apparel, in parti-coloured tunics, with short caps and bands wound cord-wise round their heads, and girdles bound with gold and silver, and daggers in pouches across their body.  And thus they rode on choice coursers to the place of tourney; and so spent and wasted their goods and vexed their bodies with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of the people sounded everywhere.  But they neither feared God nor blushed at the chaste voice of the people.”

[Sidenote:  The Black Death]

The “chaste voice of the people” was soon to grow into the stern moral protest of the Lollards, but for the moment all murmurs were hushed by the king’s success.  The truce which followed the capture of Calais seemed a mere rest in the career of victories which opened before Edward.  England was drunk with her glory and with the hope of plunder.  The cloths of Caen had been brought after the sack of that town to London.  “There was no woman,” says Walsingham, “who had not got garments, furs, feather-beds, and utensils from the spoils of Calais and other foreign cities.”  The court revelled in gorgeous tournaments and luxury of dress; and the establishment in 1346 of the Order of the Garter which found its home in the new castle that Edward was raising at Windsor marked the highest reach of the spurious “Chivalry” of the day.  But it was at this moment of triumph that the whole colour of Edward’s reign suddenly changed.  The most terrible plague the world has ever witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic swooped at the close of 1348 upon Britain.  The traditions of its destructiveness and the panic-struck words of the statutes passed after its visitation have been amply justified by modern research.  Of the three or four millions who then formed the population of England more than one-half were swept away in its repeated visitations.  Its ravages were fiercest in the greater towns where filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and fever.  In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Maunay purchased for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked by the Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to have been interred.  Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in Bristol the living were hardly able to bury the dead.  But the Black Death fell on the villages almost as fiercely as on the towns.  More than one-half of the priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the diocese of Norwich two-thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents.  The whole organization of labour was thrown out of gear.  The scarcity of hands produced by the terrible mortality made it difficult for villeins to perform the services due for their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent by the landowners induced the farmers of their demesnes to refrain from the abandonment of their farms.  For a time cultivation became