The Pestilence
95
Henry II’s wife (Eleanor of Aquitaine), as well as of Calais.
The pestilence of 1348–9.France had been harried from end to end; but so had Northern England by the Scots. And, though our country was gorged with French gold, it was by no means happy. The war had in fact become a war of plunder, which is the worst kind of war. And in 1348 a pestilence, called the Black Death, had swept off more than a third of the population of England, which early in the century had perhaps reached four millions. The exceedingly dirty habits of our ancestors had frequently caused epidemics of various horrible diseases, but never before upon such a scale. Results of the pestilence on life and labour.No doubt this Plague was brought by travellers and goods coming from the East. All Western Europe suffered, but England perhaps worse than any country. The ‘villein’ class was certainly diminished by one half; and so landowners could no longer get their labour-rents, or, indeed, get their land tilled at all. Prices doubled everywhere, and the few villeins that were left demanded enormous wages for a little work. All the ‘feudal’ ties which had bound village life together were snapped. Men began to wander ‘in search of work’ from the old home where they had been born and where their ancestors had lived from earliest Saxon days. Landowners, finding they could get no reapers or threshers, began to sell their land, or take to sheep farming, which wants few hands. Parliament went on saying: ‘Oh ye villeins, you shall work for the old wages; oh ye landowners, you shall not pay higher ones.’ But it was not a bit of good. There was a great deal of work to be done; there were very few men to do it, and those men asked and received higher