516 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Middle Ages. Other explanations, however, can be given, and these things seem to have begun to decline a little before 1348. Possibly the great mortality in the plague was, like the other things, due to a dying-out of medieval vitality and power. As yet the Black Death has been little studied except in connection with English history. There we know that it Its effects seriously crippled the Church and lowered the in England q Ua lity of the clergy ; that it broke up manors and left crops to rot and cattle to starve and the surviving serfs to wander off looking for work as free men. For the great mortality made labor, especially agricultural labor, very scarce and wages very high. Prices also went up. In many manors and towns the court rolls and other records are very scanty or cease altogether for many years after the pestilence. In some places all local government may have come to a standstill; in others there was no one left who could write. Yet medieval English literature reached its height after the plague in the writings of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer in the second half of the century. It was perhaps, however, in the Black Death that Lang- land lost the father and friends who had paid for his educa- The Vision t * on ' ^ ut wnose deaths left him unprovided with of Piers the a regular living in the Church and compelled him, though he was "poor gentle blood," to "dwell on Cornhill, Kit and I in a cot, clothed as a loller," and to "beg without other bag or bottle than my belly," or "in the habit of a hermit unholy of works to wander wide in this world wonders to hear. " It was thus that he gained that in- timate knowledge of the low life of his time: the vagabonds; the beggars; the poor, uncared-for lunatics, "more or less mad according as the moon sits," and who walk "witless but with a good will in many wide countries"; the false clergy and pretended hermits and pilgrims; the deserving poor, "prisoners in pits and poor folk in cottages," who "go hungry and thirsty" in order to dress respectably and "are ashamed to beg" ; the tavern-keepers and their customers — Sis the shoemaker, Wat the game-warden, Tomkyn the
