Black Death

an infectious, oriental fever, accompanied by boils and black spots indicating decomposition. In England the pestilence broke out in the southern counties in 1348, or soon after the battle of Crecy, and raged for three years. Its ravages were not so severe in Ireland, and were much lighter in mountainous districts. It is thought that Scotland might have escaped had not the Scots taken advantage of the English distress to send a marauding army southward. This army was not only seized by the plague, but the survivors carried it home to the remote parts of the land. From England the death spread to Norway by ship. All countries of Europe were afflicted. It is stated on authority that 25,000,000 European people perished. In England the mortality was so great that agricultural districts suffered for laborers, and wages rose. Not only this, but English laborers, at that time little better than serfs, were able to make better terms with the ruling classes, and to lay the foundation for a long series of improvements in the social conditions of wage-earners.

Defoe gives a graphic description of a later outbreak in London in 1665, called the Great Plague, which carried off 63,-596 people. A veritable reign of terror ensued. The inhabitants fled in every direction leaving thousands of unburied corpses to pollute the fever-stricken air. It is no wonder that the English Book of Common Prayer contains a petition to be preserved from pestilence. The Black Death is believed to have been the same as the modern Bubonic Plague, which see.

The most terrible plague which the world ever witnessed advanced at this juncture from the East, and after devastating Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic, swooped at the close of 1348 upon Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness, and the panic-struck words of the statutes which followed it, have been more than justified by modern research. Of the three or four millions who then formed the population of England, more than one-half were swept away in its repeated visitations. Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns, where filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and fever. In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay purchased for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been interred. Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black Death fell on the villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More than one-half of the priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the diocese of Norwich two-thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents. The whole organization of labour was thrown out of gear. The scarcity of hands made it difficult for the minor tenants to perform the services due for their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent by the landowners induced the farmers to refrain from the abandonment of their farms. For a time cultivation became impossible. "The sheep and cattle strayed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary, "and there were none left who could drive them." Even when the first burst of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on the enormous diminution in the supply of free labour, though accompanied by a corresponding rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the course of industrial employments; harvests rotted on the ground, and fields were left untilled, not merely from scarcity of hands, but from the strife which now for the first time revealed itself between capital and labour.--J. R. Green, History of the English People.