The Flagellants Hit London

by Venetia Green

flagellum – a whip;

flagellare – to whip;

“The Brotherhood of the Flagellants” – the medieval movement characterised by men whipping their own bare flesh in ritual processions as a penance for sin.

While men – and women – have been whipping themselves in the name of faith since classical times at least, flagellation first emerged as a popular millennial movement in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century. Self-scourging – already established as a form of private penance in monasteries – now became adopted by lay-people with the aim of allaying the perceived wrath of God.

The Flagellant movement revived with a vengeance when the ultimate wrath of God – the Black Death – descended upon Europe in the late 1340s. This time, the Flagellant heartland was Germany, from which it spread to the Low Countries…

…and thence to London. As Robert of Avesbury tells us:

About Michaelmas 1349 over six hundred men came to London from Flanders …. Sometimes at St Paul’s and sometimes at other points in the city they made two daily public appearances wearing cloths from the thighs to the ankles, but otherwise stripped bare. … Each had in his right hand a scourge with three tails. Each tail had a knot and through the middle of it there were sometimes sharp nails fixed. They marched in single file … and whipped themselves with these scourges on their naked and bleeding bodies. Four of them would cant in their native tongue and, another four would chant in response like a litany. Thrice they would all cast themselves on the ground in this sort of procession, stretching out their hands like the arms of a cross. The singing would go on and, the one who was in the rear of those thus prostrate acting first, each of them in turn would step over the others and give one stroke with his scourge to the man lying under him. … It is said that every night they performed the same penance.

For some reason, this dramatic demonstration of penance failed to catch on in London – or within the British Isles more generally. The Flemish Flagellants of 1349 were deported and the movement did not reappear in England.

Pope Clement issued a Bull denouncing the Flagellant Movement in October 1349, and things went downhill for the Flagellants from there. Rulers from Sicily to Poland moved to violently repress the sect. In England, however, there was only the fleeting spectacle of a mass of chanting foreigners whipping themselves bloody in the streets of London in 1349 (or 1350, as Walsingham has it). Were Londoners repulsed by this eerie and stomach-turning spectacle – or did they find in it tantalising hope of salvation from the Plague?

References:
D. G. Caramenico “Black Death, Flagellants, And Jews”, J. P. Byrne (ed.), Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues, Westport, Conn., 2008, pp.67-69.
R. Lerner, ‘The Black Death and western eschatological mentalities’, The American Historical Review, vol.86, no.3, 1981.
J. E. Lewis, London: The Autobiography, New York, 2012.
P. Zeigler, The Black Death, London, 1969.

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Venetia Green was born in England and has lived most of her life in Western Australia. She studied medieval history and literature at postgraduate level, but gave it all away to write historical fiction instead. Now she writes dark romances set amongst the fjords of Viking Age Scandinavia and back-alleys of medieval London.

The Pestilence of Great Mortality (The Black Plague)

by Phillip C. Wright

Imagine living in medieval Europe in 1348. If you were the average European, you were a peasant who either tended the orchards, fed the animals or worked in the fields. The nobles had inherited their land through birthright, or some, through service to the king as a soldier in his army or night in his court.

Life in the 14th century wasn’t glamorous--neither was it easy. Most people never ventured out of their own town or village. Most were uneducated, which in truth, kept the servant class in their place, for education then, as today always meant more opportunity, and the nobles and the royals knew this. In fact, the only education the average person received was on Sunday by the local priest. The nobles and the royalty hired monks to teach their children, everyone else continued illiterate generation after generation to follow in the footsteps of their father which usually meant learning the family trade and performing it from one generation to another.

In England, the king maintained a stronghold over his subjects. To keep order and to collect taxes, every town was organized with a local government that reported back to the king. The local sheriff kept order, kept the peace and supervised the collecting of taxes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t uncommon for unethical government officials to take advantage of the locals. In fact, a famous sheriff of the time, John Oxford of Nottingham, was known for his extortion and robbery from his community; due to his notoriety he later became a famous character in the Robin Hood tales.

Not every town was controlled by corrupt leaders, and for most life was simple and very predictable in medieval Europe, but something happened in the summer of 1348--something that not only changed lives, but livelihood, politics and even religion.

Imagine it’s June 1348 and that you just finished purchasing a bag of grain from a local merchant in the seaside town of Bristol, England. With over 10,000 full time residents, Bristol was the second largest city in England and the main English port for trade throughout Europe. As you loaded the bag onto your cart, you noticed a ship anchoring in the harbor.

Of course, this was nothing you hadn’t seen before, there were always ships coming and going in the Bristol harbor. But among the cargo of this ship was a unique stow-away, one of many unnoticed passengers that had already caused havoc in the lives of thousands as it traveled all the way from eastern Mongolia, Asia, to Egypt, western and eastern Europe, the Middle East and today it was debarking into the beautiful and welcoming town of Bristol. Neither you nor any of the other residents and visitors of Bristol had any idea that today would be the beginning of the pestilence of great mortality in England.

Most modern day researchers agree that it was the flea that carried the Black Plague from Asia, to Africa and to Europe. As the strain of the pestilence grew it also morphed into different types of bacteria. The most common form entered the blood stream, and the other lodged in the lungs, so just breathing on another person transmitted almost certain death.

Those infected had little hope of survival. For most, the plague ended their lives within days and some within hours. The pain was so intense that the infected welcomed death as an end to their suffering. Once infected, lethargy overcame the body, accompanied by high fever, delirium, boils under the arms and in the groin, black circles on the skin, and dried blood as the flesh decayed from the inside out. The uninfected lived in fear of becoming the next victim of this unyielding, blood sucking killer.

Within days you get word that the merchant you’ve done business with for years has died of a horrible sickness, days later his wife and even children also die. You hope that it is an isolated event, but then discover that one of your neighbors has contracted what appears to be the same sickness.

You are awakened at three o’clock in the morning by loud screams. At first you think that someone down the street has been robbed. You look out the window of your second story apartment that is meshed between many identical homes on the street, and all of the doors appear to be locked. You then notice an unusual sight of pigs wondering down the street. You assume that they got out of their pen from the farmer's house about a mile away in the country. So you go back to bed, only to be awakened again by more screams. This time your wife and children also wake. The screams continue for the next two hours. Finally, just before sunrise you dress, tell your family to stay inside, and you muster the courage to leave your home.

The pigs are gone, but the sounds of human sobs continue. You walk just three doors down, and you hear a man sobbing from the open window; he is your friend Arthur. You look into the window and see that he is sitting on a bed holding the corpse of his dead wife, a woman that you spoke to on the street just two days earlier. Before you can speak, he looks up and notices you. His eyes are bloodshot, and filled with salty tears of despair, that are running down his cheeks and throat. He shakes his head as he speaks to you,

“My friend, evil has come and we are all going to die. Run! Leave now, while you still can!”

He turns his head back toward his dead wife, and you notice a large black pustule on the side of his neck. You slowly move away from the window trying to make sense of what you just saw and heard. Suddenly you hear screams coming from two blocks away, and then more, even closer. It occurs to you that with the rising of the sun more people are discovering the dead all around them.

You turn around and begin running back to your home. You run up the stairs, fling open the door and shout to your wife and children to dress. You tell them that you must all leave now, before it’s too late. They begin to ask questions, your six year old daughter begins crying causing a chain reaction to your ten year old daughter, and 12 year old son. Your wife tries to comfort the children as she too fights to maintain her composure. After five minutes, everyone is dressed, small bags of clothes are packed, two loaves of bread and dried fruit and meat are shoved into a basket.

You take your wife by the hand, the children join hands making a human train that rushes down the stairs and out the back of the building. You hurry everyone to the cart. You open the stable door and take your horse from among the other horses still tied to the hitch. You think about your job working for the local blacksmith, and wonder what your boss will think when you don’t show up for work today.

You attach your horse to the cart, jump on its back, kick it in the shanks and pray that somehow God will spare your family as your little cart heads for the countryside. Unfortunately, you soon discover that nowhere and no one is safe from whatever evil has come to Bristol.

By the time the Black Plague begins to devour the town of Bristol, it has already moved deep inland and up the coast. It is only a matter of days before it hits London and all of the major cities of England. Word comes that a mysterious pestilence is overcoming France, Germany, Italy and all of the coastal communities of Europe.

Physicians began to administer treatment, to no avail. Communities are shocked and terrified as the doctors succumb to and die of the sickness. The people turn to the Church for an answer. Church officials are baffled as to the cause, or how to defeat the plague. Soon priests, in fear of their own lives, begin to hide from their parishioners; so many have died that local churches and towns cannot keep up with the burials. Eventually towns begin to dig mass graves; workers are paid to dump the plague victims into the graves. The Pope declares absolution to anyone who dies from the plague; even mid-wives are given authority from the Pope to administer last rights to newborn children and their dying mothers.

Everyone wanted answers to the cause and treatment of the plague. Theories came from every direction. Some believed it was a plague from God caused by wickedness. Others thought it was an unusual alignment of the planets, still others thought it was a poisonous cloud traveling through the air, and others thought it was a virus-like menace carried by cats, the known companions of witches. A decree was sent throughout all of Europe to kill every cat. Obviously, as the cat population decreased, the rat population increased, and so did the plague.

Those who adhered to the religious belief that God had sent the plague to clean the land of the wicked looked for ways to separate themselves from the wicked. A group of zealot priest arose in Germany who decided that God wanted another sacrifice to rid the earth of the plague. They formed a coalition of like-minded priests and parishioners that became known as the Flagellants. These men marched from town to town, carrying crosses, beating themselves with whips laced with glass and metal shards, unwittingly taking the plague from town to town. They believed that God would accept their public display of humility and remorse, along with the shedding of their blood, as a type of atonement for the sins of mankind. The Pope eventually put an end to this vile display of self-debauchery, with a decree condemning it.

As the plague continued to grow another idea of its origins surfaced. The followers of the Flagellants determined that the Jews had been poisoning the wells and the public water system. Throughout Germany Jews, men, women and children, were rounded up and burned in mass fire pits. The Pope came to the rescue a second time, condemning anyone involved in such an act as being "seduced by that liar, the Devil." and threatened punishment for anyone involved in such an act of wickedness.

Although 1348 ushered in the beginning of the Black Plague which lasted about three years, the plague returned on several occasion over the next twenty seven years, at one point returning for two years and only killing boys. The last known occurrence of the Black Plague ended in 1665.

By the end of 1350 more than 25 million people, one third of Europe’s population, not to mention the great number in Africa and Asia, had died. This tremendous death toll caused an economic strain on England and Europe. In England, the serfs who had survived the plague began to charge higher wages for their work, some became land owners, and even nobles began to work in their own fields.

But one of the most interesting effects of the Black Plague happened to the Church. During the middle ages the only common bond between the bickering European countries was the Church in Rome. The Pope had amassed great power and influence over the kings and rulers of Europe, none of whom wanted to be seen as a heretic of the Church. In fact, the Church was highly involved in politics almost as much as it was in religion.

As the plague ravaged Europe and the Church had no answer to stop it, more and more believers began to question the legitimacy of the Church and more specifically the Pope.

 During this time the Pope Clement VI sent mixed messages to the masses by asking astrologers to help explain the origins of the plague, condemning the murdering of innocent Jews, the wandering Flagellants, and then issuing Indulgences that were essentially a free pass to heaven for anyone willing to pay a certain price to the Church. A faithful Catholic Englishman by the name of John Wycliff lost his faith in the Church and began to teach that all people should have access to the Bible and that it should be printed in English. He later printed the first English version of the Catholic Vulgate, the Holy Bible.

The Black Plague was certainly the most horrific killer of all time, and the effects of this plague not only caused a major decrease in the population of Europe, but it brought about political change and religious change in Christianity which effects are still being felt today.

My novel, Not Without Mercy: The Black Death, is book one in the Not Without Mercy series. Although the story takes place during the Black Plague, it is not a story about the Black Plague. It is a story of how one family survived in the midst of terrible odds. It is a story of faith, family, love, courage, hope and redemption. The Pestilence of Great Mortality caused moral malaise in the land. It created two types of people, the faithful and the faithless. The faithless became fearful as they saw death all around them, with no way out. The faithful, became fearless, as they looked toward God for survival, and as they discovered in the midst of the most frightful killer of all time, that God had left them Not Without Mercy.

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Mr. Wright is not new to the publishing world, neither is he a novice at writing. In fact, he has worked professionally as a writer, director and producer of television and radio productions, commercials, documentaries and infomercials. He won the coveted Silver Telly Award for a television productions for The Yellow Jacket Trap, by Stirling International, two other Telly Awards, and five Silver Microphone awards on radio commercials for Nissan.

Phillip C. Wright is a resident of Bountiful, Utah. He has been married to Shaun (McKinney) Wright since 1982. They are the parents of seven children, and they have six grandchildren.

He has written and directed numerous plays including a full length musical re-creation with Brett Raymond called "First Light" with an original cast over 200 people. Phill is in the process of publishing several new books. The Not Without Mercy series begun with the first volume, The Black Death. The series will contain at least two more volumes, book two, The Passage Home, to be released the end of 2013 and book three, Redemption, will be released in 2014, along with two other books, Time and Time Again and The Arm of the Flesh.

Scourge of Europe: The Religious Hysteria Created by the Black Plague

By Rosanne E. Lortz

Death has always been one of the most frightening prospects faced by mankind. The fear of death even has its own word to describe it—thanotophobia. In a society where a third to a half of the people around you have succumbed to death within the past year, the terror of knowing that you might be next can become overwhelming. It can drive a person to bizarre and unthinkable acts as he tries to ward off death’s icy grip from descending on his own shoulder. This is what happened in the mid-fourteenth century, during the years of the Black Plague. The world went wild with thanotophobia, and the country of England was no exception.

Monty Python to the contrary, the Black Plague was no joking matter. The medieval chronicler Geoffrey le Baker wrote:

Men who had been one day full of life, were often found dead the next. Some were afflicted with abscesses which erupted in various parts of their bodies, and which were so hard and dry, that even when they were cut with a knife, hardly and liquid flowed out…. Others had small black sores which developed all over their bodies. Only a very few who suffered from these survived and recovered their health. 

Such was the great plague which reached Bristol on 15 August [1348], and London around 29 September. It raged in England for a year or more, and such were its ravages, that many country towns were almost emptied of human life.

For some, the proximity of the plague created the pernicious attitude of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Immorality, excess, and crime became rife in towns and cities, especially in the metropolis of London, as despairing people grasped after every last piece of self-gratification before death should come for them.

Others, however, still nourished the hope that the plague might be avoided. Doctors tried the normal remedies of bleeding and laxatives and prescribed more outlandish cures such as drinking one’s own urine. It soon became obvious, however, that medicine had failed to find the answer. As corpse after corpse was thrown in the common burial pits, the only course left to the living was to repent of their sins, cast themselves on divine mercy, and entreat the angel of death to forbear.

The fourteenth century, like the rest of the medieval period, was quick to consider any sort of disaster (natural or manmade) as a judgment from God. Earthquakes, fires, Viking invasions, Muslim conquests—all these things came about because of the sinful backsliding of God’s people. When the Black Plague, the greatest disaster in human memory, beset Europe, it was not hard for the deeply religious and deeply frightened populace to believe that God was exceptionally wroth with the world. Someone must intercede with Almighty, and prevail upon Him to stay His hand.

The early Church had understood Christ to be the intercessor between His people and God the Father. But somewhere, in between the age of the Church Fathers and the era of the Hundred Years’ War, Christ, the “shepherd of tender youth,” had metamorphosed into Christ, the stern and implacable Judge. With Christ seen as the author of the plague itself, the desperate looked for a mediator in His kinder, gentler mother Mary.

Across Europe, a strange sect known as the Flagellants began to gain followers. Wearing a uniform of a white robe marked with a red cross—much like the Knights Templar’ surcoat seen in so many period films—the Flagellants were a society of ascetic laymen determined to atone for the sins of the world. They gathered in groups of anywhere from 50 to 500 men, traveling around the towns of Europe and performing the ritual of publicly scourging themselves.

The Catholic Encyclopedia offers this description of the Flagellants’ activities:

Twice a day, proceeding slowly to the public square or to the principal church, they put off their shoes, stripped themselves to the waist and prostrated themselves in a large circle. By their posture they indicated the nature of the sins they intended to expiate, the murderer lying on his back, the adulterer on his face, the perjurer on one side holding up three fingers, etc. First they were beaten by the "Master", then, bidden solemnly in a prescribed form to rise, they stood in a circle and scourged themselves severely, crying out that their blood was mingled with the Blood of Christ and that their penance was preserving the whole world from perishing. 

After the Flagellants had gathered a crowd to watch their bloody antics, the Master would read aloud from a “heavenly letter,” trying to terrify the onlookers with its apocalyptic contents. Matthew of Neuenberg wrote:

In this [letter], the angel said that Christ was displeased by the depravities of the world, and named many sins: violation of the Lord’s day, not fasting on Friday, blasphemy, usury, adultery. The letter went on to say that, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin and the angels, Christ had replied that to obtain mercy, a man should undertake voluntary exile and flagellate himself for thirty-three and a half days….

The number was a symbolic one, standing for the thirty-three and a half years that Christ had dwelt in human form upon the earth. By identifying themselves with Christ, and taking on his sufferings as it were, the Flagellants could redeem the world from the death and destruction that had come in the form of the Black Plague.

At first, the Church did not know what to make of this strange new sect. The clergy appreciated the Flagellants’ calls for repentance but also feared that this parachurch organization would provide a rival to the Roman Church’s authority. When the Flagellants began to speak out against the Church, blaming it for allowing the corruption that had brought God’s judgment, and also began to embellish their own teachings with flagrant heresy (e.g. denial of the sacraments, professing their own ability to grant absolution), the Church reacted violently. Pope Clement VI commanded that the brotherhood be suppressed in whatever country they appeared throughout Europe.

The Church’s antagonism toward the Flagellants, however, did not necessarily reflect the popular perception of them. The fear of death that had overshadowed Europe created a ripe breeding ground for the Flagellants’ fanaticism. The movement grew quickly in Germany and the Netherlands. Matthew of Neuenberg remarks that after the Flagellants proceeded through the city of Strasbourg, about a thousand men joined their brotherhood. France, also, had many converts to the sect until in 1349, King Philip VI forbade public self-flagellation on pain of death; this decree effectively nipped the movement in the bud throughout his domains.

Interestingly enough, England was one of the countries where the Flagellants made the fewest inroads. In 1349, a group of fanatical Frisians came across the Channel hoping to gain converts in London. They put on a dramatic public display outside of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But although their bloody flails and eerie chants unnerved the crowd, the chroniclers record that not a single Englishman wished to don their red-cross robes and take up the scourge himself.

In my book, I Serve: A Novel of the Black Prince, the hero Sir John Potenhale encounters this group of Flagellants making their demonstration in London. His mother has already been carried off by the plague, his father has been driven insane by it, and Potenhale himself is in a spiritually fragile condition. The Flagellants’ bloody ceremony fills him with horror and makes him wonder whether it is indeed the sins of the world that have brought this punishment upon the land. Although he is not impelled to join the brotherhood, their ceremony does make him question his own calling as a knight, a quandary central to the plot of the novel.

Fortunately for Europe, a movement like this could not last forever. The fuel of the Flagellants’ fanaticism had always been the terror created by the Black Plague, and when the pestilence began to abate in the early 1350’s, the numbers of the sect diminished significantly. Although it was not eradicated entirely, the Flagellant brotherhood disappeared from public view and into the void of obscurity. Throughout the next couple centuries, pockets of it would crop up here and there, but the brotherhood never again gained the same following that the Black Plague had brought them. The scourge of Europe had disappeared, and there was no longer any need to scourge oneself in an attempt to avoid it. The thanotophobia had receded, and with it the religious hysteria that had turned the fourteenth century on its head.

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Rosanne E. Lortz's first book, I Serve: A Novel of the Black Prince, is a tale of arms, of death, of love and of honor--all set against the turbulent backdrop of the Hundred Years' War. 

Her latest book, Road from the West: Book I of the Chronicles of Tancred, is set during the First Crusade and follows a young Norman noble on his quest to be the first over the walls of Jerusalem. 

You can learn more about Rosanne's books at her author website.