The Black Death полностью

Even with this exception, it is clear that the Bishop was authorizing a very considerable relaxation of the normal rules.

The authority to hear confession has, in all periods of the Church’s history, been restricted to the priesthood. To throw it open to laymen and even to women, though not in defiance of canonical authority, was a step to be taken only in case of extreme emergency. It was a confession on the part of the Church that the crisis was out of control and the normal machinery no longer able to cope with it.

The most revealing phrase in the Bishop’s letter is the one in which he refers to the lack of priests willing to take on new parishes or to visit the sick ‘perhaps for fear of infection and contagion’. The implied rebuke would have come better if Ralph of Shrewsbury himself had ventured a little farther into the battle. From November 1348 until 13 May 1349 the period in which the Black Death was at its height in all parts of his diocese, the Bishop remained at his house at Wiveliscombe, a remote village in the corner of his territory.^{239} It is true that it was his normal practice to winter at Wiveliscombe and also only justice to say that he seems in no way to have neglected his duty or shunned direct contact with visitors from plague-infested areas. Indeed, a stream of priests came to his retreat to receive their letters of institution. No doubt he had good reason to argue, like Pope Clement before him, that the best way he could serve his flock was by staying alive and not indulging in false or, at least, futile heroics. But, when all is said and done, one would still have slightly greater respect for the Bishop and sympathy for his railing at the reluctant clergy if he had paid a single visit to Bristol, Bath or any other important town in his diocese while it was suffering the agonies of the plague.

However reluctant some of the priests may have been to expose themselves, the clergy of Somerset, another county in the Bishop’s diocese, did in fact suffer greatly as a result of the Black Death.^{240} Institutions to new benefices rose from a more or less normal figure of nine in November 1348 to thirty-two in December, forty-seven in January 1349, forty-three in February, thirty-six in March, forty in April and then fell away to twenty-one in May and a mere seven in June – the month in which the Bishop thought fit to set forth on his travels again. So extreme was the confusion that the Bishop felt it necessary to insert a saving clause in all his appointments protecting his position in case, in a moment of excusable aberration, he instituted a priest to a benefice which in fact was not vacant at all. It would be most unwise to generalize on the basis of a single county but it is fair to say that the evidence of Somerset shows no tendency on the part of the parish priests to shirk their terrifyingly perilous responsibilities.

Such data needs closer analysis before they can provide more than an indication of a general trend and often the material for such an analysis does not exist. Though Gasquet himself does not mention the fact it seems, for instance, that in the case of Somerset about a quarter of the new institutions were the result of the resignation of the previous incumbent rather than his death. But, in its turn, for this figure to mean much one would have to know what inspired the individual resignation. Was it reluctance to face the dangers which confronted a parish priest during a lethal epidemic, the economic impossibility of soldiering on in an anyway poor parish which had now lost the majority of its more prosperous parishioners or, perhaps most probable, the translation of the incumbent to another, more important parish which had lost its priest? Even among those who died the statistics are not wholly conclusive since one or two at least may have been the victims of old age, accident or other disease rather than the Black Death. Such facts will never be established: the historian is lucky even if he finds proof that the vacancy was caused by death, let alone information about its cause.