Chapter VII: The Prophet of Walnut-Tree Yard (5)

Such hopes and fears and provocations as these all contributed to relieve the monotony which it has been too readily assumed was the characteristic of the cloister life. The monks had a world of their own within the precincts, but they were not so shut in but that their relations with the greater world outside were very real. Moreover, that confinement to the monastery itself, which was necessarily very greatly relaxed in the case of the officers or obedientaries of the convent, was almost as easily relaxed if one of the brethren could manage to get the right side of the abbot or prior. When Archbishop Peckham was holding his visitations in 1282 he more than once remarks with asperity upon a monk _farming_ a manor of his convent, and declares that the practice must stop. The outlying manors must have somebody to look after them, it was assumed, and if one of the brethren was willing to undertake the management for the convent, why should he not?

Nor, again, must we suppose that the monks were debarred all amusements. On August 29, 1283, there was a great wrestling match at Hockliffe, in Beds, and a huge concourse of people of all sorts were there to see the fun. The roughs and the "fancy" were present in great force, and somehow it came to pass that a free fight ensued. I am sorry to say that the canons of Dunstable were largely represented upon the occasion. We are left to infer that the representatives were chiefly the servants of the canons, but I am afraid that some at least of their masters were there too. In the fight one Simon Mustard, who appears to have been something like a professional prize-fighter, "a bully exceeding fierce," says the annalist, got killed; but thereon ensued much inquiry and much litigation, and Dunstable and its "religious" had to suffer vexations not a few. In fairness it should be remembered that these Dunstable people were not monks but canons--regular or irregular--and those canons, we all know, would do anything. We protest against being confounded with canons!

The amusements of monks were more innocent. The garden was always a great place of resort, and gardening a favourite pastime. We may be sure there was much lamentation and grumbling at St. Alban's when Abbot John de Maryns forbade any monk, who from infirmity could only be carried on a litter, from entering the garden at all. Poor old fellows! had their bearers been disorderly and trodden upon the flower-beds? Bowls was the favourite and a very common diversion among them; but in the opinion of Archbishop Peckham, as appears by his letters, there were other diversions of a far more reprehensible character. Actually at the small Priory of Coxford, in Norfolk, the prior and his canons were wholly given over to chess-playing. It was dreadful! In other monasteries the monks positively hunted; not only the abbots, but the common domestic monks! Nay, such things were to be found as monks keeping dogs, or even birds, in the cloister, Peckham denounces these breaches of decorum as grave offences, which were not to be passed over and not to be allowed. What! a black monk stalking along with a bull-pup at his heels, and a jackdaw, worse than the Jackdaw of Rheims, using bad words in the garth, and showing an evil example to the chorister boys, with his head on one side!

But, after all, it must be confessed that the greatest of all delights to the thirteenth-century monks was eating and drinking. "Sir, I like my dinner!" said Dr. Johnson, and I don't think any one thought the worse of him for his honest outspokenness. The dinner in a great abbey was clearly a very important event in the day--I will not say it was _the_ important event, but it was a _very_ important one. It must strike any one who knows much of the literature of this age that the weak point in the monastic life of the thirteenth century was the gormandizing. It was exactly as, I am told, it is on board ship on a long voyage, where people have little or nothing to do, they are always looking forward to the next meal, and the sound of the dinner-bell is the most exciting sound that greets the ear in the twenty-four hours. And so with the monks in a great monastery which had grown rich, and in point of fact had more money than it knew what to do with: the dinner was the event of the day. It is not that we hear much of drunkenness, for we really hear very little of it, and where it is spoken of it is always with reprobation. Nor is it that we hear of anything like the loathsome and disgusting gluttony of the Romans of the empire, but eating and drinking, and especially eating, are always cropping up; one is perpetually being reminded of them in one way or another, and it is significant that when the Cistercian revival began, one of the chief reforms aimed at was the rigorous simplification of the meals and the curtailing the luxury of the refectory.

But the monks were not the only people in those times who had a high appreciation of good cheer. When a man of high degree took up his quarters in a monastery he by no means wished to be put off with salt-fish-and-toast-and-water cheer. Richard de Marisco, one of King John's profligate councillors, who was eventually foisted into the see of Durham, gave the Abbey of St. Alban's the tithes of Eglingham, in Northumberland, to help them to make their ale better--"taking compassion upon the weakness of the convent's drink," as the chronicler tells us. The small beer of St. Alban's, it seems, was not so much improved as was to be desired, notwithstanding this appropriation of Church property, for twice after this the abbey had the same delicate hint given to it that its brewing was not up to the mark, when the rectory of Norton, in Hertfordshire, and two-thirds of the tithes of Hartburn, in Northumberland, were given to the monastery that no excuse might remain for the bad quality of the malt liquor.

And here let me remark in passing that another wide-spread delusion needs to be removed from the popular mind with regard to the relations between the monks and the clergy. We have again and again heard people say, "Wonderfully devoted men, those monks! Look at the churches all over the land! If it had not been for the monks how could all the village churches have been built? The monks built them all!" Monks build parish churches! Why, the monks were always robbing the country parsons, and the town parsons, too, for that matter. Every vicarage in England represents a spoliation of the church, whose rectorial tithes had been appropriated by a religious house, the parson being left with the vicarial tithes, and often not even with them, but thrown for his daily bread upon the voluntary offerings of his parishioners. The monks build churches! I could not from my own knowledge bring forward a single instance in all the history of England of a monastery contributing a shilling of money or a load of stone for the repair, let alone the erection, of any parish church in the land. So far from it, they pulled down the churches when they had a chance, and they were always on the look-out to steal the rectory houses and substitute for them any cheap-and-nasty vicarage unless the bishop kept a sharp look-out upon them and came to the help of his clergy. Of all the sins that the monks had to answer for, this greedy grasping at Church property, this shameless robbery of the seculars, was beyond compare the most inexcusable and the most mischievous. To the credit of the Cistercians it must be told that they _at first_ set themselves against the wholesale pillage of the parochial clergy. I am not prepared to say they were true to their first principles--no corporate society ever was, and least of all a religious corporation--but at starting the Cistercians were decidedly opposed to the alienating of tithes and appropriating them to the endowment of their abbeys, and this was probably one among other causes why the Cistercians prospered so wonderfully as they did during the first hundred years or so after their first coming here; people believed that the new order was not going to live by robbing parsons, as the older orders had done without remorse. The swindler always thinks his victim a fool, and the victim never forgives the smarter man who has taken him in. Accordingly the monks always pretended to think scorn of the clergy, and when the monasteries fell the clergy were the very last people to lament their fall.

And this brings us to the question of the moral condition of the monasteries. Bishop Stubbs has called the thirteenth century "the golden age of English Churchmanship." Subject to correction from the greatest of England's great historians--and subject to correction, too, from others, who, standing in a rank below his unapproachable eminence, are yet very much my superiors in their knowledge of this subject--I venture to express my belief that the thirteenth century was also the golden age of English Monachism. Certainly we know much more about the monasteries and their inner life during this period than at any other time. The materials ready to our hand are very voluminous, and the evidence accessible to the inquirer is very various. I do not believe that any man of common fairness and candour who should give some years to the careful study of those materials and that evidence could rise from his examination with any other impression than that, as a body, the monks of the thirteenth century were better than their age. Vicious and profligate, drunken and unchaste, as a class, they certainly were not. Of course there were scandalous brethren. Here and there--but rarely, very rarely--there was a wicked abbot or prior. Of course there were instances of abominations on which one cannot dwell; of course there are stories which are bad to read; stories which find their way into the chronicles because they were strange or startling; but these stories are always told with horror, and commented upon with severity and scorn. Excuse for wickedness or any palliation of it, you simply never find.

On the other hand, the intense _esprit de corps_ of a convent of monks went beyond anything that we can now realize, and led to grave sins against truth and honesty. The forgeries of charters, bulls, and legal instruments of all kinds for the glorification of a monastery by its members was at least condoned only too frequently. It can hardly be doubted that the scriptorium of many a religious house must have been turned to very discreditable uses by unscrupulous and clever scribes, with the connivance if not with the actual knowledge of the convent, for such things were not done in a corner. If the forgeries succeeded--and that they often did succeed we know--the monastery got all the advantage of the rascality; no inquiry was made, and it was tacitly assumed that where so much was gained, and the pride of "our house" was gratified, the end justified the means.

There remains one question which may suggest itself to our minds as it has often suggested itself to others. From what class or classes in society were the monks for the most part taken? This is one of the most difficult questions to answer. The late Dr. Maitland, who perhaps knew more, and had read more, about monks and monasteries than any Englishman of his time, professed himself unable to answer it; and my friend Dr. Luard--whose labours in this field of research have gained for him a European reputation, and whose wonderful industry, carefulness, and profound knowledge, qualify him to speak with authority on such a point, if any one might pronounce upon it--hesitates to give a decided opinion. The impression that is left upon my own mind is, that the thirteenth-century monk, as a rule, was drawn from the gentry class, as distinguished from the aristocracy on the one hand, or the artisans on the other. In fact, _mutatis mutandis_, that the representatives of the monks of the thirteenth century were the Fellows of Colleges of the nineteenth before the recent alteration of University and College statutes came into force. An ignorant monk was certainly a rarity, an absolutely unlettered or uneducated one was an impossibility, and an abbot or prior who could not talk and write Latin with facility, who could not preach with tolerable fluency on occasion, and hold his own as a debater and man of business, would have found himself sooner or later in a very ridiculous and very uncomfortable position, from which he might be glad to escape by resignation.

* * * * * * *

Three centuries after the time we have been considering, the religious houses were suppressed--to use that euphonious term which has become universally accepted--only after they had existed in these islands in one form or another for at least a thousand years. Century after century monasteries continued to spring up, and there never was much difficulty in finding devout people who were ready to befriend a new order, to endow it with lands, and to give it a fair start. In other words, there was always a _demand_ for new monasteries, and the first sure sign that that demand had been met, and more than met, was when the supply of monks began to fall short, and when, as was the case before the end of the fifteenth century, the religious houses could not fill up their full complement of brethren. Is it conceivable that this constant demand could have gone on, unless the common sense of the nation had been profoundly convinced, and continuously convinced, that the religious orders gave back some great equivalent for all the immense surrenders of wealth which generation after generation of Englishmen had made--some equivalent for all the vast stream of benefactions which flowed on from age to age so strongly that kings and statesmen had to interfere and check, if it might be, the dangerous prodigality of lavish benefactors? What that equivalent was, what the real work of the monasteries was, what great functions they discharged in the body politic, what the nation at large gained by their continuance and lost by their fall--these are questions which on this occasion I am not concerned with, and with which I scrupulously forbear from dealing. But there are moments when a great horror comes upon some men's minds, and a vision of a lonely and childless old age rises before them in the gloom of a dreary twilight, or when the mists of autumn hide the sunbeams, and they think, "If desolation were to come upon our homes, where could we hide the stricken head and broken heart?" To that question--a morbid question if you will--I have never found an answer. The answer was possible once, but it was in an age which has passed away.

Yes, that age has passed away for ever. History repeats itself, it is true, but history will not bear mimicry. In every melody that wakes the echoes there is repetition of this note and that, the same single sound is heard again and again; but the glorious intertwinings of the several parts, the subtle fugues and merry peals of laughter that "flash along the chords and go," the wail of the minor, as if crying for the theme that has vanished and yet will reappear--"like armies whispering where great echoes be"--these things are not mere repetition; they are messages from the Eternal Father to the sons of men, reminding them that the world moves on. Merely to ape the past, and to attempt to reproduce in the nineteenth century the tree that had taken a millennium to grow into its maturity in the thirteenth and was rudely cut down root and branch in the sixteenth, is about as wise as it would be to try and make us sing the Hallelujah Chorus in unison! Let the dead bury their dead.

Meanwhile the successors of the thirteenth-century monasteries are rising up around us each after his kind; Pall Mall swarms with them, hardly less splendid than their progenitors, certainly not less luxurious. Our modern monks look out at the windows of the Carlton and the Athenæum with no suspicion that they are at all like the monks of old. Nor are they. They lack the old faith, the old loyalty to their order, and with the old picturesqueness something else that we can less afford to miss--the old enthusiasm. We look back upon the men of the thirteenth century with much complacency. A supercilious glance at the past seems to give the moderns an excellent opinion of themselves. But suppose the men of the thirteenth century could turn the tables upon us, and, from their point of view, pass their judgment upon the daily life of the conventuals of St. James's, who are, after all, only survivals, but just conceivably not quite survivals of the fittest; would the monks of old find all things quite up to the highest ideal, or would they hide their heads in shame and confusion of face compelled to acknowledge that the new is in all things so much better than the old?

IV.

THE BLACK DEATH IN EAST ANGLIA.

"So they died! The dead were slaying the dying,
And a famine of strivers silenced strife:
There were none to love and none to wed,
And pity and joy and hope had fled,
And grief had spent her passion in sighing;
And where was the Spirit of Life?"

From across the Channel during the last few months [Footnote: February, 1884.] there have come to us tidings of a visitation of pestilence which have seemed to some men very disquieting, and to some heavy with menace. From Italy, the land beyond the Alps; from Spain, the land beyond the Pyrenees; from seaports in France and cities of the plain, we hear that the cholera has been striking down its victims. The Phantom with the deadly breath has shown strange caprice in his coming and going; but when he has been suspected to be nigh at hand, wild-eyed Panic has shown herself as of old. It is sad and discouraging to find that, spite of all our boasted progress--all that science has taught us, and all that we are supposed to have learnt--the attitude of the multitude when certain dangers threaten, appears to be as it was, and that we still hear of shuddering wretches trying to fight a dreaded enemy by letting off old muskets and drenching portmanteaus with Condy's fluid.

Such things have been before. Must they recur again? Philosophers comfort us with the assurance that our brains are larger than those of our forefathers. Nay, that the convolutions of the said brains are more complex. How about the _moral fibre?_ Are we never to have stouter hearts or more "bowels and mercies?" In the face of the same circumstances, will men for ever show themselves the same? Or is it that all these stories of mad stampedes and of chaotic anarchy breaking loose here and there--anarchy gibbering, blind, profligate and senselessly cruel--are true only of exceptional communities, as yet unaffected by the great lift which optimists confidently believe in, and which they unhesitatingly assure us is steadily going on?

The cholera has abated, we are told; as we were told it would. Thus far we in England have escaped its ravages. Experts--and experts are the people whose vocation it is to speak without doubt or hesitation whenever they speak--experts assure us that London was never more free from cholera than during this present summer. Other experts--they too speaking with authority--confidently affirm that our time is coming, that a severe visitation is impending; that all we have heard of hitherto of the ravages of the epidemic elsewhere, will prove but child's play in comparison with that which we shall hear of by and by. "And then, sir, you'll see!" That is a comforting assurance--at any rate, _some_ of us will survive.

But what do we know of the march of any mysterious form of death that has ever appeared in bygone ages, suddenly starting up and striding over the earth--"the land as a garden of Eden before him, and behind him a desolate wilderness?" We have most of us read of such frightful visitations in Thucydides, in Ovid, in Virgil, in Lucretius, not to mention the moderns; but if any of us were to write down the sum and substance of his knowledge, and attempt to discover from any trustworthy evidence the nature, the course, and the intensity of any great plague that has ever proved a real scourge upon any large section of the human race, what would his summing-up amount to? How long would it take to write; or rather, when it was written, how long would it take to read?

This island of Great Britain has more than once been visited by pestilence. De Foe has left us an inimitable romance, which he calls "The History of the Plague in London in 1665." How much or how little of sober fact there may be in those thrilling incidents, worked up so marvellously by the great novelist, it is impossible to say. That there is at least as much of fiction as of fact in the book none can doubt. The author was a child when the plague was raging--a child of two years' old, toddling about the butcher's shop. The plague of 1665 did not travel far; out of London its incidence was comparatively trifling. The cholera has visited us again and again, but never on a scale to demoralize the people at large. Only once in our history has the destroyer passed over England, leaving probably no shire unvisited by his awful presence, and no parish in which there was not one dead. It is never fair to draw inferences from the silence of historians; but it is at least significant that among all contemporary writers who have made mention of the Black Death--as it has been agreed to call it--the Black Death in the reign of Edward III.--there is little mention of any panic, few ugly tales of desertion of the dying, no flagrant instances of miserable creatures crying that the wells were poisoned. On the contrary, we have proof that as a rule men died at their posts during all that trying time, that those in authority never lost their heads, and that though there must, of course, have been isolated cases of abject fear, expressing itself in the maddest extravagances of despair, yet we have to look long and look far and wide to find such cases--and after all our search may be fruitless.

As yet the history of the Black Death can hardly be said to have been investigated at all; and until specialists can be prevailed upon to examine the evidence ready at hand, we shall continue to be put off with mere generalities when we ask for more light upon a calamity which was the most stupendous that ever befell this island.

* * * * * * *

We have all heard of Boccaccio's _Decameron_--only naughty people have _read it_--and how it was written when the plague was raging at Florence, the great plague that carried off Petrarch's Laura, and those other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then and knows nothing now. Some, too, have heard that the plague swept over Europe--desolating, devastating--the spectre with the swinging scythe mowing down broad swathes of men. Some, when they hear of it, picture to themselves Pope Clement VI. at Avignon, sitting in that vast palace that overlooks the Rhone, the stench of corpses mastered for him by the fragrant smoke of aromatic logs burning in huge pyres round about him night and day. Some have heard of Giovanne Villani, the historian of Florence, who wrote feebly about that same pestilence in his native city, and who doubtless would have written more, and more plainly and more strongly, but that in the midst of his writing Azrael touched him too, and his pen fell from his hand. [Footnote: Muratori, "Rerum Italicarum Scriptores," vol. xiii. pp, 1-771.] Some few, again, have a faint recollection of that Emperor of the West, John Cantacuzene, who ruled at Constantinople when the plague was, and who wrote about it. [Footnote: His four books of Histories are to be found in the "Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae."] Didn't he? Nay! Hadn't he a son, Andronicus, who died of it? How did it come to pass that Gibbon did not so much as allude to it? Some, peradventure, think of Rome and of Rienzi, and how it was about that time that he was potent, or was he in hiding there among the Fraticelli? And isn't there something too about the plague visiting Greenland, and putting back the clock that was moving on steadily, but which suddenly stopped? How vague we are!

* * * * * * *

What was this plague? How did it strike men down?

"It showed itself," says Boccaccio, "in a sad and wonderful manner; and _different from what it had been in the East_, where bleeding from the nose is the fatal prognostic, here [at Florence] there appeared certain tumours in the groin or under the armpits, some as big as an apple, others as big as an egg; and afterwards purple spots in most parts of the body: in some cases large and but few in number, in others less and more numerous, both kinds the usual messengers of death... They generally died," he adds, "the third day from the first appearance of the symptoms, without a fever or other bad circumstance attending."

"It took men generally in the head and stomach, appearing first in the groin," says Villani, "or under the armpits, by little knobs or swellings called kernels, boils, blains, blisters, pimples, or plague-sores; being generally attended with devouring fever, with occasional spitting and vomiting of blood, whence, for the most part, they died presently or in half a day, or within a day or two at the most."

Less precise and minute is the description of the great surgeon, Guido de Chauliac, who nobly stayed at Avignon for the six months during which the visitation was at its worst; but he too mentions the carbuncular swellings in the axillae and the groin, the purple spots, and the violent inflammation of the lungs, attended by fatal expectoration of blood.

As for the Emperor John Cantacuzene, his description is so flagrantly a mere adaptation of the history of the plague at Athens by Thucydides that it must be received with caution. It is only in what it omits and in what it adds to the older narrative that it possesses any great historic value. It agrees with the accounts quoted above in making mention of the swellings, the blood-spitting, and the awful rapidity with which the disease ran its course. It omits all mention of the eruption on the surface of the skin, the flushed eyes, and, above all, the swollen and inflamed condition of the larynx, the cough, the sneezing, and the hiccough, which Dr. Collier found so significant.

Comparing, then, the several accounts which have come down to us, meagre though they are, it ought to be possible to arrive at some conclusions regarding the nature of the plague of the fourteenth century which, for the pathologist, would amount to certainties. The wonder is that such men as Dr. Hecker and his learned translator should have shown so much reserve--not to say timidity--in pronouncing judgment upon the question.

A layman runs a risk of incurring withering scorn at his presumption, and ridicule at his ignorance who ventures to express an opinion--or to have one--on any subject which the medical profession claims as within its own domain; and I should not dare to speak otherwise than as a very humble inquirer when the learned are silent. There are, however, some conclusions which may be accepted without hesitation and which will be admitted by all.

I. The Black Death was _not_ scarlatina maligna, as the plague at Athens undoubtedly was. [Footnote: "The History of the Plague of Athens," translated from Thucydides by C. Collier, M.D., London, 1857.]

II. It was _not_ small-pox.

III. It was _not_ cholera.

IV. It probably _was_ a variety of the Oriental plague, which has reappeared in Europe in more modern times, and regarding which they who wish to know more must seek their information where it is to be found.

The next question usually asked is, Where did the new plague come from? And here the answer is even more uncertain than that to the other question--What the great plague was.

In fact, a careful comparison of such testimony as comes to hand leaves the inquirer in a very perplexed condition, and inclines him rather to accept than reject the old-fashioned theory of a "general corruption of the atmosphere" as the only working hypothesis whereby to account for the startling spontaneity of the outbreak and its appearance at so many and such distant points at the same time.

The Imperial author, who appears to have done his best to gather information, evidently found himself quite baffled in his attempt to follow the march of the plague. It had originated among the Hyperborean Scythians; it had passed through Pontus, and Libya, and Syria, and the furthest East, and "in a manner all the world round about." Other writers are just as much in the dark as Cantacuzene, and it seems mere waste of time to endeavour to arrive at any conclusion from data so defective and statements so void of historical basis as have come down to us. This only seems established, that during the year 1347 there was great atmospheric disturbance extending over a large area of Southern Europe, and resulting in extensive failure of the harvest, and consequent distress and famine; and that in January, 1348, one of the most violent earthquakes in history wrought immense havoc in Italy, the shocks being felt in the islands of the Mediterranean, and even north of the Alps.

It is at least curious that the date of the earthquake coincides very closely with the date which has been given by Guido de Chauliac for the first appearance of the plague at Avignon. He tells us expressly that it broke out in that city in January, 1348, and I think it would be difficult to produce trustworthy evidence of any earlier outbreak than this, at any rate, in Europe. [Footnote: One of our monastic chroniclers states expressly that it began about St. James's Day in 1347. I _feel_ certain that the date is wrong, and that it could be proved to be wrong without much difficulty by reference to documentary evidence which might be consulted.] "It appeared at Florence," says Villani, "at the beginning of April, and at Cesena, on the other side of the Apennines, on the 1st of June." It is asserted that it reached England at the beginning of August, is said to have lingered for some months in the west, and to have devastated Bristol with awful severity.

There can be no doubt that in the towns of Italy and France there was a dreadful mortality; but when we are told that 100,000 died in Venice, and 60,000 in Florence, and 70,000 in Siena, it is impossible to accept such round numbers as anything better than ignorant guesses. Whether the great cities of the Low Countries were visited by the pestilence with any severity, or how far the towns of Germany were affected, I am unable to say, nor am I much concerned at present with such an inquiry; that I leave to others to throw light upon. But as to the progress, the incidence, and the effect of the Black Death in England--when it came and where it showed itself, how long it lasted, and what effects followed--on these questions the time has come for pointing out that we have a body of evidence such as perhaps exists in no other country--evidence, too, which hitherto has hardly received any attention, its very existence entirely overlooked, forgotten, nay! not even suspected.

* * * * * * *

Let us understand where we are, and look about us for a little while.

When King Edward III. entered London in triumph on the 14th of October, 1347, he was the foremost man in Europe, and England had reached a height of power and glory such as she had never attained before. At the battle of Creçi France had received a crushing blow, and by the loss of Calais, after an eleven months' siege, she had been reduced well-nigh to the lowest point of humiliation. David II., King of Scotland, was now lying a prisoner in the Tower of London. Louis of Bavaria had just been killed by a fall from his horse, the Imperial throne was vacant, and the electors in eager haste proclaimed that they had chosen the King of England to succeed. To their discomfiture the King of England declined the proffered crown. He "had other views." Intoxicated by the splendour of their sovereign and his martial renown, and the Success which seemed to attend him wherever he showed himself, the English people had gone mad with exultation--all except the merchant princes, the monied men, who are not often given to lose their heads. They took a much more sober view of the outlook than the populace did--they had an eye to their own interests and the interests of the trade and commerce in which they were engaged. They were very much in earnest in asserting their rights and protesting against their wrongs, and they presented their petitions to the King after the fashion of the time--petitions which must have seemed rather startling protests in the fourteenth century, betraying, as they did, some advanced opinions for which the world at large was hardly then prepared.

Students of the manual, compendium, and popular handbook style of literature may possibly be hardly aware that the war of protection _versus_ free trade, and the other war concerned with the incidence of taxation upon property, real and personal, had already begun. Even my distinguished friend, Mr. Cadaverous, who never made a mistake in his life, and whose memory for facts is portentous--even Mr. Cadaverous assures me that he has never met with any mention of the above fact in all his study of history.

History! What is history but the science which teaches us to see the throbbing life of the present in the throbbing life of the past?

Note that these "gentlemen of the House of Commons," who made themselves somewhat disagreeable in the Parliament of 1348, were not the warriors who had gone out to fight the King's battles, but the burghers who stayed at home, heaped up money, and grumbled. It was otherwise with the roistering swash-bucklers who came back in that glorious autumn. They are said to have returned laden with the spoils of France, the plunder of Calais, and so on and so on. Calais must have been rather a queer little place to afford much _plunder_ after all that it had gone through. The swash-bucklers doubtless brought prize-money home, but it did not all come from France--that is pretty certain. Villani, our Florentine friend, tells us of an unexampled commercial crisis at Florence about this time--brought about, observe, by the English conqueror of France not paying his debts. So the Bardi and the Peruzzi actually stopped payment; for the King owed them a million and a half of gold florins, and there was lamentation and distress of mind, and the level of the Arno rose by reason of the flood of tears that fell "from tired eyelids upon tired eyes." All that made no difference to the swash-bucklers, and up and down England there was wild extravagance, and money seemed to burn in people's pockets. Feasting and merriment, and all that appertains thereto, were the order of the day, and all went merry as a marriage bell.

The King got all he could get out of the Parliament, but he did not get, he could not get, all he wished. What was to be done next? The Pope said, "Make peace!" and his Holiness did his little best to bring about the desired end. The summer of 1348 had come, and it seems that at Avignon the plague had by this time spent itself, people were no longer afraid to go there now, and the Pope would peradventure come out of his seclusion and receive an embassy. So on the 28th of July Edward III. wrote a letter to Pope Clement, and announced his intention of sending his ambassadors to Avignon to treat about terms. The negotiations fell through, and on the 8th of October the King announced by proclamation that he was once more going to make an inroad upon France with an armed force. He did not keep his word. In November a truce was patched up somehow; and on the first of the next month we find the King once more at Westminster, and there he seems to have remained over Christmas. If the dates are correctly given, the news from the west of England about this time was not likely to have provoked much merriment.

Are the dates correct? Gentlemen of an antiquarian turn of mind, out in the west there, might do worse than spend some weeks in looking into this matter.

Meanwhile, it is at this point that we get our first direct, unquestionable proof, that the plague had reached our shores. On the 1st of January, 1349, the King wrote to the Bishop of Winchester, informing him that although the Parliament had been summoned to meet on the 19th of the month, yet because a _sudden visitation of deadly pestilence had broken out at Westminster and the neighbourhood,_ which was increasing daily, and occasioning much apprehension for the safety of any great concourse of people, should it assemble in that place at the time appointed; therefore it had been determined to prorogue the Parliament to Monday, the 27th of April.

I gather from the wording of this document that the Government did not look upon the outbreak with any very grave apprehension, that they did not regard it as anything more than an epidemic which would be confined to narrow limits, and one likely to pass off after a little time as the spring advanced; and that they can hardly as yet have received any very disturbing intelligence of its ravages, such as must have soon come in from all points of the compass. Two months passed, and the situation had seriously changed. On the 10th of March the King issued another letter, in which, after referring to the previous proclamation, he further prorogued the meeting of Parliament _sine die._ The reason for this step is explained to be "because the deadly pestilence in Westminster, _and in the City of London,_ and in other places thereabouts, was increasing with extraordinary severity" _(gravius solito invalescit)._

It is to be observed that, in the first notice of prorogation, no mention is made of the City of London, only of Westminster and its neighbourhood. In the second, we hear that the plague had already extended over a wider area, and was showing no signs of abating. Nay, by this time the King and his advisers had taken alarm--there was no knowing where the mortality would stop.

Two days after this (12th of March, 1349) William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich, received his letters of protection as ambassador for the King in France. His safe conduct--for himself and his suite--was to extend till Whitsuntide next ensuing (31st of May, 1349). The suite consisted of eight persons, all Norfolk men; two were wealthy laymen, two were distinguished ecclesiastics, three were country parsons, of one I know nothing. I believe they all got back safely, but the three country parsons returned to their several cures only to be smitten by the plague. The Bishop had not shown himself again in his diocese many weeks before they were all three dead. In making this last statement, I am a little anticipating the course of events, but only a little. The Angel of Death moves at no laggard pace when once he begins his march with his sword drawn in his hand.

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Thus far I have been quoting from, or referring to, authorities which are accessible to any one with an adequate command of books at his elbow--the chroniclers and the historians named, the Foedera, the Rolls of Parliament, and such authorities as whoever chooses may consult for himself. These printed authorities, which have all been consulted and looked into again and again, have told us very little, but they have given us certain notes of time--furnished us, in fact, with a _terminus a quo_. We have learnt this, at any rate, that about Christmas, 1348, the plague appeared at Westminster and its vicinity, and that it had increased alarmingly in London and elsewhere by the beginning of March, 1349.

We have next to deal with that other evidence to which I have alluded--the unprinted documentary evidence ready to our hands--I mean the Institution Books in the various Diocesan Registries and the Rolls of the Manor Courts, which still exist in very great abundance, though they are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. It is necessary that I should trespass upon my reader's attention while I endeavour to explain the nature and the value of these two classes of documents before proceeding to deal with their testimony.

I. Students of English history know that few aggressions of the Pope of Rome during the thirteenth century caused more deep discontent among the laity than those which threatened interference with their right of patronage to ecclesiastical benefices, and actually did interfere with those rights. The disgraceful recklessness with which Italians, ignorant of our language, were forced into English livings, and the best preferment was claimed for Papal nominees, produced an amount of irritation and revolt against Roman interference which had never been known before. The feeling of the laity became more and more outspoken, and at last Innocent IV. gave way, and the rights of private patronage were assured to the great lords--assured, at any rate, in word--though the Papal rescript "paltered with them in a double sense" and the quibbles and reservations, which could always be resorted to under colour of the _non obstante_ clause, constantly afforded excuse for fresh encroachments and evasions when the opportunity occurred. The jealousy of Roman interference continued to increase, and the legislation of the first half of the fourteenth century was largely taken up with enactments to guard the rights of English patrons, from the King downwards. But there was always a feeling of insecurity on the part of those who had any benefices in their gift, and a corresponding feeling on the part of those who were candidates for preferment. This led to a vicious system, whereby appointments were made with almost indecent haste to every vacant cure; institution was granted to an applicant for a benefice with the least possible delay after a vacancy had once been made known; the patron was willing to exercise his right in favour of any one, rather than not exercise it at all; the candidate for the living knew that it was a case of now or never; the Bishop had nothing to gain, and something to fear, from asking too many questions; and there is some reason to think that the parishioners had more voice in the matter than they have now. That followed which was likely to follow, namely, that the institutions to vacant benefices were made as a rule within a very few weeks, or even days, after the death of an incumbent. A man who had got his nomination lost no time in presenting himself to the Bishop. There was no widow or family of his predecessor to consider; and for every reason, the sooner the new man got into the parsonage the better for all parties concerned. Moreover, to guard against all chances of a disputed claim, the Bishops' Registers of Institution were kept with the most scrupulous care, and while enormous masses of ecclesiastical records in every diocese in England have perished, the Institution Books have been preserved with extraordinary fidelity, have survived all the troubles and wars and spoliation that have gone on, and, speaking within certain limits, have been preserved for five hundred years from one end of England to the other. It is no exaggeration to say that there are hundreds of parishes in England of whose incumbents for centuries not only a complete list may be made out, but the very day and place be set down where those incumbents received institution into the benefice either at the hands of the Diocesan or his official. This is certainly the case in the great East Anglian diocese of Norwich, which comprehended, in the fourteenth century, the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk and a portion of Cambridgeshire. We may safely say that we are able to tell approximately--within a few weeks or days--when any living fell vacant during the period under review, who succeeded, and who the patron was who presented to the cure. Nor is this true only of the secular or parochial clergy. Jealous as the religious houses were of their rights and privileges, the heads of monasteries, as a rule, were compelled to receive institution too at the hands of the Bishops of the see in which they were situated. They too presented themselves to their Diocesan that their elections might be formally recognized; and thus the Institution Books contain not only the records of the various changes in the incumbency of the secular clergy, but also of such as were occasioned by the death of all abbots, or priors or abbesses as presided over that large number of religious houses as were not exempt from Episcopal jurisdiction. It is obvious that these Records constitute an invaluable body of evidence, from which important information may be drawn regarding our parochial and ecclesiastical history. The Institution Books, as might be expected, contain a great deal of curious matter besides the mere records of admission to benefices, but with this I am at present not concerned.

II. I come now to the Court Rolls, which throw much more light upon our parochial history than any other documents that have come down to us; their information is concerned exclusively with the civil, domestic, sometimes with the political life of our forefathers; about their religious life, or their contentions with ecclesiastics, they have rarely a word to say.

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All who have at any time owned or purchased what is known as copyhold land might be supposed to know something of the nature of the title on which such land is held. If they do not it is not for want of being reminded from time to time, in a very vexatious way, that they are in theory and in fact not so much owners of their several holdings as _tenants_ of the Lord of the Manor to which such holdings appertain. But inasmuch as a great deal of ignorance prevails as to the nature of this tenure, and as it is impossible to estimate the value and importance of the evidence which the Rolls of the Manor Courts supply in the inquiry on which we are engaged, I feel it necessary to introduce at this point a few paragraphs introductory to and explanatory of what follows.

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In the thirteenth century it may be said that _in theory_ the land of England belonged to the sovereign. The sovereign had indeed assigned large tracts of territory to A or B or C; but under certain circumstances, of no very unfrequent occurrence, these tracts of territory came back into the hands of the sovereign, and were re-granted by him at his will to whom he chose. In return for such grants, A or B or C were bound to perform certain _services_ in recognition of the fact that they were _tenants_ of the king; and by virtue of such _services_-the equivalents of what we now understand by _rent_-they were called _tenants in chief_, or tenants _in capite_.

The tracts of territory held by A or B or C were in almost every case made up of lands scattered about over all parts of the kingdom. The tenant in chief had his castle or capital mansion, [Footnote: Experts will object to the use of this term and other terms as strictly inaccurate. I am not writing for experts.]which was supposed to be his abode; but as far as the larger portion--immensely the larger portion--of his possessions, he was necessarily a non-resident landlord, getting what he could out of them either by farming them through the agency of a bailiff, or letting out his estates to be held under himself in precisely the same way as he held his _fief_, or original grant, from the King.

_In theory_, the tenant in chief could not sell his land; he could sublet it to a _mesne tenant_, who stood to himself precisely in the same relation as he--the tenant _in capite_--stood to the sovereign, the mesne tenant in his turn being bound to render certain _services_ to his over lord, and liable to forfeit his _lease_--for in theory it was that--if certain contingencies happened. It was inevitable that, as time went by, the mesne tenant should regard his estate as his own, and that the same necessities which compelled the tenant _in capite_ to relax his hold over an outlying landed estate would compel the mesne tenant to follow his example. The process went on till it was becoming a serious difficulty to discover how the King was to get his _services_ from the tenant _in capite_, who had practically got rid of two-thirds of his _fief_, and how he again was to get _his services_ from the mesne tenant, who had parted with two-thirds of _his_ estate to half a dozen under tenants. Obviously, when the King's _scutage_ had to be levied, there was no telling who was liable for it, or how it should be apportioned.

It was to meet this difficulty, and to check the prevailing sub-division of land--_sub-infeudation_ men called it then--that the statute of _Quia Emptores_ was passed in the eighteenth year of King Edward I. [A.D. 1290]. The result of all the sub-division that been going on had been that the number of what we now call _landed estates_ had largely increased, each of them administered on the model of the larger _fiefs_ originally granted to the tenants _in capite_. There was a capital mansion in which the _lord_ resided, or was supposed to reside, and sub-tenants holding their land under the lord, and paying to him periodically certain small money rents and rendering him certain _services_. The _estate_ comprehended the capital mansion with its appurtenances and the domain lands in the lord's occupation, the common lands over which the tenants had certain common rights, and the lands in the occupation of the tenants, which they farmed with more or less freedom for their own behoof,--the whole constituting a manor whose owner was the lord. At certain intervals the tenants were bound to appear before their lord and give account of themselves; bound, that is, to show cause why they had not performed their _services_; bound to pay their quit rents, whether in money or kind; bound to go through a great deal of queer business; but above all, as far as our present purpose is concerned, _to do fealty_ to the lord of the manor in every case where the small patches of land had changed hands, and pay a fine for entering upon land acquired by the various forms of alienation or by inheritance. In some manors, if a tenant died the lord laid claim to some of his live stock as a _heriot_, which was forthwith seized by the bailiff of the manor; and in all manors, if a man died without heirs, his land _escheated_ to the lord of the manor; that is, it came back to the lord who _in theory_ was the owner of the soil.

These periodical meetings at which all this business and a great deal else was transacted were called the _Courts_ of the Manor, and the Records of these Courts were kept with exceeding and most jealous scrupulousness; they were invariably drawn up in Latin, according to a strictly legal form, and were inscribed on long _rolls_ of parchment, and are known as Manor Court Rolls. This is not the time to say much more about the Court Rolls. They are not very easy reading--they require a somewhat long apprenticeship before they can be readily deciphered; but when one has once become familiar with them, they afford the student some very curious and unexpected information from time to time, though it must be allowed that you have to do a good deal of digging for every nugget that you find.