TEE GREAT MORTALITY. 407 



necessities of their lords, and became irreligious and rebellious. 

 Scarcely a writer fails to record the utter selfishness of the period of 

 the visitation and the dissoluteness and lowered morals which fol- 

 lowed in its wake. The surviving laborers insisted on higher wages, 

 and employers used their influence with the Government to pass laws 

 to compel the acceptance of the old rates. Contention raged between 

 rich and poor, and the seeds were sown for Jacqueries and Peasants' 

 Eebellions. The building of churches ceased for a time. The newly 

 laid foundations of the vast nave and choir of the cathedral at Siena 

 were left as they were and have never been built upon to this day. A 

 thousand partially built churches remained stationary for a time, and 

 their construction was resumed only when architectural style had 

 changed so distinctly that the line of division can still be seen. At 

 Oxford and Cambridge and Paris the number of students was depleted 

 and never again rose to its former number. The clergy suffered more 

 than any other class in the community. Many a monastery had lost 

 its whole body of occupants. In others the few survivors, with dimin- 

 ished income from their land and weakened devotion and discipline 

 because of the death of their leading members, never refilled their 

 numbers or regained their old prosperity and vigor. The bishops were 

 compelled to ordain to the service of the church the young, the inex- 

 perienced, the illiterate ; and even then there were too few for its needs. 

 Society gradually reconstructed itself on much the same old lines. 

 Permanent changes come not from sudden and conspicuous, but from 

 slowly acting and obscure, influences. Yet Europe was never quite the 

 same again. Two centuries may have passed before the void in me- 

 dieval population was refilled. Even to this day grain ripens yearly 

 over the sites of villages which lost their population and their name in 

 the great mortality. Various social changes were hastened or retarded 

 or deflected from their former direction. Even though there was no 

 actual breach in the continuity of European development, yet new in- 

 terests arose, new evil and new good appeared. 'Sithence the pesti- 

 lence' is an era which Piers Plowman quite naturally uses; for it was 

 graven deep in the memory of his generation. 



