The scum of England

The Year of the Plague #6

Part One: The Worst Year Ever
Part Two: Rats
Part Three: Rome’s Miserable Fate
Part Four: Crop rotation in the 14th century
Part Five: ‘We live in an age where illness and deformity are commonplace’

Even before the arrival of the plague, the 1340s were turning into a spectacularly bad decade, and the period ‘between 1345 and 1348 would have seemed uniquely unfortunate in any other century’, in Philip Ziegler’s words. A generation after the worst famine in European history, the continent was hit by another cold, wet summer in 1335, followed by flooding in 1338 and 1342, leading to more hunger.

There were volcano eruptions in Italy, earthquakes in Austria, and swarm of locusts ‘three German miles’ long in Poland, as a chronicler recorded (confusingly, a German mile varies from place to place, so this could mean anywhere between about 1.5 miles to 20 miles, but at any rate probably quite alarming). In Cyprus, following a tidal wave, a ‘pestiferous wind spread so poisonous an odour that many, being overpowered... fell down suddenly and expired in dreadful agonies’.

In July 1345 six months of rain led to ruined crops across Europe, and famine hit again in 1346 and 1347. Italy was having an especially tough time: in the years before the plague arrived there were a number of earthquakes, in Naples, Rome, Pisa, Bologna, Padua and Venice. The decade had also seen Europe’s first great banking collapse.

During the previous decade France, meanwhile, had suffered that unbearable calamity, the English visiting. King Edward III rallied the dregs of his kingdom to embark on a war that would last for another century, and so come to be called the Hundred Years War (although again that term was a later invention, and it was more a succession of wars). During this time France was ‘ravaged by the scum of England and the worst mercenaries of Europe’, in the words of one historian.

The English army had been drawn from a ‘commissions of array’, and the commissioners, local men with military experience, chose from the local population - usually the people the local community were most keen to be rid of. It is estimated that 12 per cent of Edward's army were outlaws, most of them murderers who could obtain a charter of pardon if they fought.