The world of education, through its dependence on a comparatively small group of learned men of whom the most powerful and distinguished were often also among the oldest, was peculiarly sensitive to the impact of the plague. Mortality among men of learning had been calamitously high. Four of Europe’s thirty universities vanished in the middle of the fourteenth century: no one can be sure that the Black Death was responsible but it would be over-cautious to deny that it must have played a part.{481} Arezzo ceased to exist a few years later; Siena closed for several years. The chancellor of Oxford petitioned the King ‘showing that the university is ruined and enfeebled by the pestilence and other causes, so that its estate can hardly be maintained or protected’. The students of Avignon addressed the Pope: ‘…at a time when the university body of your Studium… is deprived of all lectures, since the whole number has been left desolate by the death from pestilence of doctors, licentiates, bachelors and students…’
Into this vacuum there was ample scope for new ideas and doctrines to infiltrate. In England one important by-product, caused in part at least by the shortage of people qualified to teach in French after the Black Death, was the growth of education in the vernacular and of translation from Latin direct to English:{482} John Trevisa said of the old system – the translation of Latin to French:
Thys manere was moche y-used tofore the furste moreyn, and ys sethe somdel ychanged. For Johan Cornwall, a mayster of gramere, chayngede the lore in gramer-scole, and construccion of Freynsch into Englysch; and Richard Pencrych lurnede that manere teching of hym, and other men of Pencrych, so that now, the yere of our Lord a thousand, three hundred foure score and fyve… in all the grammer-scoles of England children leaveth Frensch and construeth and lurneth ye Englysch and habbeth thereby avauntage in on syde and desvauntage yn another. Their avauntage ys that they lurneth gramer in lesse tyme than children were i-woned to doo; desavauntage ys that now childern of gramer-scole canneth na more Frensche then can thir lift heale, and that is harme for them an they schulle passe the see and travaille in straunge landes…
Viewing the history of the English language and its literature over the last six hundred years there are few who would deny that John Cornwall, mayster of gramere, deserved well of his country. The disadvantage to which Trevisa refers still exists to trouble us but the fruits of Cornwall’s reform outweigh immeasurably the gulf which it placed between this island and mainland Europe. It would, of course, be absurd to attribute to any individual or to the Black Death itself the full responsibility for a change which had already started even before 1348 and, in the end, would inevitably have carried all before it. But it would also be a mistake to discount unduly the importance of the Black Death in removing so many of those who would have been a barrier to reform and in making it, in purely practical terms, far more difficult to carry on along the old path.
