European calamity, and it is strange to imagine that the effects of the plague in England should have been so much deeper than in France or Germany, and so different.  In the fourteenth century there was little that was distinctly insular in the conditions of England, as compared with those of the continent.  A trouble common to both regions alike could hardly have been the starting-point of such differentiation between them as later ages undoubtedly witnessed.  There was a French counterpart to the statute of labourers.

In truth the Black Death was no isolated phenomenon.  There were already in the air the seeds of the decay of the ancient order, and those seeds fructified more rapidly in England by reason of the plague.[1] It is only because of the impetus which it gave to changes already in progress that the pestilence had in a fashion more lasting results in England than elsewhere.  The last thirty years of the reign of Edward were an epoch of social upheaval and unrest contrasting strongly with the uneventful times that had preceded the Black Death.  It is not right to regard the period as one of misery or severe distress.  The war of classes, which was beginning, sprang not so much from material discomfort of the poor, as from what unsympathetic annalists called their greediness, their pride, and their wantonness.  The wage-earner was master of the situation and did not hesitate to make his power felt.  While the spread of manufactures, the rise of prices, and the opening out of wider markets still secured the prosperity of the shopkeeper, the merchant, or the artisan of the towns, the whole brunt of the social change fell upon the landed classes, and most heavily upon the ecclesiastics and especially upon the monks.  Broken down by the heavy demands of the state, unable to share with the layman in the new avenues to wealth opened up by the expanding resources of the country, the monks saw the chief sources of their prosperity drying up.  Their rents were shrinking and it became increasingly difficult to cultivate their lands.  They never recovered their ancient welfare, and were already getting out of touch with the national life.

[1] See for this W. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. i., p. 330 ff. (ed. 4); T.W.  Page, The End of Villainage in England (American Economic Association, 1900); and, above all, P. Vinogradoff in Engl.  Hist.  Review, xv. (1900), 774-781.

One immediate result of the plague was a renewed activity in founding religious houses.  Upon the two plague pits west and east of the city of London, Sir Walter Manny set up his Charterhouse in Smithfield, and Edward III. his foundation for Cistercian nuns between Tower Hill and Aldgate.  More characteristic of the times was the foundation of secular colleges, which were established either with mainly ecclesiastical objects or to encourage study at the universities.  Both at Oxford and Cambridge there were more colleges