subsequent epidemics in the 1360s and 1370s. Whatever their local incidence, epidemics as virulent as these inevitably had a profound impact on later medieval society. Precise figures are hard to establish and difficult to interpret, but a general European death-rate of about 35 per cent would lead to substantial depopulation of rural areas, a dearth of labour in both town and countryside, and a redistribution of wealth among those who survived. The gaps in the ranks had to be filled and the period 1350-1400 saw a series of violent reactions to the increased social mobility precipitated by the epidemics. Prospects of material improvement beckoned the artisan, unfree peasant, or urban pauper, and the frustration of these classes at their lot after the enactment of labour laws or the closing of ranks by urban oligarchies was vented in the popular risings of the period. The Jacquerie ( 1358), the Tuchinat of Southern France ( 1380s), the English Peasants' Revolt ( 1381), and the risings in maritime Flanders ( 1382-4) were not the product of organized collaboration among the excluded classes of northern Europe, but they seem to have had common origins in postplague economic and social conditions. All were suppressed, generally brutally, by the governing classes and only in Flanders did social conflict continue, fuelled by the quasi-independent stance of the three great towns, above all Ghent, towards their new Burgundian rulers.

Other classes of society besides the most unfortunate felt the impact of plague. Human distress took many forms, some extreme--such as the outbreak of self-flagellation which accompanied the penitential processions of the 1350s--others less spectacular, such as the devotional cults of St Sebastian and St Giles who were invoked as protectors from the terrors of the plague. The clergy suffered badly: the abbey of Saint-Martin at Tournai, for example, lost 80 per cent of its monks between 1348 and 1362. New ordinands had to be found to fill vacant benefices and bishops' ordination lists were often long in the second half of the century. But a problem of recruitment affected many areas of human activity, not merely the Church. Governments found soldiers harder to recruit, and their wages consequently rose, while apprentices, masons, and rural

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