Fairly or unfairly, medieval man felt that his Church had let him down. The plague, it was taken for granted, was the work of God, and the Church assured him, with uncomfortable regularity, that he had brought it on his own head. ‘Man’s sensuality… now fallen into deeper malice’ had provoked the Divine anger and he was now suffering just retribution for his sins. But the Church must have seen what had been going on over the previous years and decades, yet had given no sign that the patience of the Almighty was being tried too high. It would, perhaps, not have been reasonable to have expected protection from the wrath of God but surely it was not too much to ask that the Church, presumably better equipped than anybody else to predict a coming storm, should have given some warning of the danger that mankind was courting? Instead, there had been no more than the routine remonstrance which made up the repertoire of every preacher. All that the Church had done was wait until it was too late and then point out to their flock how wicked they had been.
The villagers observed with interest that the parish priest was just as likely, indeed more likely, to die of the plague than his parishioners. God’s wrath seemed just as hot against Church as against people: a significant commentary on those preachers who denounced all their fellows with such tedious zest. So little hard evidence survives that any generalization about relationships within society can be little more than guess work. Yet it would have been surprising, in a community so credulous and so deeply religious, if the village priest, the Man of God, had not been accorded, not only the respect due to a figure of temporal power, but also a tinge of awe appropriate to one who enjoyed a special relationship with the Almighty. That the parson was mortal, everyone knew, that he ate, drank, defecated and in due course died. Often, indeed, he came from the same village as his flock and had relations living near him to testify that he was but flesh and blood. Yet, with his ordination, surely he acquired too a touch of the superhuman; remained a man but became a man apart? After the plague, his vulnerability so strikingly exposed, all trace of the superhuman must have vanished.
But he might at least have hoped that what he lost in awfulness he would regain in the sympathies of his flock. The priests, after all, suffered and died at the side of the laity; were always, indeed, among the most likely victims. Yet the slender evidence that exists shows that they lost in popularity as a result of the plague. They were deemed not to have risen to the level of their responsibilities, to have run away in fear or in search of gain, to have put their own skins first and the souls of their parishioners a bad second. It was not only captious critics like Langland or Chaucer who so accused them but their own kind. It was the Bishop of Bath and Wells who taxed them with lack of devotion to their duty;{493} a monk who wrote: ‘In this plague many chaplains and hired parish priests would not serve without excessive pay’;{494} the chronicler of the Archbishops who complained that: ‘… parishes remained altogether unserved and beneficed parsons had turned away from the care of their benefices for fear of death’.{495} Such criticism must have reflected a general view.
One of the most perplexing features of the Black Death is the reconciliation of this criticism with the outstandingly high mortality among the priests. We have already considered the factors which contributed to this high death rate. There is much which remains uncertain. But what seems clear beyond contradiction is that, if the parish priest had chosen to devote his superior wealth and the privileges conferred by his status solely to preserving his own person, he would have stood a better chance than his parishioners of survival. The fact that he suffered more proves that he cannot altogether have shirked his duty. The picture which one forms to explain this seeming ingratitude on the part of the people towards their priests is that of a clergy doing its daily work but with reluctance and some timidity; thereby incurring the worst of the danger but forfeiting the respect which it should have earned. Add to this a few notorious examples of priests deserting their flocks and of conspicuous courage on the part of certain wandering friars, and some idea can be formed of why the established Church emerged from the Black Death with such diminished credit. The contempt of contemporaries may not have been justified but it was still to cost the Church dear over the next decades.
