About this time, also, statutes were passed which forbade appeals from the King’s courts of justice to that of the Pope,[1] who was then a Frenchman, and was believed to be under French political influence.  Furthermore, all foreign Church officials were prohibited from asking or taking money from the English Church, or interfering in any way with its management.[2]

[1] First Statute of Provisors (1351) and of Praemunire (1353) (S265).  The first Statute of Praemunire did not mention the Pope or the Court of Rome by name; the second, or Great Statute of Praemunire of 1393, expressly mentioned them in the strongest terms.  See Constitutionals Documents in the Appendix, p. xxxii. [2] Statute of Provisors (1351), and see S265.

244.  The Black Death, or Plague, 1349.

Shortly after the first campaign in France, a frightful pestilence broke out in London, which swept over the country, destroying upwards of half the population.  The disease, which was known as the Black Death, had already traversed Europe, where it had proved equally fatal.

“How many amiable young persons,” said a noted writer of that period, “breakfasted with their friends in the morning, who, when evening came, supped with their ancestors!” In Bristol and some other English cities, the mortality was so great that the living were hardly able to bury the dead; so that all business, and for a time even war, came to a standstill.

245.  Effect of the Plague on Labor, 1349.

After the pestilence had subsided, it was impossible to find laborers enough to till the soil and shear the sheep.  Those who were free now demanded higher wages, while the villeins, or serfs (S113), and slaves left their masters and roamed about the country asking for pay for their work, like freemen.

It was a general agricultural strike, which lasted over thirty years.  It marks the beginning of that contest between capital and labor which had such an important influence on the next reign, and which, after a lapse of more than five hundred years, is not yet satisfactorily adjusted.

Parliament endeavored to restore order.  It passed laws forbidding any freeman to ask more for a day’s work than before the plague.  It gave the master the right to punish a serf who persisted in running away, by branding him on the forehead with the letter F, for “fugitive.”  But legislation was in vain; the movement had begun, and statutes of Parliament could no more stop it than they could stop the rolling of the ocean tide.  It continued to go on until it reached its climax in the peasant insurrection led by Wat Tyler, under Edward’s successor, Richard II (S251).

246.  Beginning of English Literature, 1369-1377.

During Edward’s reign the first work in English prose may have been written.  It was a volume of travels by Sir John Mandeville, who had journeyed in the East for over thirty years.  On his return he wrote an account of what he had heard and seen, first in Latin, that the learned might read it; next in French, that the nobles might read it; and lastly he, or some unknown person, translated it into English for the common people.  He dedicated the work to the King.