Neither was the standing of the Church helped by a penchant for blaming the victim, a habit particularly pronouced among the English clergy. “Let us look at what is happening now,” declared the Bishop of Rochester. “We [English] are not stable in faith. We are not honorable in the eyes of the world—on the contrary, we are, of all men, the falsest and in consequence, not loved by God.” Henry Knighton could not have agreed more, though, in Friar Knighton’s view, it was tournament groupies that brought down God’s wrath against the English. The plague, he wrote, was a consequence of the bands of
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