A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

What had happened in the last thirty years, as a result of plague, war, oppression, and incompetence, was a weakened acceptance of the system, a mistrust of government and governors, lay and ecclesiastical, an awakening sense that authority could be challenged—that change was in fact possible. Moral authority can be no stronger than its acknowledgment. When officials were venal—as even the poor could see they were in the bribing of tax commissioners—and warriors a curse and the Church oppressive, the push for change gained strength. It was encouraged by the preachers’ castigation of the powerful. “The tournaments of the rich,” they said, “are the torments of the poor.” They regularly denounced “evil princes,” “false executors who increase the sorrows of widows,” “wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people,” and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for “lowness of blod or foulenesse of body,” for deformed shape of body or limb, for dullness of wit and uncunning of craft, and deign not to speak to them, and who are themselves stuffed with pride—of ancestry, fortune, gentility, possessions, power, comeliness, strength, children, treasure—“prowde in lokynge, prowde in spekyng,… prowde in goinge, standynge and sytting.” All would be drawn by fiends to Hell on the Day of Judgment. On that day of wrath, said the Dominican John Bromyard in terms that spoke directly to the peasant, the rich would have hung ar...