The execution of Jan Hus. (University of Prague/Ihe Art Archive)
In May 1990 the Czech Republic’s parliament declared July 6, the date of Jan Hus’s execution in 1415, a Czech national holiday. The son of free farmers, Hus (ca. 1369-1415) was born in Husinec in southern Bohemia, an area of heavy German settlement, and grew up conscious of the ethnic differences between Czechs and Germans. Most of his professors at Charles University in Prague were Germans. In 1396 he received a master’s degree, and just before his ordination as a priest in 1400 he wrote that he would not be a “clerical careerist,” implying that ambition for church offices motivated many of his peers.
The young priest lectured at the university and preached at the private Bethlehem Chapel. During his twelve years there Hus preached only in Czech. He denounced superstition, the sale of indulgences, and other abuses, but his remarks were thoroughly orthodox. He attracted attention among artisans and the small Czech middle class, but not Germans. His austere life and lack of ambition enhanced his reputation.
Around 1400 Czech students returning from study at Oxford introduced into Bohemia the reforming ideas of the English theologian John Wyclif. When German professors condemned Wyclif’s ideas as heretical, Hus and the Czechs argued “academic freedom,” the right to read and teach Wyclif’s works regardless of their particular merits. When popular demonstrations against ecclesiastical abuses and German influence at the university erupted, King Vaclav (vah-SLAV) IV (1378-1419) placed control of the university in Czech hands. Hus was elected rector, the top administrative official.
The people of Prague, with perhaps the largest urban population in central Europe, 40 percent of it living below the poverty line and entirely dependent on casual labor, found Hus’s denunciations of an overendowed church appealing. Hus considered the issues theological; his listeners saw them as socioeconomic.
Church officials in Prague were split about Hus’s ideas, and popular unrest grew. The king forced Hus to leave the city, but he continued to preach and write. He disputed papal authority, denounced abuses, and argued that everyone should receive both bread and wine in the Eucharist (YOO-kuh-rist). (By this time, in standard Western Christian practice, the laity received only the bread; the priest received the wine for the laity, a mark of his distinctiveness.) Hus also defended transubstan-tiation (see page 341); insisted that church authority rested on Scripture, conscience, and tradition (in contrast to sixteenth-century Protestant reformers, who placed authority in Scripture alone); and made it clear that he had no intention of leaving the church or inciting a popular movement.
In 1413 the emperor Sigismund urged the calling of a general council to end the schism. Hus was invited, and, given the emperor’s safe conduct (protection from attack or arrest), agreed to go. What he found was an atmosphere of inquisition. The safe conduct was disregarded, and Hus was arrested. Under questioning about his acceptance of Wyclif’s ideas, Hus repeatedly replied, “I have not held; I do not hold.” Council members were more interested in proving Hus a Wyclite than in his responses. They took away his priesthood, banned his teachings, burned his books, and burned Hus himself at the stake. He then belonged to the ages.
The ages have made good use of him. His death aggravated the divisions between the bishops at Constance and the Czech clerics and people. In September 1415,452 nobles from all parts of Bohemia signed a letter saying that Hus had been unjustly executed and rejecting council rulings. This event marks the first time that an ecclesiastical decision was publicly defied. Revolution swept through Bohemia, with Hussites — Czech nobles and people — insisting on clerical poverty and both the bread and wine at the Eucharist, and with German citizens remaining loyal to the Roman church. In the sixteenth century reformers hailed Hus as
The forerunner of Protestantism. In the eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophes evoked Hus as a defender of freedom of expression. In the nineteenth century central European nationalists used Hus’s name to defend national sentiment against Habsburg rule. And in the twentieth century Hus’s name was used against German fascist and Russian communist tyranny.
Questions for Analysis
1. Since Jan Hus lived and died insisting that his religious teaching was thoroughly orthodox, why has he been hailed as a reformer?
2. What political and cultural interests did the martyred Hus serve?
Claimed fiscal rights over the county of Flanders. Monasteries also pressed peasants for additional money, above their customary tithes. In retaliation, peasants burned and pillaged castles and aristocratic country houses. A French army crushed peasant forces, and savage repression and the confiscation of peasant property followed in the 1330s.
Jacquerie A massive uprising by French peasants in 1358 protesting heavy taxation.
In 1358, when French taxation for the Hundred Years’ War fell heavily on the poor, the frustrations of the French peasantry exploded in a massive uprising called the Jacquerie (zhahk-REE), after a mythical agricultural laborer, Jacques Bon-homme (Good Fellow). Peasants blamed the nobility for oppressive taxes, for the criminal brigandage of the countryside, for losses on the battlefield, and for the general misery. Crowds swept through the countryside, slashing the throats of nobles, burning their castles, raping their wives and daughters, and kill ing or maiming their horses and cattle. Artisans, small merchants, and parish priests joined the peasants. Urban and rural groups committed terrible destruction, and for several weeks the nobles were on the defensive. Then the upper class united to repress the revolt with merciless ferocity. Thousands of the "Jacques,” innocent as well as guilty, were cut down. That forcible suppression of social rebellion, without any effort to alleviate its underlying causes, served to drive protest underground.
The Peasants’ Revolt in Engiand in 1381 involved thousands of people. Its causes were complex and varied from place to place. In general, though, the thirteenth century had witnessed the steady commutation of labor services for cash rents, and the Black Death had drastically cut the labor supply. As a result, peasants demanded higher wages and fewer manorial obligations. Their lords countered with a law freezing wages and binding workers to their manors. Unable to climb higher, the peasants sought release for their economic frustrations in revolt. Economic grievances combined with other factors. The south of England, where the revolt broke out, had been subjected to destructive French raids. The English government did little to protect the south, and villagers grew increasingly frightened and insecure. Moreover, decades of aristocratic violence against the weak peasantry had bred hostility and bitterness. Social and religious agitation by the popular preacher John Ball fanned the embers of discontent. Ball’s famous couplet "When Adam delved and Eve span; Who was then the gentleman?” reflected real revolutionary sentiment.
The English revolt was ignited by the reimposition of a head tax on all adult males. Despite widespread opposition to the tax in 1380, the royal council ordered the sheriffs to collect it again in 1381 on penalty of a huge fine. Beginning with assaults on the tax collectors, the uprising in England followed a course similar to that of the Jacquerie in France. Castles and manors were sacked. Manorial records were destroyed. Many nobles, including the archbishop of Canterbury (KAN-ter-ber-ee), who had ordered the collection of the tax, were murdered.
The center of the revolt lay in the highly populated and economically advanced south and east, but sections of the north and the Midlands also witnessed rebellions. Violence took different forms in different places. Urban discontent merged with rural violence. In Engl ish towns where skilled Flemish craftsmen were employed, fear of competition led to their being attacked and murdered. Apprentices and journeymen, frustrated because the highest positions in the guilds were closed to them, rioted.
The boy-king Richard II (r. 1377-1399) met the leaders of the revolt, agreed to charters ensuring peasants’ freedom, tricked them with false promises, and then crushed the uprising with terrible ferocity. The nobility tried to restore ancient duties of serfdom, but nearly a century of freedom had elapsed, and the commutation of manorial services continued. Rural serfdom disappeared in England by 1550.
In Flanders, France, and England, peasant revolts often Urban Conflicts Blended with conflicts involving workers in cities. Unrest
Also occurred in Italian, Spanish, and German cities.
These revolts typically flared up in urban centers where the conditions of work were changing for many people. In the thirteenth century craft guilds had organized the production of most goods, with masters, journeymen, and apprentices working side by side. In the fourteenth century a new system evolved to make products on a larger scale. Capitalist investors hired many households, with each household performing only one step of the process. Initially these investors were wealthy bankers and merchants, but eventually shop masters embraced the system. This promoted a greater division within guilds between wealthier masters and the poorer masters and journeymen they hired. Some masters became so wealthy that they no longer had to work in a shop themselves, nor did their wives and family members, though they still generally belonged to the craft guild.
While capitalism provided opportunities for some artisans to become investors and entrepreneurs, especially in cloth production, for many it led to a decrease in income and status. Guilds often responded to competition by limiting membership to existing guild families, which meant that journeymen who were not master’s sons or who could not find a master’s widow or daughter to marry could never become masters themselves. They remained journeymen their entire lives, losing their sense of solidarity with the masters of their craft. Resentment led to rebellion over economic issues.
Urban uprisings were also sparked by issues involving honor, such as employers’ requiring workers to do tasks they regarded as beneath them. As their actual status and economic prospects declined and their work became basically wage labor, journeymen and poorer masters emphasized skill and honor as qualities that set them apart from less-skilled workers.
Guilds increasingly came to view the honor of their work as tied to an all-male workplace. When urban economies were expanding in the High Middle Ages, the master’s wife and daughters worked alongside him, and female domestic servants also carried out productive tasks. (See the feature "Listening to the Past: Christine de Pizan” on pages 305-306.) Masters’ widows ran shops after the death of their husbands. But in the fourteenth century, a woman’s right to work slowly eroded. First, masters’ widows were limited in the amount of time they could keep operating a shop or were prohibited from hiring journeymen; then female domestic servants were excluded from any productive tasks; then the number of daughters a master craftsman could employ was limited. When women were allowed to work, it was viewed as a substitute for charity.
Peasant and urban revolts and riots had clear economic Sex in the City Bases, but some historians have suggested that late me
Dieval marital patterns may have also played a role in unrest. In northwestern Europe, people believed that couples should be economically independent before they married, so both spouses spent long periods as servants or workers in other households saving money and learning skills, or they waited until their own parents had died and the family property was distributed.
The most unusual feature of this pattern was the late age of marriage for women. Women entered marriage as adults and took charge of running a household immediately. They were thus not as dependent on their husbands or their mothers-in-law as were women who married at younger ages. They had fewer pregnancies than women who married earlier, though not necessarily fewer surviving children.
Men of all social groups were older when they married. In general, men were in their middle or late twenties at first marriage, with wealthier urban merchants often much older. Journeymen and apprentices were often explicitly prohibited from marrying, as were the students at universities, as they were understood to be in "minor orders” and thus like clergy, even if they were not intending on careers in the church.
The prohibitions on marriage for certain groups of men and the late age of marriage for most men meant that cities and villages were filled with large numbers of young adult men with no family responsibilities who often formed the core of riots and unrest. Not surprisingly, this situation also contributed to a steady market for sexual services outside of marriage, what in later centuries was termed prostitution. Research on the southern French province of Languedoc in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has revealed the establishment of legal houses of prostitution in many cities. Municipal authorities set up houses or red-light districts either outside the city walls or away from respectable neighborhoods. For example, authorities in Montpellier set aside Hot Street for prostitution, required public women to live there, and forbade anyone to molest them. Prostitution thus passed from being a private concern to a social matter requiring public supervision. The towns of Languedoc were not unique. Public authorities in Amiens, Dijon, Paris, Venice, Genoa, London, Florence, Rome, most of the larger German towns, and the English port of Sandwich set up brothels.
Visiting brothels was associated with achieving manhood in the eyes of young men, though for the women themselves their activities were work. Indeed, in some cases the women had no choice, for they had been traded to the brothel manager by their parents or other people in payment for debt, or had quickly become indebted to him (or, more rarely, her) for the clothes and other finery regarded as essential to their occupation. Poor women—and men—also sold sex illegally outside of city brothels, combining this with other sorts of part-time work such as laundering or sewing. Prostitution was an urban phenomenon because only populous towns had large numbers of unmarried young men, communities of transient merchants, and a culture accustomed to a cash exchange.
Though selling sex for money was legal in the Middle Ages, the position of women who did so was always marginal. In the late fifteenth century cities began to limit brothel residents’ freedom of movement and choice of clothing, requiring them to wear distinctive head coverings or bands on their clothing so that they would not be mistaken for "honorable” women. The cities also began to impose harsher penalties on women who did not live in the designated house or section of town. A few prostitutes did earn enough to donate money to charity or buy property, but most were very poor.
Along with buying sex, young men also took it by force. Unmarried women often found it difficult to avoid sexual contact. Many of them worked as domestic servants, where their employers or employers’ sons or male relatives could easily coerce them, or they worked in proximity to men. Notions of female honor kept upper-class women secluded in their homes, particularly in southern and eastern Europe, but there was little attempt anywhere to keep female servants or day laborers from the risk of seduction or rape. Rape was a capital crime in many parts of Europe, but the actual sentences handed out were more likely to be fines and brief
Prostitute Invites a Traveling Merchant
Poverty drove women into prostitution, which, though denounced by moralists, was accepted as a normal part of the medieval social fabric. In the cities and larger towns where prostitution flourished, public officials passed laws requiring prostitutes to wear a special mark on their clothing, regulated hours of business, forbade women to drag men into their houses, and denied business to women with the “burning sickness," gonorrhea.
(Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Bodl. 264, fol. 245V) imprisonment, with the severity of the sentence dependent on the social status of the victim and the perpetrator.
Same-sex relations—what in the late nineteenth century would be termed “homosexuality”—were another feature of medieval urban life (and of village life, though there are very few sources relating to sexual relations of any type in the rural context). Same-sex relations were of relatively little concern to church or state authorities in the early Middle Ages, but this attitude changed beginning in the late twelfth century. By 1300 most areas had defined such actions as "crimes against nature.” Same-sex relations, usually termed "sodomy,” became a capital crime in most of Europe, with adult offenders threatened with execution by fire. The Italian cities of Venice, Florence, and Lucca created special courts to deal with sodomy, which saw thousands of investigations.
Sodomy was not a marginal practice, which may account for the fact that, despite harsh laws and special courts, actual executions for sodomy were rare. Same-sex relations often developed within the context of all-male environments, such as the army, the craft shop, and the artistic workshop, and were part of the collective male experience. Homoerotic relationships played important roles in defining stages of life, expressing distinctions of status, and shaping masculine gender identity. Same-sex relations involving women almost never came to the attention of legal authorities, so it is difficult to find out how common they were. However, female-female desire was expressed in songs, plays, and stories, as was male-male desire, offering evidence of the way people understood same-sex relations.
The Hundred Years’ War had provided employment and Fur-Collar Crime Opportunity for thousands of idle and fortune-seeking
Knights. But during periods of truce and after the war finally ended, many nobles once again had little to do. Inflation hurt them. Although many were living on fixed incomes, their chivalric code demanded lavish
Generosity and an aristocratic lifestyle. Many nobles turned to crime as a way of raising money. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a great deal of "fur-collar crime,” so called for the miniver fur nobles alone were allowed to wear on their collars.
Groups of noble brigands roamed the English countryside stealing from both rich and poor. Operating like modern urban racketeers, knightly gangs demanded that peasants pay "protection money” or else have their hovels burned and their fields destroyed. They seized wealthy travelers and held them for ransom.
When accused of wrongdoing, fur-collar criminals intimidated witnesses, threatened jurors, and used "pull” or cash to bribe judges. As a fourteenth-century Engl ish judge wrote to a young nobleman, "For the love of your father I have hindered charges being brought against you and have prevented execution of indictment actually made.”4 Criminal activity by nobles continued decade after decade because governments were too weak to stop it.
The ballads of Robin Hood, a collection of folk legends from late medieval England, describe the adventures of the outlaw hero and his merry men as they avenge the common people against fur-collar criminals—grasping landlords, wicked sheriffs, and mercenary churchmen. Robin Hood was a popular figure because he symbolized the deep resentment of aristocratic corruption and abuse; he represented the struggle against tyranny and oppression.
Ethnic Tensions And Restrictions
Large numbers of people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries migrated from one part of Europe to another: the English into Scotland and Ireland; Germans, French, and Flemings into Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary; the French into Spain. The colonization of frontier regions meant that peoples of different ethnic backgrounds lived side by side. Everywhere in Europe, towns recruited people from the countryside (see page 249). In frontier regions, townspeople were usually long-distance immigrants and, in eastern Europe, Ireland, and Scotland, ethnically different from the surrounding rural population. In eastern Europe, German was the language of the towns; in Irish towns, French, the tongue of Norman or English settlers, predominated.
In the early periods of conquest and colonization, and in all regions with extensive migrations, a legal dualism existed: native peoples remained subject to their traditional laws; newcomers brought and were subject to the laws of the countries from which they came. On the Prussian and Polish frontier, for example, the law was that "men who come there. . . should be judged on account of any crime or contract engaged in there according to Polish custom if they are Poles and according to German custom if they are Germans.”5 Likewise, the conquered Muslim subjects of Christian kings in Spain had the right to be judged under Muslim law by Muslim judges.
The great exception to this broad pattern was Ireland. From the start, the English practiced an extreme form of discrimination toward the native Irish. The English distinguished between the free and the unfree, and the entire Irish population, simply by the fact of Irish birth, was unfree. When an English legal structure was established, the Irish were denied access to the common-law courts. In civil (property) disputes, an English defendant need not respond to his Irish plaintiff; no Irish person could make a will. In criminal procedures, the murder of an Irishman was not considered a felony. Other than in Ireland, although native peoples commonly held humbler positions, both immigrant and native townspeople prospered during the expanding economy of the thirteenth century. But when economic recession hit during the fourteenth century, ethnic tensions multiplied.
The later Middle Ages witnessed a movement away from legal pluralism or dualism and toward legal homogeneity and an emphasis on blood descent. The dominant ethnic group in an area tried to bar the other from positions of church leadership and guild membership. Marriage laws were instituted that attempted to maintain ethnic purity and some church leaders actively promoted ethnic discrimination.
Statute of Kilkenny Laws issued in 1366 that discriminated against the Irish, forbidding marriage between the English and the Irish, requiring the use of the English language, and denying the Irish access to ecclesiastical offices.
The most extensive attempt to prevent intermarriage and protect ethnic purity is embodied in Ireland’s Statute of Kilkenny (kil-KEN-ee) (1366), which states that "there were to be no marriages between those of immigrant and native stock; that the Engl ish inhabitants of Ireland must employ the Engl ish language and bear English names; that they must ride in the English way (i. e., with saddles) and have English apparel; that no Irishmen were to be granted ecclesiastical benefices or admitted to monasteries in the English parts of Ireland. . . .”6
Late medieval chroniclers used words such as gens (zhahn) (race or clan) and natio (NAHT-ee-oh) (species, stock, or kind) to refer to different groups. They held that peoples differed according to language, traditions, customs, and laws. None of these were unchangeable, however, and commentators increasingly also described ethnic differences in terms of "blood”—"German blood,” "English blood,” and so on — which made ethnicity heritable. Religious beliefs also came to be conceptualized as blood, with people regarded as having Jewish blood, Muslim blood, or Christian blood. The most dramatic expression of this was in Spain, where "purity of the blood”—having no Muslim or Jewish ancestors —became an obsession. Blood was also used as a way to talk about social differences, especially for nobles. Just as Irish and English were prohibited from marrying each other, those of "noble blood” were prohibited from marrying commoners in many parts of Europe. As Europeans increasingly came into contact with people from Africa and Asia, and particularly as they developed colonial empires, these notions of blood also became a way of conceptualizing racial categories (see page 325).
Literacy and Vernacular Literature
The development of ethnic identities had many negative consequences, but a more positive effect was the increasing use of the vernacular. Two masterpieces of European culture, Dante’s (DAHN-tay) Divine Comedy (1310-1320) and Chaucer’s (CHAW-ser) Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), illustrate a sophisticated use of the rhythms and rhymes of the vernacular.
Dante Alighieri (ah-lee-ghee-AIR-ee) (1265-1321) called his work a "comedy” because he wrote it in Italian and in a different style from the "tragic” Latin; a later generation added the adjective divine, referring both to its sacred subject and to Dante’s artistry. The Divine Comedy is an epic poem of one hundred cantos (verses) each of whose three equal parts (1 + 33 + 33 + 33) describes one of the realms of the next world: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The Roman poet Virgil, representing reason, leads Dante through Hell, where Dante observes the torments of the damned and denounces the disorders of his own time, especially ecclesiastical ambition and corruption. Passing up into Purgatory, Virgil shows the poet how souls are purified of their disordered inclinations. From Purgatory, Beatrice (BEE-uh-triss), a woman Dante once loved and the symbol of divine revelation in the poem, leads him to Paradise. In Paradise, home of the angels and saints, Saint Bernard —representing mystic contemplation—leads Dante to the Virgin Mary. Through her intercession, he at last attains a vision of God.
The Divine Comedy portrays contemporary and historical figures, comments on secular and ecclesiastical affairs, and draws on Scholastic philosophy. Within the framework of a symbolic pilgrimage to the City of God, the Divine Comedy
Embodies the psychological tensions of the age. A profoundly Christian poem, it also contains bitter criticism of some church authorities. In its symmetrical structure and use of figures from the ancient world, such as Virgil, the poem perpetuates the classical tradition, but as the first major work of literature in the Italian vernacular, it is distinctly modern.
Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400) was an official in the administrations of the English kings Edward III and Richard II and wrote poetry as an avocation. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories in lengthy rhymed narrative. On a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury (see page 203), thirty people of various social backgrounds tell tales. For example, the gross Miller tells a vulgar story about a deceived husband; the earthy Wife of Bath, who has buried five husbands, sketches a fable about the selection of a spouse; and the elegant Prioress, who violates her vows by wearing jewelry, delivers a homily on the Virgin. In depicting the interests and behavior of all types of people, Chaucer presents a rich panorama of English social life in the fourteenth century. Like the Divine Comedy, the Canterbury Tales reflects the cultural tensions of the times. Ostensibly Christ ian, many of the pilgrims are also materialistic, sensual, and worldly, suggesting the ambivalence of the broader society’s concern for the next world and frank enjoyment of this one.
Beginning in the fourteenth century, a variety of evidence attests to the increasing literacy of laypeople. Wills and inventories reveal that many people, not just nobles, possessed books—mainly devotional, but also romances, manuals on manners and etiquette, histories, and sometimes legal and philosophical texts. In England the number of schools in the diocese of York quadrupled between 1350 and 1500. Information from Flemish and German towns is similar: children were sent to schools and were taught the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithme-
Schoolmaster and Schoolmistress Teaching
Ambrosius Holbein (HOHL-bine), elder brother of the more famous Hans Holbein, produced this signboard for the Swiss educator Myconius; it is an excellent example of what we would call commercial art-art used to advertise, in this case Myconius's profession. The German script above promised that all who enrolled, girls and boys, would learn to read and write. Most schools were for boys only, but a few offered instruction for girls as well. By modern standards the classroom seems bleak: the windows have glass panes but they don't admit much light, and the schoolmaster is prepared to use the sticks if the boy makes a mistake. (Kunstmuseum Basel, Acc. No. 311/Martin Buhler, photographer)
What were the demographic, social, and economic consequences of climate change? (page 278)
The crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were acids that burned deeply into the fabric of traditional medieval society. Bad weather brought poor harvests, which contributed to widespread famine and disease and an international economic depression. Political leaders attempted to find solutions, but were unable to deal with the economic and social problems that resulted.
How did the spread of the plague shape European society? (page 280)
In 1348 a new disease, most likely the bubonic plague, came to mainland Europe, carried from the Black Sea by ships. It spread quickly by land and sea and within two years may have killed as much as one-third of the European population. Contemporary medical explanations for the plague linked it to poisoned air or water, and treatments were ineffective. Many people regarded the plague as a divine punishment and sought remedies in religious practices such as prayer, pilgrimages, or donations to churches. Population losses caused by the Black Death led to inflation but in the long run may have contributed to more opportunities for the peasants and urban workers who survived the disease.
What were the causes of the Hundred Years’ War, and how did the war affect European politics, economics, and cultural life? (page 286)
The miseries of the plague were enhanced in England and France by the Hundred Years' War, which was fought intermittently in France from 1337 to 1453. The war began as a dispute over the succession to the French crown, and royal propaganda on both sides fostered a kind of early nationalism. The English won most of the battles
Tic. Laymen increasingly served as managers or stewards of estates and as clerks to guilds and town governments; such positions obviously required that they be able to keep administrative and financial records.
The penetration of laymen into the higher positions of governmental administration, long the preserve of clerics, also illustrates rising lay literacy. With growing frequency, the upper classes sent their daughters to convent schools, where, in addition to instruction in singing, religion, needlework, deportment, and household management, girls gained the rudiments of reading and sometimes writing.
The spread of literacy represents a response to the needs of an increasingly complex society. Trade, commerce, and expanding government bureaucracies required more and more literate people. Late medieval culture remained an oral culture in which most people received information by word of mouth. But by the midfifteenth century, even before the printing press was turning out large quantities of reading materials, the evolution toward a literary culture was already perceptible.
Peasant revolts due to increased taxes, economic frustration, and fear, resulted in widespread violence and destruction, leading to a backlash of repression by the nobility.
Urban conflict occurred as capitalism magnified the disparity between rich and poor and caused limits on entry into guilds and on women's right to work in guild shops.
Poor women were forced into prostitution in urban centers, and homosexuality and rape were common.
After the Hundred Years' War, unemployed young nobles, called fur-collar criminals, roamed the countryside, stealing and causing trouble.
The large migrations of different ethnicities brought with them the laws of their countries of origin, except in Ireland, where English law discriminated against the Irish.
Ethnic identities increased the use of vernacular language, and great works of literature such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reflected the tensions of the era.
With the advancements in trade, commerce, and government, literacy increased and more books became available.
Great Famine (p. 278)
Black Death (p. 280) flagellants (p. 284)
Agincourt (p. 287) representative assemblies (p. 290) nationalism (p. 290)
Babylonian Captivity (p. 291) Great Schism (p. 291) conciliarists (p. 292) confraternities (p. 293) peasant revolts (p. 293)
Jacquerie (p. 296)
Statute of Kilkenny (p. 301)
And in 1419 advanced to the walls of Paris. The appearance of Joan of Arc rallied the French cause, and French troops eventually pushed English forces out of all of France except the port of Calais. The war served as a catalyst for the development of representative government in England. In France, on the other hand, the war stiffened opposition to national assemblies.
What were the causes of the Great Schism, and how did church leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary people respond? (page 291)
Religious beliefs offered people solace through these difficult times, but the Western Christ ian church was going through a particularly difficult period in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The papacy moved to Avignon in France, where it was dominated by the French monarchy. This led eventually to some cardinals electing a second, Roman pope, a division in the church called the Great Schism. The Avignon papacy and the Great Schism weakened the prestige of the church and people’s faith in papal authority. The conciliar movement, by denying the church’s universal sovereignty, strengthened the claims of secular governments to jurisdiction over all their peoples. As members of the clergy challenged the power of the pope, laypeople challenged the authority of the church itself. Women and men increasingly relied on direct approaches to God, often through mystical encounters, rather than on the institutional church. Some, including John Wyclif and Jan Hus, questioned basic church doctrines.
How did economic and social tensions contribute to revolts, crime, violence, and
A growing sense of ethnic and national distinctions? (page 293)
The plague and the war both led to higher taxes and economic dislocations, which sparked peasant revolts in Flanders, France, and England. Peasant revolts often blended with conflicts involving workers in cities, where working conditions were changing to create a greater gap between wealthy merchant-producers and poor workers. Unrest in the countryside and cities may have been further exacerbated by marriage patterns that left large numbers of young men unmarried and rootless. The pattern of late marriage for men contributed to a growth in prostitution, which was an accepted feature of medieval urban society. Along with peasant revolts and urban crime and unrest, violence perpetrated by nobles was a common part of late medieval life. The economic and demographic crises of the fourteenth century also contributed to increasing ethnic tensions in the many parts of Europe where migration had brought different population groups together. A growing sense of ethnic and national identity led to restrictions and occasionally to violence, but also to the increasing use of vernacular languages for works of literature. The increasing number of schools that led to the growth of lay literacy represents another positive achievement of the later Middle Ages.
1. Quoted in J. Barnie, War in Medieval English Society: Social "Values and the Hundred Years’ War (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 34.
2. See G. O. Sayles, The King’s Parliament of England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), app., pp. 137-141.
3. Quoted in J. H. Smith, The Great Schism, 1378: The Disintegration of the Medieval Papacy (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1970), p. 15.
4. Quoted in B. A. Hanawalt, "Fur Collar Crime: The Pattern of Crime Among the Fourteenth-Century English Nobility,” Journal of Social History 8 (Spring 1975): p. 7.
5. Quoted in R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 205.
6. Quoted ibid., p. 239.
World History
