In the Wake of the Plague Read online

  There are the “poor folk in cottages” who have no land and who exist perilously as day laborers and seasoners. They have “no coin but their craft to clothe and keep them.” What money they make is spent mostly on “house-hire” (rent), and they exist on a “mess of porridge,” happily once in a while supplemented by scraps of cold meat and cold fish. These “afflicted churls” have too many children. “Crippled with hunger and with thirst, they keep up appearances and are abashed for to beg” (translated by Terence Tiller).

  There may be further insight into the consciousness of the wealthier and more literate peasants in a thirty-page English poem, Pearl, from the 1370s or 1380s. Pearl was first edited and published in the 1920s by the Oxford don J. R. R. Tolkien, later author of Lord of the Rings. Pearl is an elegy, a dirge, for a dead girl written by a country gentleman within the English midlands a hundred miles north of Oxford, about three decades after the Black Death.

  Pearl is a pious poem shaped by traditional theology but expresses in a highly personal, emotional tone a perfect balance between form and content. Very near the end of the poem (here quoted in the splendid verse translation by Marie Borroff) there is a glimpse of another theme: anxiety, confusion, and disorientation:

  Drawn heavenward by divine accord

  I had seen and heard more mysteries yet;

  But always men would have and hoard

  And again the more, the more they get.

  So banished I was, by cares beset

  From realms eternal untimely sent;

  How madly, Lord they strive and fret

  Whose acts accord not with your content!

  Perhaps the little angelic girl who is the subject of this poem, hypostatized by the poet into a precious pearl and seen in a dream—common poetic motifs of the time—died in the Black Death.

  But in this twilight world between medieval feudalism and early modern capitalism, the law of hierarchy still prevailed. There was restlessness and even occasional rebellion among the peasants, but the only comprehensible model for social relations was still that of lordship and hierarchy. The way of thinking was still vertical, still from the top down, even if some degree of individualism and a liberal sense of community was starting to creep in.

  The church authorities who controlled education and social theorizing still stressed the pragmatic value of the natural law of hierarchy. Tell us who your lord is, and we can then tell you what your social and political identity is—this was the medieval tradition that still prevailed.

  The clarity and stability that the medieval idea of lordship and practice of hierarchy represented had strong functional values. You knew your place and who your lord was; if he could be demanding or even cruel, he was ultimately your rock and redeemer, your comforting protector, sometimes gracefully inspired by conscience, but always driven by shrewd consideration of your economic value to himself.

  If the lords were struck dumb and made immobile by a great physical catastrophe such as the Great Plague, then times were really bad for peasants, bitingly dismal for the medieval world’s ordinary people. The electrical force of lordship and hierarchy was momentarily switched off, leaving a society given to anxiety, grief, and confusion. The peasants living on the estate of the abbot of Halesowen felt this displacement in their bones.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Death Comes to the Archbishop

  ON AUGUST 19, 1349, a fifty-nine-year-old clergyman and former Oxford University academic, Thomas Bradwardine, landed at the port of Dover on the English Channel, having crossed over from France. Before sailing for Dover, Bradwardine had traversed a great part of France by horse and foot from the papal court at Avignon on the Rhone River.

  Avignon then officially lay just outside the borders of the French kingdom, in the ramshackle territory of the German emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg. But in fact it was a city under French control. Here since the first decade of the century a succession of French popes had lived in exile from Rome, ostensibly because Rome was ridden with civil strife and organized crime.

  The Avignon papacy had emerged from the French monarchy under Philip the Fair, having gotten rid of a troublesome Italian pope in 1303. Boniface VIII had a heart attack after being taken into captivity at his summer residence in the hills near Rome by three hundred French soldiers commissioned to bring the pope to Paris for trial as a heretic. Boniface, in a moment of exasperation during his long and noisy quarrel with the French king over dividing the tax income from the French church, was reputed to have remarked that he would rather be a dog than a Frenchman, and dogs had no souls, so the logic, if not the motive, was clear.

  After Boniface’s death the French government got the majority of the cardinals, about 40 percent of them Frenchmen, to elect the archbishop of Bordeaux as pope. Although Bordeaux was in English-controlled Gascony, the archbishop was attuned to the politics of the French government in Paris. The new pope never made it to Rome. Instead he and his successors (until the second decade of the fifteenth century) established themselves in the pleasant river town of Avignon on the Rhone.

  Today Avignon is known for the ruins of its medieval stone bridge over the river (and a folksong that commemorates it) and for the summer rock concerts and theater there, as well as for vineyards planted by the popes, which still produce the finest and most expensive red Southern Rhone wine, Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

  The huge ugly palace that the popes built in two stages, in the 1320s and 1360s, is still there in good shape and is now a state-of-the-art museum specializing in Picasso’s later paintings. Inside, the building is sparse and austere—all the medieval artwork and furnishings were removed in the nineteenth century when the anticlerical Third Republic used the Palace of the Popes as a stable for army horses. To anti-Catholics horse piss and defecation on ecclesiastical grounds is the ultimate, most satisfying insult. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan dictator of England, did the same thing to the Anglican churches during the English Civil War of the 1640s.

  What is now the main exhibition hall at Avignon’s Palace of the Popes was in the 1340s the pope’s banquet hall at which fresh Rhone wine washed down exquisite and lengthy feasts. Perhaps the most impressive sight at Avignon today is a huge kitchen in a separate building from the main palace that any three-star Michelin chef would still find commodious, if a little awkward, in its use of massive open-hearth wood-fired stone stoves.

  Bradwardine had been in Avignon to get the blessing of Pope Clement VI for his consecration as archbishop of Canterbury, the top position in the English church. Bradwardine was on the Continent in his frequent role as royal diplomat when King Edward III approved his election to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, an immensely important position politically as well as vastly rich and potentially spiritually influential, made by the chapter of the Canterbury cathedral monks. Bradwardine went immediately to Avignon to get the papal consecration. He got it, but not without some sarcastic joshing from the pope and the resident cardinals, mostly Frenchmen by this time.

  This was because only four months earlier Edward III had sought papal approval for a different candidate, his chancellor John Offord, even though the Canterbury canons had elected Bradwardine. In doing so the Canterbury clerics had probably acted to please the king, because Bradwardine was Edward’s personal confessor and a well-used royal diplomat.

  The previous archbishop of Canterbury, John Stratford, 1333–48 (who probably died of natural causes, not the plague), had occasionally been in a state of political tension with the royal government, as often happened with the Canterbury prelates. By picking Bradwardine, the king’s confessor, the monks in 1349 thought they would please Edward. They may have done so, but Edward surprisingly declined Bradwardine’s nomination—as he had a legal right to—and sought approval from the pope in Avignon for his chancellor, the head of the royal administration, John Offord.

  There was plenty of legal precedent for Edward’s unilateral action, the most famous being Henry II Plantagenet’s appointment of his chancellor and d
rinking and womanizing companion Thomas Becket as archbishop of Canterbury, a rash act that turned out badly for all concerned, especially for Becket, who was cut down in 1170 by the swords of four royal courtiers as he stood in front of the altar of his cathedral shouting “pimp” at the leading assassin.

  Edward’s preference for his chancellor Offord—only nominally a cleric—over his confessor Bradwardine, an esteemed church thinker and academic, was peculiar. England was in the midst of the great war with France and the kingdom needed strong spiritual leadership to buttress royal propaganda on behalf of heavy taxation and military service. Offord, aside from having no spiritual reputation, was already sick and paralytic at the time of the king’s nomination of him for appointment to Avignon.

  Possibly Edward did not want to lose his confessor, who had become a personal friend and courtier as well as trusted diplomat. Or perhaps the king feared that the learned, popular, and ambitious Bradwardine would turn into another Becket. Regardless, the plague intervened and Offord died of the Black Death on May 2, 1349, his decaying body unable to withstand the pestilence.

  Thus there was joshing and a bit of irritation in Avignon at the king’s seeming high-handedness when Bradwardine, a prominent European figure, turned up at the Palace of the Popes to get the papal consecration. Clement VI remarked that if Edward asked him to appoint a jackass as archbishop of Canterbury, he would have to agree to it. (Yes, he would, as a matter of fact.)

  Of course the pope consecrated Bradwardine, an unusually qualified archepiscopal appointment in every respect. But at a banquet in the great papal feasting hall, as a platoon of puffing servants rushed huge platters of delicacies through the ten yards out-of-doors from the gargantuan kitchen, one of the cardinals, a relative of Clement VI, arranged for a clown seated on a jackass to enter the hall and present a petition that he should be made archbishop of Canterbury. The austerely intellectual Bradwardine probably feigned a smile through gritted teeth—just the sort of nonsense that he might have expected at Clement VI’s flamboyant court.

  After Bradwardine landed at Dover port on August 19, 1349, he proceeded directly to one of the royal residences to meet with Edward III. It had been the practice since the Norman Conquest of 1066 and establishment of strict royal control over the church in England—and confirmed by the papally approved Concordat of London of 1107 after a brief dispute over this important matter—that a bishop or abbot could enter his office only after he had sworn feudal loyalty (homage and feudal vassalage) to the king and received the “temporalities” or landed property tied to the episcopate or abbey directly from the king’s hand, like any other major lord proceeding into his inheritance with royal approval.

  Bradwardine went through this vitally important ceremony and received the enormous temporalities of Canterbury, the wealthiest bishopric in the kingdom, producing an equivalent of a billion dollars a year in revenue. Then he hastened to Rochester on August 21, to the palace of the bishop of that small diocese, the perennial official adjutant to the archbishop.

  On the morning after his arrival Bradwardine developed a high fever, which was thought to be the result of the exertion of his journey, remarkable by its length and speed for a man of fifty-nine, elderly by medieval standards. But on the same evening the dreaded buboes or black welts around the groin and armpits appeared, and his physicians acknowledged that the new archbishop was dying of the plague. He lingered for another five days and died on August 26. It is quite possible that a plague-carrying flea from a rat had bitten him on the ship while he was crossing the English Channel and that he was doomed before he set foot in England.

  By this time the populace was weary of bodies struck down by the plague. It was feared that a mortally diseased body would somehow transmit the plague to anyone who approached it. In spite of this fear, Bradwardine’s body was not immediately interred at Rochester. It was carried the twenty miles from Rochester to Canterbury and buried in the cathedral. His tomb is still there. That a risk was taken to transport a plague-ridden body a considerable distance signifies the affection and esteem in which Bradwardine was held.

  The brand-new archbishop’s death was a severe personal blow to Edward and the royal family, of whose entourage Bradwardine had been a part, especially after the recent death of young princess Joan. The plague was not sparing the royal family nor England’s leading intellectual and religious figures.

  Bradwardine’s demise was that of a great public personage who exercised influence and did important things in many aspects of political life. On his way to Coblenz with the king in 1338 he had encouraged Edward to make a significant contribution to the building of Cologne cathedral. This monstrous pile survived the frequent Allied bombing of Cologne during World War II unscathed. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in Europe (the largest in the world, the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine is, strangely in Manhattan, New York, at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 113th Street).

  In 1344 Bradwardine was representing his then-patron the bishop of Durham in parliament. He accompanied Edward through the great battle of Crecy in 1347 and the subsequent siege of Calais. Bradwardine’s dispatches home carried some of the earliest news of these victories. Popular opinion attributed Edward’s successes in part to Bradwardine’s divine intercession.

  Bradwardine himself encouraged this opinion. After Crecy he preached before the king and the royal family and entourage on the text from Second Corinthians: “God who always leads us in triumph grants victory to those whom He wills, and He wills to grant victory to the virtuous.” In view of his visibility and impeccable reputation, Bradwardine’s death in the plague was a psychological blow not only to the king and his family, but to political society in general. No one was safe.

  Thomas Bradwardine remarked in one of his books that his parents lived in Chichester in Sussex in southern England. He probably came of old gentry or bourgeois stock. He entered Oxford University, then in its intellectually most flourishing era before the nineteenth century. To become one of the three thousand students at Oxford (in the mid-1950s, even after turning coed, Oxford had only seventy-five hundred students), he would have had at least nominally to become a clergyman, but this was a role that Bradwardine pursued professionally and sincerely.

  He was a brilliant student among a group of the best philosophical and theological minds in Europe. By 1321, at age thirty, he was a fellow (don, faculty member) of a new residential undergraduate college endowed by a Scots lord especially for his young compatriots, Balliol College. By 1323 Bradwardine had an advanced degree in philosophy and theology and had joined the faculty of Merton College, the second-eldest (or perhaps first) of the Oxford colleges, as Master of Arts.

  Merton College was the hub of a group of dons devoted to natural science, mainly physics, astronomy, and mathematics, in competition with another such group of intellectuals at the University of Paris. Bradwardine fell in with this mentor group and published a treatise on velocity that made him the intellectual star of the faculty. This was followed by a major treatise on theology.

  Bradwardine’s theorizing reached its high point in his arguing that space was an infinite void in which God could have created other worlds which He ruled as He did this planet. His treatise on astrophysics was not published in print until 1618, and its circulation in manuscript in the Middle Ages was a very small one. Therefore, his innovative doctrine on void and space was little known outside Oxford. But the impression Bradwardine made on his Oxford colleagues led to his recognition as a theorist of the first rank.

  His theory that space was an infinite void in which God could have created other worlds had revolutionary implications. It departed from the comforting medieval assumption that this earth was God’s only created planet. It looked forward to modern recognition that there may be other worlds on which life exists. Thereby it threatened the singularity of our world and of human life and its relationship to God.

  Bradwardine did not develop the implications of his theory, probably beca
use they would have struck at the center of medieval religion and moral belief. He was content to leave his theory in its astrophysical and less controversial form.

  He had great ambition beyond academia. Becoming the center of a highly visible theological and moral controversy would have restricted his career possibilities.

  Bradwardine was not content with his high academic reputation. By temperament, he was a social conformist. He wanted a grand career in the church and public life and advanced rapidly up the ladder of patronage, holding several ecclesiastical appointments until he became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and confessor to the king and then for a couple of months the ill-fated archbishop of Canterbury. He artfully reached the top of the ecclesiastical pole, from which he was abruptly removed by the Black Death.

  Heavyweight intellectuals rarely became archbishop of Canterbury in the Middle Ages. That does not mean the Canterbury archbishops were not well educated and highly literate in ecclesiastical Latin, a ponderous and difficult language (with the exception of Thomas Becket, a college dropout who couldn’t read Latin and instead hired the best Latinist in England to translate into French).

  The last front-rank philosopher and theologian who had been archbishop of Canterbury was St. Anselm in the early years of the twelfth century. He did poorly as archbishop, getting into needless quarrels with kings, exasperating the pope, and turning the monks of Canterbury into an ingroup of young gays.

  What Bradwardine would have done at Canterbury is anyone’s guess. But as a theorist he was formidable, and his theology related to the human response to the Black Death. God in His absolute and infinite being, thought Bradwardine, is totally beyond understanding. His actions whether of love or death cannot be rationally articulated by the human mind. God’s predestination of human events can only be endured and blessed, not explained. But humanity has the rational capacity to begin analyzing and comprehending the natural world.