No doubt the rodomontades of the virtuous were often overstated and the plague blamed for much for which it was not responsible. Hoeniger for one has suggested that ‘the low state of morals belonged to the period and was no worse after the epidemic than before’.{519} But this cannot be the whole answer, nor was it only the impressionable contemporary chronicler who has recorded the phenomenon. In her study of Orvieto, Dr Carpentier has found ample evidence that the Black Death was followed by an immediate and sharp decline in public morality. There were many more cases of maltreatment of orphans, more people carried arms, the strict rules governing female dress were relaxed and there was a considerable increase in the number of prosecutions and convictions for every kind of crime.{520}
Such self-indulgence strikes one today as a curiously illogical reaction to the disaster which had been so painfully survived. Medieval man in 1350 and 1351 believed without question that the Black Death was God’s punishment for his wickedness. This time he had been spared but he could hardly hope for such indulgence to be renewed if his contumacious failure to mend his ways stung God into a second onslaught. The situation, with sin provoking plague and plague generating yet more sin, seemed to have all the makings of a uniquely vicious circle, a circle from which he could only hope to escape by a drastic mending of his ways. Yet, undeterred, he continued on his wicked course against a background of apocalyptic mutterings prophesying every kind of doom.
In spite of the diatribes of Matteo Villani and the more prosaic statistics of Dr Carpentier it is difficult to take altogether seriously the sins of the post-plague generation. Laxness there certainly was, but it was the laxness which comes through relief from almost intolerable tension and the enjoyment of more money than one has been used to spending. In a stimulating essay, Mr J. W. Thompson has drawn an interesting if sometimes strained analogy between the reactions of the population after the Black Death and after the Great War of 1914–18.{521} In both cases he finds the same complaints about the immorality and instability of those who survived. The gloomy relish with which their conduct was denounced can be matched in the Naples of 1944, the Paris of 1815 or, indeed, in almost any situation where human beings recuperate from some extensive disaster. The decline in morality should not be ignored but nor should it be imagined that the Europeans who survived the Black Death had any very special attributes in the way of wickedness.
Nevertheless, no society could endure the punishment which the plague had meted out and emerge without serious strains. One sign of this, already mentioned, was the damage done to the relationship between priest and laic; another, the tension that arose between different groups within society, in particular between rich and poor. Renouard has examined the result of this in France.{522} In the country, he says, the landowner was generally impoverished while the lot of the peasant, on the whole, improved. An up-and-coming peasantry clashed with an impoverished ruling class which sought to regain its former prosperity at the expense of its tenants. In the cities the situation was very different. Here the laws of inheritance ensured that those who survived among the rich accumulated still greater fortunes while the poor, with nothing to inherit, were economically no better off. A newly rich bourgeoisie joyfully oppressed a defenceless proletariat In the countryside the gap between rich and poor narrowed, in the cities it widened; in both cases relations deteriorated as a result. The second half of the fourteenth century in France was peculiarly rich in social disorder and the scars left by the Black Death were at least in part responsible for the rural insurrection of Jacques in 1358 and of Tuchins in 1381, and for the risings of the weavers in Ghent in 1379, of the Harelle at Rouen in 1380 and of the Maillotins in Paris in 1382.
