set up in the first than in the second half of the fourteenth century; and it is noteworthy that several Cambridge colleges incorporated after the plague were founded with the avowed motive of filling up the gaps in the secular clergy occasioned by it.  The riots between the Oxford townsmen and the clerks of the university on St. Scholastica’s day, 1354, resulted in the victory of the former because of the recent diminution in the number of the scholars.  Yet even as regards the monasteries, it is easy to exaggerate the effects of the plague.  Five years after the Black Death, the Cistercians of the Lancashire abbey of Whalley boasted that they had added twenty monks to their convent, and were busy in enlarging their church.[1]

[1] Cal. Papal Registers, Petitions, i., 264.  Professor Tait, however, informs me that the monks took a sanguine view of their numbers.  After the plague of 1362, we know that they were not much more numerous than in the previous century.

Change was in the air in religion as well as in society.  Along with democratic ideas filtering in with the exiles from the great Flemish cities, came a breath of that restless and unquiet spirit which soon awakened the concern of the inquisition in the Netherlands.  There brotherhoods, some mystical and quietistic, others enthusiastic and fanatical, were growing in numbers and importance.  Some of these bodies, Beguines, Beghards, and what not, were harmless enough, but the whole history of the Middle Ages bears testimony to the readiness with which religious excitement unchastened by discipline or direction, grew into dangerous heresy.  The strangest of the new communities, the Flagellants, made its appearance in England immediately after the pestilence.  In the autumn of 1349, some six score men crossed over from Holland and marched in procession through the open spaces of London, chanting doleful litanies in their own tongue.  They wore nothing save a linen cloth that covered the lower part of their body, and on their heads hats marked with a red cross behind and before.  Each of them bore in his right hand a scourge, with which he belaboured the naked back and shoulders of his comrade in the fore rank.  Twice a day they repeated this mournful exercise, and even at other times were never seen in public but with cap on head and discipline in hand.  Few Englishmen joined the Flagellants, but their appearance is not unworthy of notice as the first concrete evidence of the religious unrest which soon became more widespread.  Before long the Yorkshireman, John Wycliffe, was studying arts at the little north-country foundation of the Balliols at Oxford, and John Ball, the Essex priest, was preaching his revolutionary socialism to the villeins.  “We are all come,” said he, “from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve.  How can the gentry show that they are greater lords than we?"[1] In 1355 there were heretics in the diocese of York who maintained that it is impossible to merit eternal life by good works, and that original sin does not deserve damnation.[2]