In some places, religious authorities and town councils imposed tight restrictions on people’s behaviour in the hope of keeping the plague at bay. In the French city of Tournai, men and women who were living together but not married were ordered to marry or to separate, and gambling, swearing and working on the Sabbath (a day of religious observance) were banned.
SOURCE5 A mass grave was discovered in Gdansk, Poland, at the former site of a hospital. The sheer number of bodies meant that they could not be buried in the usual style.
SOURCE4 This image depicts Saint Sebastian interceding for victims of the plague.
Mass deaths and burials So large was the death toll from the Black Death that all the usual religious rituals associated with death, such as confessing one’s sins to a priest before death, could rarely be observed. As many as half the priests died from the plague and many others fled, making the situation worse. In 1348, Pope Clement VI decreed that those who were infected could make their confessions to each other, including to a woman, if no priest was available. Collection of corpses took place every night, with most buried in mass graves on the outskirts of the town. Very rarely was a proper funeral service held for those who had died. Monks and monasteries Throughout Catholic Europe, monasteries had become important centres of learning, and many had schools attached. The monks made an important contribution to the life of the surrounding community and were often the first ones that people would turn to in times of trouble. Because the monks saw it as their duty to tend to the sick, they quickly caught the disease and their numbers in the monasteries were reduced. In the period after the Black Death, many inexperienced and poorly trained monks moved into the monasteries, reducing their influence as places of learning. The Flagellants One religious group that responded very publicly to the spread of the plague was a group known as the Flagellants. They believed that whipping themselves with steel-tipped whips would show their willingness to be punished for their sins, and win God’s favour. The Flagellants are believed to have originated in the eleventh century and had undertaken pilgrimages across Europe in the 1260s. The onset of the Black Death drew many new followers to their group, and they travelled from town to town across Europe, whipping themselves until they bled. In reality, they were probably helping to spread the disease. Many of them carried the disease in their blood, and they often brought the disease-carrying rats and fleas with them as they travelled.
TOPIC3 Medieval Europe 101
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