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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.
So far from it, such records of the years 1349 and 1350 as I have examined are fuller than ever of fights and quarrels At Lessingham, about Christmas time, 1349, there was a free fight of a most sanguinary character, men and women joining in it freely. It seems to have arisen from some one finding a horse wandering about the deserted fields.
The first great companies of flagellants appeared, immediately after the fall of Ezzelino and his house, in the neighbourhood of the same Perugia which has been already spoken of as the headquarters of the revivalist preachers. Then followed the flagellants of 1310 and 1334, and then the great pilgrimage without encouraging in the year 1349, which Corio has recorded.
This close and stifling system of street building must have ensured fatal odds against the chances of life in some of those world-devastating plagues that characterised past ages. Bergen was, in fact, nearly depopulated by that terrible pestilence which, in 1349, ravaged the North of Europe, and whose memory is still preserved under the name of "The Black Death."
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.
The persecution of the Jews commenced in September and October, 1348, at Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the first criminal proceedings were instituted against them, after they had long before been accused by the people of poisoning the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern and Freyburg, in January, 1349.
It fell upon the district round with terrific fury, and the people died in that dreadful April, 1349, as the locusts die when the hurricane drives them seaward, and they rot in piles upon the shore. The Roll of the Manor Court is a horrible record of the suddenness and the force with which the Black Death smote the wretched Essex people.
The courts of one of them were held three times in the year 1348. Upon the same parchment, and immediately following the records of the previous year, come some scarcely legible notes of a court held in 1349, the precise day of the month omitted, the entries scrawled informally by a scribe who not only did not know the forms of the court, but who was evidently not a professional writer.
Hence we see that this fanaticism was a mania of the middle ages, which, in the year 1349, on so fearful an occasion, and while still so fresh in remembrance, needed no new founder; of whom, indeed, all the records are silent.
In the summer of 1349, while the pestilence was still raging in the north of England, the king, acting on the advice of his Council, issued a proclamation to all the sheriffs and the officials of the larger towns, declaring that the laborers were taking advantage of the needs of their lords to demand excessive wages, and prohibiting them from asking more than had been due and accustomed in the year before the outbreak of the pestilence or for the preceding five or six years.
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