beggars would eat only the finest bread; the labourers grew dainty, and were not content even with penny ale and a piece of bacon, but wanted fresh flesh and fried fish, and grumbled about their low wages.

Langland is very bitter against the indulgences granted by the priests for men's sins. A man can only obtain pardon by good works. The merchants must trade fairly, must repair hospitals and broken bridges, must dower maidens and aid poor scholars. He is more severe upon the lawyers than upon almost any other class; they take bribes, and will never speak unless you give them money first; only those who plead the cause of the poor, and do not need to be bought, can be saved. With crushing severity he dwells continually upon the sins of the clergy, and, like Wiclif, wishes for the return of the apostolical purity of the Church. The pestilence, he says, came simply as a punishment for men's sins. The whole poem is full of allusions to the questions of the day, and the severity of its criticisms is relieved by no playfulness, hardly by a single touch of humour.

In the form of his poem, Langland has followed the fashionable poets of his day, and has adopted the machinery of a dream. All that he tells us passed before him in a vision. Some few touches show that he too was not wanting in some growing sense of the beauties of nature, particularly in the opening of the poem, when he tells us that he wandered on the Malvern Hills on a May morning. When weary of wandering, he laid himself down

It is only the form, however, that Langland has taken from the fashionable poets of his day; of their spirit he has nothing. The beautiful side of chivalry was quite lost to him. He saw only its dark side, the luxury and selfish idleness to which it had led. He is a voice from the people, and as such is doubly interesting to us, since most of the chroniclers and writers of those times entirely disregarded the people, and spoke only of the upper ranks of society.