Edward III: a military king

Edward III was determined to be a military king who would restore the Plantagenet prestige and fortunes. Scotland was to be subjugated as a vassal state; Gascony was to be reclaimed – and, as grandson of King Philip the Fair of France, he aspired to the French throne. Allied to the Netherlands and the Austro-German 'Holy Roman Empire', he embarked on the war with France which would continue, with intermissions, as the 'Hundred Years War', and which, despite some famous English victories, would end in the complete eradication of English rule in France with the

The Great Seal of Edward III

sole exception of the town of Calais, and would in turn precipitate the internal upheavals of the ‘Wars of the Roses’.

The black death

But from 1348, for a time the true ruler not only of England but of all Britain and Western Europe was a bacillus, later known as Pasteurella pestis, spread by the flea-infested black rat. The interwoven diseases caused by this tiny organism, bubonic plague, pneumonic plague and septicaemic plague, collectively known as the Black Death, advanced inexorably across the country from ports on the south coast during the summer of that year. Its cause undetectable, its symptoms untreatable, it was the greatest natural disaster ever to befall England/ The human tolls of floods, storms and wars were far less than the death-count of this silent and irresistible invasion. Town and country were equally at risk. In London, with some seventy thousand inhabitants, around a third of the population perished; and this was probably the case with the rest of the country. In a population generally supposed to be around four million persons in 1348, something like 1.300.000 perished by 1350. A second outbreak, in 1361, decimated, or more than decimated, the reduced population, and there would be four lesser epidemics before the end of the century.

Our modern view of the fourteenth century as a time of universal, if often naive religious belief, might presuppose a collapse of national morale in the face of what could only be considered a divinely ordained catastrophe. But there is little evidence of this, and, on the contrary, the resilience of European communities in the face of the Black Death was as strong as it was in both earlier and later disasters on a less vast scale. Perhaps the main victim of popular opinion was the church, which, as intermediary between the people and God, had totally failed to predict or prevent the onset of God's wrath. During the plague outbreaks, many people sought protection in the remedies of quack doctors or country superstition rather than in prayer. The church itself lost a high proportion, between a third and a half, of its priests. In his history of these events, The Black Death, Philip Ziegler notes that: 'The villagers observed with interest that the parish priest was just as likely, indeed more likely, to die of the plague than his parishioners'. As with a tidal wave or volcanic eruption, those who survived were more likely to congratulate themselves and dedicate themselves to the business of living (and procreation) than to spend time in considering the spiritual implications of what had happened.