The Black Death полностью

And yet neither the blitz nor the Revolutionary Terror yield an adequate impression of the psychological shock which medieval man endured. For where there is a common, identifiable enemy then there must be a sense of camaraderie; it matters little who the foe may be, to hate him will provide relief and bulk larger in the mind than the pettier grudges that divide one from one’s neighbours. The first fine flower of anger against the emigre aristocrat or the marauding bomber might, in time, lose its capacity to excite or inspire but it survived as an element lending cohesion to the attacked. Medieval men had no one to hate. They might work off their resentment in campaigns against the lepers or the Jews but few of those who sacked the ghettoes can have believed that, by their deed, they were doing more than tinker with the instrument of their destruction while leaving the root cause untouched. The Black Death was the work of God, and against God they could not fight.

The only defence against the plague in which the doctors had the slighest faith was flight from the afflicted area. This the poor knew, and yet they knew too that it was a defence to which they could have no recourse. As the poor of Genoa, Florence, Paris or London saw the rich and privileged bundle up their most precious possessions and flee the cities it would have been astonishing if they had felt no resentment, no sense that they were being deserted and betrayed. With such a mood abroad it was inevitable that the processions of the Flagellants would quickly take on a revolutionary tinge, that the houses of the magnates would be sacked and the clergy abused, derided or even assaulted.

There is little chapter and verse to illustrate the upsurge of class hatred which arose during the plague. ‘Before 1789’, wrote Baehrel in explanation of this in France, ‘this sentiment of hatred left few traces: the poor rarely use a pen.’ But subsequent epidemics have made it clear how quickly the feelings of the underprivileged could be embittered. During the cholera epidemic of 1832, when slightly greater sophistication if not tolerance might have been expected, the Parisian mob rioted through the smarter quartiers, accusing nobles and bourgeois not only of suffering less seriously from the disease but of poisoning their impoverished fellow-citizens into the bargain. Who can doubt that the vastly more credulous and worse afflicted poor of the fourteenth century must have felt the same rancour and suspicion? If they failed to sack the houses of the rich it can only have been because the torpor induced by famine and misery had already broken their spirits before the plague began to work on their emaciated bodies. But, in the last analysis, the most noticeable feature of the Black Death was not that some escaped but that everyone was to some extent involved and paid the price of involvement. For the months which the Black Death lasted it must have seemed to those who suffered that everything was discredited and at an end. The doctors could cure nobody and, by their efforts, made themselves a laughing stock. The Church was impotent to defend itself or its faithful and had resort only to muttered objurgations about the sinfulness of mankind. The rulers abandoned their palaces and their responsibilities and left their people to die in misery. And the Black Death spared nobody.

Death had always been a preoccupation of medieval man; now it became an obsession. Always he had known that in time it must come to everyone but never before had the fact been brought so forcibly to his attention. Never before had those set in authority over him been shown so clearly to be no braver, no better, no wiser and no less vulnerable. Like every other lesson, it was to be forgotten but, at that moment, it must have seemed that its memory would never fade.