Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/417

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 followed 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' Rebellions. 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 diminished 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 inexperienced, 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 medieval 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 interests arose, new evil and new good appeared. 'Sithence the pestilence' is an era which Piers Plowman quite naturally uses; for it was graven deep in the memory of his generation.