A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Possibly the relative emotional blankness of a medieval infancy may account for the casual attitude toward life a...

About half the population, it has been estimated, was under twenty-one, and about one third under fourteen.

St. Anne, the patron saint of mothers,

to ride, to fight, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of noble life,

Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration.

Fortune’s Wheel, plunging down the mighty and (more rarely) raising the lowly, was the prevailing image of the instability of life in an uncertain world. Progress, moral or material, in man or society, was not expected during this life on earth, of which the conditions were fixed.

The year began in March—the month, according to Chaucer, “in which the world began, when God first made man.”

The flickering lights of marsh gas could only be fairies or goblins; fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants.

Storms were omens, death by heart attack or other seizures could be the work of demons.

Magic was present in the world: demons, fairies, sorcerers, ghosts, and ghouls touched and manipulated human lives;

Medieval people felt surrounded by puzzles, yet because God was there they were willing to acknowledge that causes are hidden, that man cannot know why all things are as they are; “they are as God pleases.”

That did not silence the one unending question: Why does God allow evil, illness, and poverty? Why did He not make man incapable of sin? Why did He not assure him of Paradise? The answer,

never wholly satisfying, was that God owed the ...

More than a code of manners in war and love, chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life. That it was about four parts in five illusion made it no less governing for all that.

Since a knight’s usual activities were as much at odds with Christian theory as a merchant’s, a moral gloss was needed that would allow the Church to tolerate the warriors in good conscience and the warriors to pursue their own values in spiritual comfort.

like business enterprise, chivalry could not be contained by the Church, and bursting through the pious veils, it developed its own principles.

Fighting filled the noble’s need of something to do, a way to exert himself. It was his substitute for work.

If tournaments were an acting-out of chivalry, courtly love was its dreamland. Courtly love was understood by its contemporaries to be love for its own sake, romantic love, true love, physical love, unassociated with property or family, and consequently focused on another man’s wife,

formulated by chivalry, romance was pictured as extra-marital because love was considered irrelevant to marriage, was indeed discouraged in order not to get in the way of dynastic arrangements.

Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

The governing fact was that medieval organization by this time had passed to a predominantly money economy. Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal’s obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay.

Above all, war was made to pay for itself through pillage. Booty and ransom were not just a bonus, but a necessity to take the place of arrears in pay and to induce enlistment.

The Middle Ages had no equivalent of the Roman legion. Towns maintained trained bands of municipal

police, but they tended to fill up their contingents for national defense with riff-raff good for nothing else.

In any epoch the difference between a rabble and an army is training, which was not bestowed on foot soldiers called up by the arrière-ban. Despised as ineffective, the...

It was no lack of prowess that defeated the French and allied knights. They fought as valiantly as the English, for knights were much the same in all countries. England’s advantage lay in combining the use of those excluded from chivalry—the Welsh knifemen, the pikemen, and, above all, the trained yeomen who pulled the longbow—with the action of the armored knight. So long as one side in the contest made use of this advantage while the other side did not, the fortunes of war were to remain unbalanced.

Medicine was the one aspect of medieval life, perhaps because of its links with the Arabs, not shaped by Christian doctrine.

Because of the terrible interest of the subject, the translations of the plague tracts stimulated use of national languages. In that one respect, life came from death.

To the people at large there could be but one explanation—the wrath of God. Planets might satisfy the learned doctors, but God was closer to the average man.

The apparent absence of earthly cause gave the plague a supernatural and sinister quality. Scandinavians believed that a Pest Maiden emerged from the mouth of the dead in the form of a blue flame and flew through the air to infect the next house.

Divine anger so great that it contemplated the extermination of man did not bear close examination.

Doctors’ remedies in the 14th century ranged from the empiric and sensible to the magical, with little distinction made between one and the other.

Nor were they lacking in practical skills. They could set broken bones, extract teeth, remove bladder stones, remove cataracts of the eye with a silver needle, and restore a mutilated face by skin graft from the arm. They understood epilepsy and apoplexy as spasms of the brain. They used urinalysis and pulse beat for diagnosis, knew what substances served as laxatives and diuretics, applied a truss for hernia, a mixture of oil, vinegar, and sulfur for toothache, and ground peony root with oil of roses for headache.

Ringworm was treated by washing the scalp with a boy’s urine, gout by a plaster of goat dung mixed with rosemary and honey. Relief of the patient was their object—cure being left to God—and psychological suggestion often their means. To prevent pockmarks, a smallpox patient would be wrapped in red cloth in a bed hung with red hangings. When surgery was unavailing, recourse was had to the aid of the Virgin or the relics of saints. In

Public flouting of ordinances was more to blame for unsanitary streets than inadequate technology.

The Jew had become the object of popular animosity because the early Church, as an offshoot of Judaism striving to replace the parent, had to make him so. His rejection of Christ as Saviour

and his dogged refusal to accept the new law of the Gospel in place of the Mosaic law made the Jew a perpetual insult to the newly established Church, a danger who must be kept distinct and apart from the Christian community.

Once people envisioned the

possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914–18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust. In creating

climate for pessimism, the Black Death was the equivalent of the First World War, although it took fifty years for the psychological effects to develop.

In England coroners’ rolls showed manslaughter far ahead of accident as cause of death, and more often than not the offender escaped punishment by obtaining benefit of clergy through bribes or the right connections.

medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled by the spectacle of pain, but rather enjoyed

It may be that the untender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no more than they had been valued in their own formative years.

the habituating of armed men to cruelty and destruction as accepted practice poisoned the 14th century.

residue of ruined knights was a by-product

product of Poitiers.

The furs of otter, cat, miniver, squirrel, and fox were less expensive than heavy wool cloth; ermine and marten adorned the rich.

medieval armies had no means of achieving a decisive result, much less unconditional surrender.

Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls. The fate of the hostages