came to his aid, and it was time, for otherwise he would have been hard pressed. The first division, seeing the danger they were in, sent a knight in great haste to the King of England, who was posted upon an eminence near a windmill. On the knight's arrival he said, "Sir, the Earl of Warwick, the Lord Reginald Cobham, and the others who are about your son, are vigorously attacked by the French; and they entreat that you would come to their assistance with your battalion, for, if their numbers should increase, they fear he will have too much to do". The king replied, "Is my son dead, unhorsed, or so badly wounded that he cannot support himself?" "Nothing of the sort, thank God," rejoined the knight; "but he is in so hot an engagement that he has great need of your help." The king answered, "Now, Sir Thomas, return to those that sent you, and tell them from me not to send again for me this day, or expect that I shall come, let what will happen, as long as my son has life and say that I command them to let the boy win his spurs; for I am determined, if it please God, that all the glory and honour of this day shall be given to him and to those into whose care I have intrusted him". The knight returned to his lords, and related the king's answer, which mightily encouraged them, and made them repent they had ever sent such a message. 40. THE BLACK DEATH (1348-49).1 The Black Death is unique among pestilences which have visited Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. It spared no country, no age, no rank, and if the mortality were placed at one half of the population, the statement would be hard to disprove. The disease came from Asia, and entering Europe at Constantinople, spread westward through Cyprus, Sicily and Marseilles. It reached England towards the end of the summer, and, though advancing slowly, laid a heavy hand on the realm. Not only did it sweep away a large part of the nation, double wages, and provoke the Statute of Labourers: it caused widespread and permanent economic changes; among which may be reckoned the rise of a new farming system whereby leaseholds were multiplied. A curious sign of its destructiveness is the small 1 The chronology of the Black Death in England is a debatable question. Several recent writers of standing make it fall wholly within 1349, but there is good reason to suppose that its disastrous course began earlier. space which it fills in contemporary chronicles. It played havoc with the monasteries, and after it ceased, the task of repairing losses threw literary occupation into the background. Take, for instance, the Cistercian Abbey of Melsa, or Meaux, in Yorkshire. "This plague was so fatal in our monastery . . . that during August the Abbot himself, twenty-two monks and six conversi1 died; of whom the Abbot and five monks lay alike for a day unburied. And the mortality among the others was such that when the plague stopped, out of fifty monks and conversi only ten monks remained."2 In supplement of this local notice a general reference by Robert of Avesbury is cited. Apart from his title, "Keeper of the Registry of the Court of Canterbury," this chronicler is a mere name. SOURCE.-Historia de Mirabilibus Gestis Edwardi III. Robert of Avesbury (fl. 1350). Rolls Series. P. 406. Trans. E. P. Cheyney. Philadelphia, 1897. (Univ. of Pennsylvania, Translations and Reprints, vol. ii., No. 5.) The pestilence which had first broken out in the land occupied by the Saracens became so much stronger that, sparing no dominion, it visited with the scourge of sudden death the various parts of all the kingdoms, extending from that land to the northward, including even Scotland, destroying the greater part of the people. For it began in England in Dorsetshire, about the feast of St. Peter, called Ad Vincula,3 in the year of the Lord 1348, and immediately advancing from place to place it attacked men without warning and for the most part those who were healthy. Very many of those who were attacked in the morning it carried out of human affairs before noon. And no one whom it willed to die did it permit to live longer than three or four days. There was moreover no choice of persons, with the exception, at least, of a few rich people. In the same day twenty, forty or sixty corpses, and indeed many times as many more bodies of those who had died, were delivered to church burial in the same pit at the same time. And about the feast of All Saints, reaching London, it deprived many of 1 Lay brothers. 2 Chronica Monasterii de Melsa. R. S., vol. iii., p. 37. A still worse case is afforded by the Abbey of Croxton in Leicestershire, where the whole community save abbot and prior died. Dugdale's Monasticon, ed. Ellis. London, 1830. Vol. vi., pt. 2, p. 879. 31st August their life daily, and increased to so great an extent that from the feast of the Purification till after Easter there were more than two hundred bodies of those who had died buried daily in the cemetery which had been then recently made near Smithfield, besides the bodies which were in other graveyards of the same city. The grace of the Holy Spirit finally intervening, that is to say about the feast of Whitsunday, it ceased at London, proceeding continuously northward. In these parts also it ceased about the feast of St. Michael,1 in the year of the Lord 1349. 41. A BULL OF GREGORY XI. AGAINST JOHN WYCLIF (1377). Milton says that "had it not bin the obstinat perversnes of our Prelats against the divine and admirable spirit of Wicklif, to suppresse him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Husse and Jerom, no nor the name of Luther, or of Calvin had bin ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had been compleatly ours". One reason why Wyclif did not produce a lasting schism was that he addressed an ignorant laity, whereas the sixteenth century reformers came after the Revival of Learning. The Lollard movement was aided at its outset by the political situation, and it was eventually crushed by politics. From 1305-1378 the popes were Frenchmen resident at Avignon, and after the Hundred Years' War began, the papacy was regarded by Englishmen as a political tool in the hands of France. Hence it was disliked, and the popular disaffection helped Wyclif. A generation later the political current ran another way, and Lollardism was suppressed by Henry IV., who sought a close alliance with the church. Subjoined is a sharp rating which Pope Gregory XI. gave the University of Oxford for its laxness in permitting Wyclif to spread his heresies. SOURCE.-Fasciculi Zizaniorum. Rolls Series, p. 242; where the following Bull of Gregory XI. (1336-1378) is cited. Trans. E. P. Cheyney. Philadelphia, 1897. (Univ. of Pennsylvania, Translations and Reprints, vol. ii., No. 5.) Gregory, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to his beloved sons the Chancellor and University of Oxford, in the diocese of Lincoln, grace and apostolic benediction. 1 29th September. We are compelled to wonder and grieve that you, who, in consideration of the favours and privileges conceded to your University of Oxford by the apostolic see, and on account of your familiarity with the Scriptures, in whose sea you navigate, by the gift of God, with auspicious oar, you, who ought to be, as it were, warriors and champions of the orthodox faith, without which there is no salvation of souls,-that you through a certain sloth and neglect allow tares to spring up amidst the pure wheat in the fields of your glorious University aforesaid; and what is still more pernicious, even continue to grow to maturity. And you are quite careless, as has been lately reported to us, as to the extirpation of these tares; with no little clouding of a bright name, danger to your souls, contempt of the Roman church, and injury to the faith above mentioned. And what pains us the more, is that this increase of the tares aforesaid is known in Rome before the remedy of extirpation has been applied in England where they sprang up. By the insinuation of many, if they are indeed worthy of belief, deploring it deeply, it has come to our ears that John de Wycliffe, rector of the church of Lutterworth, in the diocese of Lincoln, Professor of the Sacred Scriptures (would that he were not also Master of Errors), has fallen into such a detestable madness that he does not hesitate to dogmatise and publicly preach, or rather vomit forth from the recesses of his breast certain propositions and conclusions which are erroneous and false. He has cast himself also into the depravity of preaching heretical dogmas which strive to subvert and weaken the state of the whole church and even secular polity, some of which doctrines, in changed terms, it is true, seem to express the perverse opinions and unlearned learning of Marsilio of Padua of cursed memory, and of John of Jandum,1 whose book is extant, rejected and cursed by our predecessor, Pope John XXII., of happy memory. This he has done in the kingdom of England, lately glorious in its power and in the abundance of its resources, but more glorious still in the glistening piety of its faith, and in the distinction of its sacred learning; producing also many men illustrious for their exact knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, mature in the gravity of their character, conspicuous in devotion, defenders of the Catholic church. He has polluted certain of the faithful of Christ by besprinkling them with these doc 1 Marsilio of Padua and John of Jandum (in Champagne) were associated in defending imperial against papal supremacy, circ. 1325, during the contest between Pope John XXII. and Louis of Bavaria. trines, and led them away from the right paths of the aforesaid faith to the brink of perdition. Wherefore, since we are not willing, nay, indeed, ought not to be willing, that so deadly a pestilence should continue to exist with our connivance, a pestilence which, if it is not opposed in its beginnings, and torn out by the roots in its entirety will be reached too late by medicines when it has infected very many with its contagion; we command your University with strict admonition, by the apostolic authority, in virtue of your sacred obedience, and under the penalty of the deprivation of all the favours, indulgences, and privileges granted to you and your University by the said see, for the future not to permit to be asserted or proposed to any extent whatever, the opinions, conclusions, and propositions which are in variance with good morals and faith, even when those proposing them strive to defend them under a certain fanciful wresting of words or terms. Moreover, you are on our authority to arrest the said John, or cause him to be arrested and to send him under a trustworthy guard to our venerable brother, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of London, or to one of them. Be Besides, if there should be, which God forbid, in your University, subject to your jurisdiction, opponents stained with these errors, and if they should obstinately persist in them, proceed vigorously and earnestly to a similar arrest and removal of them, and otherwise as shall seem good to you. vigilant to repair your negligence which you have hitherto shown in the premises, and so obtain our gratitude and favour, and that of the said see, besides the honour and reward of the divine recompense. Given at Rome, at Santa Maria Maggiore, on the 31st of May, the sixth year of our pontificate. 42. WAT TYLER'S REBELLION (1381). Froissart's account of the ideas and arguments which provoked the peasants' rising of 1381 bears every sign of likelihood. Considering that he was on the aristocratic side, he put the opposite case very fairly. He believed that "gentlemen and others" should "correct wicked rebels," but he reports what the rebels had to say, crazy as their words appeared to him. Froissart likens this disturbance to the French social war, the Jacquerie of 1358, and it also resembles the German |