the which greatly encouraged them, and they repined in that they had sent to the king as they did. The king of France stayed till the last. It was not until the evening that he could be induced to acknowledge that all was lost. Then, when he had left about him no more than a threescore persons, one and other, whereof Sir John of Heynault was one, who had remounted once the king-for his horse was slain with an arrow-then he said to the king, "Sir, depart hence, for it is time; lose not yourself willfully; if ye have loss this time, ye shall recover it again another season; and so he took the king's horse by the bridle and led him away in a manner per force. Then the king rode till he came to the castle of La Broyes; the gate was closed, because it was by that time dark; then the king called the captain, who came to the walls, and said, "Open your gate quickly, for this is the fortune of France." The captain knew then it was the king, and opened the gate and let down the bridge; then the king entered, and he had with him but five barons, Sir John of Heynault and four others. The unhappy king, however, could not rest there, but drank and departed thence about midnight.

XXIII.

THE BLACK DEATH.-WARBURTON.

[The great pestilence which swept over England in 1348–49 was by far the most important event of Edward III.'s reign. It destroyed nearly half of the population, and raged most fiercely among the working classes. It more than doubled the rate of wages, in spite of the stringent laws enacted to keep the price of labor at its former standard.

It led to the rising of the peasants in the next reign, to the re-organization of the agricultural system of the time, and ultimately to the emancipation of the peasant class from serfdom or villeinage.]

IN the interval between the capture of Calais and this attempt to recover it, a visitation occurred which turned all the gay prosperity of England into mourning, and brought the French nation to the very brink of ruin. The outbreak of the Plague, or the "Black Death," as it was then called, has been left comparatively in the background by contemporary historians; but it is undoubtedly the central fact of the reign of Edward III. and of the fourteenth century, and, in the opinion of some writers, the most important economic fact in modern history. Among its consequences may be reckoned an immense advance in the social condition of the working classes, owing to the scarcity of labor, and consequent increase in its value as a commodity; the substitution of what we should call tenant-farming for landlord occupation; and a "strike" of fifty years' duration, which culminated in the rebellion of Wat Tyler in the following reign, and, though then cruelly and treacherously put down, resulted at last in the emancipation of the English peasantry.

The local origin of the Plague is mysterious, and it has, therefore, perhaps, been traced to Cathay, the land of mystery; but it is an ascertained fact that all the most devastating epidemics which have visited Europe have had their cradle in the far East. Tidings of the Plague's ravages in

Central Asia had reached England as far back as the year 1333; but the western peoples thought little of it as long as it was talked of only as one of the many scourges of imperfectly known and half-barbarous nations. Constantinople was then, as now, the great frontier city between European civilization and the far East, and through it flowed one of the three principal tides of Oriental traffic. Thither, in 1347, the destroyer came, along with the caravans laden with Asiatic produce, and followed the westward course of commerce by easy stages along the shores and islands of the Mediterranean, sometimes pausing, sometimes doubling back, but always gaining ground, till it reached the uttermost north-western boundary of Europe, not sparing Iceland, and even leaping over to Greenland-where it probably extirpated the European colony—and returning by Norway and Sweden, through Russia, in 1351.

In Provence the chief cities were almost depopulated. At Avignon, where Pope Clement VI. held the most extravagant and dissolute court in Europe, three fourths of the people died. The pope shut himself up a close prisoner in his palace-fortress, and kept huge fires burning day and night.

In Cypress, Sicily, and Florence the Plague was felt with extraordinary severity. In the last place only it would seem that some efforts, though ineffectual, were made by the authorities to check the spread of the disease, among the victims of which was Petrarch's "Laura." During its ravages in that city a number of ladies and gentlemen withdrew together from all communication with the outer world, diverting themselves with music and dancing and other in-door entertainments, eating and drinking of the best, and never listening to or thinking about any thing which might check their good spirits or disturb their serenity. Stories by which they are supposed to have amused each other have been preserved, or invented, in the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, the effect of

whose gay and festive pictures is heightened by contrast with the somber background on which they are drawn.

The Black Death, which made the tour of Europe in 1349-51, is undoubtedly the same disease as the Plague, now, or till quite lately, endemic on the shores of the Levant and in Egypt, having been, as it were, domesticated there by the lazy, filthy, and fatalistic habits of the people. Its specific causes are as much unknown as its original seat. The opinion of the time and some modern authorities agree in connecting its appearance with contemporary physicał phenomena of a very remarkable kind; but it would seem as if these phenomena must have been of too limited and local a character to account for a pestilence which spread over a whole continent. Parching droughts, as it is said, were succeeded by convulsions of the earth and crackings of its surface, from which a fetid and poisonous vapor was projected into the atmosphere, the corruption of which was afterward increased by malarious exhalations from swamps caused by incessant deluges of rain. To the panic-struck imagination of the people the Black Death seemed to be advancing to their destruction in the palpable form of a "thick, stinking mist."

In some rare and frightful cases of seizure the victims fell down and died without premonitory symptoms, but in the majority of instances the attack began with shiverings and bristling of the hair, succeeded by burning internal fever with a cold skin, and the rapid formation of boils, first in the axillae and the groin, and afterward in the internal organs. The appearance of these boils was the most characteristic of all the symptoms of the Black Death, but the advance of dissolution was often so rapid as to outstrip these forerunners, which were, indeed, due to a strong effort of nature to expel the matter of the disease from the blood.

The terror of the Plague was every-where, inviting death; men's vital powers were so depressed by anticipation that they

were already half-dead before they were attacked; the throat parched, the pulse quickened, by nervous anxiety, were taken for the fatal symptoms of seizure. And next to the fear of death was that of previous desertion. Men and women feared to look in each other's faces lest they should be betrayed by the "muddy glistening" of the eye, or detected in feeling with feverish finger for "the little hard kernel, no bigger than a pea, which moved with the touch under the skin of the armpit," the sure precursor, as it was thought, of doom inevitable, irremediable, inexorable, and irrespective of persons, ages, or conditions of life. To imaginations morbid with terror pestilence indeed seemed to lurk in every thing-in every morsel eaten, in every rag that fluttered in the wind. But who would be so fool-hardy and irrational as to "throw good life after bad," by nursing a dying friend, when Black Death was in the breathing of his last sigh or the farewell pressure of his hand? So the nearest and dearest ties were dissolved, the calls of kindred and humanity neglected, and the sick were left to die and then be carted to the grave by hirelings. Numbers were driven, by an unreasoning terror, away from human habitations, and perished miserably in the solitude of the fields.

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In England, however, by far the most memorable results of the Black Death were its social and economical effects. It made its appearance in Dorsetshire, in the month of August of the fatal year 1348, but it was three months before it had reached London. Knyghton, who lived at the time, says that many villages and hamlets were desolated, without a house being left in them, all those who dwelt in them being dead.” The country places which the Plague attacked were soon silenced, for the pestilence did not even spare the brute creation; and the carcasses of sheep, horses, and oxen lay putrefying in the fields, untouched by dogs or birds of prey. But in London the streets and public places were, for a time at least, all alive and brisk with funerals-" alive with death."