A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

Of all mankind’s ideas, the equating of sex with sin has left the greatest train of trouble.

Its sexual context was largely formulated by St. Augustine, whose spiritual wrestlings set Christian dogma thereafter in opposition to man’s most powerful instinct.

Celibacy and virginity remained preferred states because they allowed total love of God, “the spouse of the soul.”

the climate of the 14th century succumbed to the brute triumph of the lawless.

Three quarters of France was their prey, especially the wine-growing areas of Burgundy, Normandy, Champagne, and Languedoc. Walled towns could organize resistance, turning back the violence upon the countryside, which was repeatedly devastated, creating a vagabond population of destitute peasants, artisans seeking work, priests without

parishes.

With clergy and knights joining the sons of iniquity, the average man felt himself living in an age of rapine and powerless to control it. “If God Himself were a soldier, He would be a robber,” said an English knight named Talbot.

Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized.

Pessimism was a normal tone of the Middle Ages, because man was understood to be born doomed and requiring salvation, but it became more pervasive, and speculation about the coming of Anti-Christ more intense, in the second half of the century. Speculatores or scouts existed, it was believed, who watched for signs that would tell of the coming of “last things.” The end was awaited both in dread and in hope, for Anti-Christ would finally be defeated at Armageddon, ushering in the reign of Christ and a new age.

Though impassable in the 20th century in winter, the alpine passes were negotiated in all seasons by medieval travelers, with the aid of Savoyard mountaineers as guides. People of the Middle Ages were less deterred by physical hazards than their more comfortable descendants.

Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.

Habit has an especially tenacious grip when, as in the Middle Ages, the pace of change is slow.

The Statute of Laborers, in a world that believed in fixed conditions, still held grimly to pre-plague wage levels, blind to the realities of supply and demand.

As elsewhere in Europe, there was a deep craving to detemporalize the Church and clear the way to God of all the money and fees and donations and oblations that cluttered it. In Wyclif the political and spiritual strains of English protestantism met and were fused into a philosophy and a program.

Parliament had complained bitterly of the income withdrawn from England by foreign holders of rich benefices like the haughty Cardinal Talleyrand de Périgord. The amount was said to be twice the revenues of the crown, and Church property in England was estimated at a third of the land of the realm.

Immunity of the clergy from civil justice, leaving a lay complainant without redress, was another cause of resentment.

Most of all, people minded the unfitness of priests.

that mark of the Devil, slashed and curling pointed shoes.

When, from denouncing such priests, Wyclif reached the point of denying the validity of the priesthood itself as necessary to

salvation, he was to strike at the foundation of the Church and its interpretation of Christ’s role. From that point he moved ineluctably to the heresy of denying transubstantiation, for without miraculous power the priest could not transform the bread and wine into the true body and blood of Christ. From there the rest followed—the non-necessity of the Pope, rejection of excommunication, confession, pilgrimages, worship of relics and saints, indulgences, treasury of merit. All were to be swept away under Wyclif’s broom.

Wyclif’s ideas and the crown’s needs fitted together like sword and sheath, accounting for the strange alliance that made him a protégé of John of Gaunt. His theory of disendowment, which maintained that nobles could repossess the lands their ancestors had bequeathed to the Church, put a doctrinal floor under Gaunt’s desire to plunder the rich ecclesiastical establishment.

Diplomacy was a ceremonial and verbose procedure with great attention paid to juridical detail and points of honor, which may have been one reason why it so often failed to produce agreement.

Of all the “strange evils and adversities” predicted for the century, the effect of the schism on the public mind was among the most damaging.

When each Pope excommunicated the followers of the other, who could be sure of salvation?

Every Christian found himself under penalty of damnation by one or the other Pope, with no way of being sure that ...

one.

Since papal revenue was cut in half, the financial effect of the schism was catastrophic. To keep each papacy from bankruptcy, simony redoubled, benefices and promotions were sold under pressure, charges for spiritual dispensations of all kinds were increased, as were chancery taxes on every document required from the Curia. Sale of indulgences, seed of the Reformation, became financially important. Instead of reform, abuses multiplied, further undermining faith.

Though surnamed the Wise, he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation

of their capacity to control events.

In a culminating heresy, he transferred salvation from the agency of the Church to the individual: “For each man that shall be damned shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall be saved by his own merit.” Unperceived, here was the start of the modern world. When he had preached disendowment

The entire Scripture of some three quarters of a million words was translated from the Latin by Wyclif and his Lollard disciples in the dangerous business of opening a direct pathway to God, bypassing the priest.

In the future fierce reaction after the Peasants’ Revolt, when Lollardy was harried as the brother of subversion, and mere possession of a Bible in English

could convict a man of heresy, the making of multiple copies of the manuscript Bible was a labor of risk and courage. In view of 175 copies that still survive and the number that must have been destroyed during the persecution and lost over the centuries, many hundreds must have been laboriously and secretively copied out by hand. Wyclif died in 1384, and the current of protest, as persecution intensified, ran on underground. When Jan Hus was burned at th...

Even riddled by the schism, the Church was still in control. The cracking of old and famous structure...

the façade...

The hateful rift in Christendom was to last for forty years.

Suborned assassination within the brotherhood of knights was an innovation of the 14th century.

Defense of their own countrymen might be lackadaisical, but in combat overseas, where plunder offered, there was no lack of will to fight, only lack of money.

the knight in the iron cocoon.

war was too important to be left to the chances of battle.

A regular financial footing, as Charles knew all too well, was government’s greatest need.

Aside from Charles V, most rulers governed by impulse in the 14th century.

If all men had a common origin in Adam and Eve, how should some be held in hereditary servitude? If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

The assumptions of autocrats are often behind the times. Economic forces were already propelling the decline of villeinage, and commutation continued, despite the crushing of the revolt, until the unfree peasant gradually disappeared. Whether the revolt hastened or delayed the process is obscure, but the

immediate outcome encouraged complacency in the ruling class, beginning with the King. Perhaps intoxicated by success, Richard developed all the instincts of absolutism except the toughness to quell his opponents, and was to end as the victim of one of them. The military saw no need for improvement; the Church was stiffened against reform. Alarmed by the Lollards’ leveling doctrines, the privileged class turned against them. In Gower’s “Corruptions of the Age,” the poet denounced them as breeders of division between church and state sent into the world by Satan. Lollardy went underground, long postponing the Protestant separation.

Even the French raids on the English coast could be taken, as the monk Walsingham suggested, as the Lord “calling men to repentance by means of such terrors.” Seen in these terms, revolt conveyed no political significance.

“Man cannot change,” a Florentine diarist wrote at this time, “that which God, for our sins, has willed.”

Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before the descendants of the Maillotins seized the Bastille.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.