all the power of medicine were profitless and
unavailing … And in most cases death
occurred within three days from the
appearance of the symptoms we have
described.
People in England knew the plague was coming their
way and were well aware of impending doom. In mid-
August 1348, King Edward III asked the Archbishop of
Canterbury to organize prayers, and many bishops wrote
letters for priests to read out in church to help people cope
with what was about to hit them. Ralph of Shrewsbury,
Bishop of Bath, wrote to his priests:
Almighty God uses thunder, lightening [ sic ],
and other blows which issue from his throne
to scourge the sons whom he wishes to
redeem. Accordingly, since a catastrophic
pestilence from the East has arrived in a
neighboring kingdom, it is to be very much
feared that, unless we pray devoutly and
incessantly, a similar pestilence will stretch
its poisonous branches into this realm, and
strike down and consume the inhabitants.
Therefore we must all come before the
presence of the Lord in confession, reciting
psalms.
It didn’t do any good. The plague hit and quickly wiped
out about half the English population. Such catastrophes
can have a huge effect on the institutions of society.
Perhaps understandably, scores of people went mad.
Boccaccio noted that “some maintained that an infallible
way of warding off this appalling evil was to drink heavily,
enjoy life to the full, go round singing and merrymaking,
gratify all one’s cravings whenever the opportunity offered,
and shrug the thing off as an enormous joke … and this
explains why those women who recovered were possibly
less chaste in the period that followed.” Yet the plague also
had a socially, economically, and politically transformative
impact on medieval European societies.
At the turn of the fourteenth century, Europe had a feudal
order, an organization of society that first emerged in