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The air is empoisoned, and each human being inhales death, even while in youth and health, their hopes are in the flower. We called to mind the plague of 1348, when it was calculated that a third of mankind had been destroyed. As yet western Europe was uninfected; would it always be so? O, yes, it would Countrymen, fear not!
Every topic seemed to lead to the forbidden enclosure. It was at a very critical moment that the Sculptor, sitting cross-legged on a bench, in a real Alma Tadema attitude, filled the dangerous pause with: "It was in the days of our Lord 1348 that there happened in Florence, the finest city in Italy "
Pursuing the course of these grand revolutions further, we find notice of an unexampled earthquake, which, on the 25th January, 1348, shook Greece, Italy, and the neighbouring countries. Naples, Rome, Pisa, Bologna, Padua, Venice, and many other cities, suffered considerably; whole villages were swallowed up.
By that of 1348, which came from the East along the lines of commercial travel, and spread all over Europe, one-third of the population of France was destroyed. Such was the condition of the peasantry, and of the common inhabitants of cities. Not much better was that of the nobles.
Returning to Holborn, from whence we have deviated, we come across Bartlett's Buildings, described by Strype as a very handsome, spacious place very well inhabited. Thavie's Inn bears the name of the vanished Inn of Chancery. Here was originally the house of an armourer called John Thavie, who, by will dated 1348, devised it with three shops for the repair and maintenance of St. Andrew's Church.
As no one meddled much with the villeins before 1349, all went well until after Crecy, but in 1348 the Black Death ravaged England, and so many laborers died that the cost of farming property by hired hands exceeded the value of the rent which the villeins paid. Then the landlords, under the usual reactionary and dangerous legal advice, tried coercion.
The Florentines who stand in the market niches are Bernardo Cennini, a goldsmith and one of Ghiberti's assistants, who introduced printing into Florence in 1471 and began with an edition of Virgil; Giovanni Villani, who was the city's first serious historian, beginning in 1300 and continuing till his death in 1348; and Michele Lando, the wool-carder, who on July 22nd, 1378, at the head of a mob, overturned the power of the Signory.
The exact date of the frescoes executed by Agnolo Gaddi is not known, but, according to Vasari, he was called to Prato after 1348. An inscription in the chapel refers them to the year 1390, a date too late to be relied on.
Matters continued to grow steadily worse until the middle of the fourteenth century. During the year 1348 there were no less than eleven variations in the value of money in France; in 1349 there were nine, in 1351 eighteen, in 1353 thirteen, and in 1355 eighteen again. In the course of a single year the value of the silver mark sprang from four to seventeen livres, and fell back again to four.
In 1348 the first Slavic university was founded in Prague, on the plan of those of Paris and Bologna, by the Emperor Charles IV., who united the crowns of Germany and Bohemia. The influence of this institution was felt, not merely in the two countries, but throughout Europe.
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