Germans of the overwhelming share they had hitherto enjoyed of our foreign trade.  The dark shadows of medieval life were indeed never absent from the picture; but medieval England seldom enjoyed greater wellbeing and tranquillity than during the first eighteen years of the personal rule of Edward III.  One sign of the increasing attention paid to suppressing disorder was an act of 1344, which empowered the local conservators of the peace, already an element in the administrative machinery, to hear and determine felonies.  A later act made this a part of their regular functions, and gave them the title of justices of the peace, thus setting up a means of maintaining local order so effective that the old machinery of the local courts gradually gave way to it.

A rude ending to this period of prosperity was brought about by the devastations of the pestilence known to modern readers as the Black Death, which since 1347 had decimated the Levant.  This was the bubonic plague, almost as familiar in the east of to-day as in the mid-fourteenth century.  It was brought along the chief commercial highways which bound the western world to the markets of the east.  First introduced into the west at the great ports of the Mediterranean, Venice, Genoa, Marseilles, it spread over France and Italy by the early months of 1348.  Avignon was a chief centre of the infection, and, amidst the desolation around him, Clement VI. strove with rare energy to give peace to a distracted world.  The regions of western and northern France, which had felt the full force of the war, were among the worst sufferers.  Aquitaine, too, was cruelly desolated, and among the victims was Edward III.’s daughter, Joan, who perished at Bordeaux on her way to Castile, as the bride of the prince afterwards infamous as Peter the Cruel.  Early in August, 1348, the scourge crossed the channel, making its first appearance in England at Weymouth.  Thence it spread northwards and westwards.  Bristol was the first great English town to feel its ravages.  Though the Gloucestershire men prohibited all intercourse between the infected port and their own villages, the plague was in no wise stayed by their precautions.  The disease extended, by way of Gloucester and Oxford, to London, reaching the capital early in November, and continuing its ravages until the following Whitsuntide.  When it had almost died out in London, it began, in the spring of 1349, to rage severely in East Anglia,[1] while in Lancashire the worst time seems to have been from the autumn of 1349 to the beginning of 1350.[2] Scotland was so long exempt that the Scots, proud of their immunity, were wont to swear “by the foul death of England”.  In 1350 they gathered together an army in Ettrick forest with the object of invading the plague-stricken border shires.  But the pestilence fell upon the host assembled for the foray, and all war was stopped while Scotland was devastated from end to end.  Ireland began to suffer in August, 1349, the disease being at first confined to the Englishry of the towns, though, after a time, it made its way also to the pure Irish.[3]