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The phenomenon recorded by Renouard seems to have been by no means invariable. In Albi, to take one example, little difference was perceptible in the social structure of the city as a result of the plague. Almost everybody was richer than before but, on the whole, the wealth of the dead seems to have been shared out among the living without any further distortion of what was already a formidably inequitable pattern.{523} But even where no extra economic motive arose, the Black Death left a legacy of mistrust between classes. No one could protect themselves against infection but the rich were at least able to take to flight. The bishops, the territorial magnates, the more affluent merchants, took refuge on their country manors and left the city to look after itself as best it could. It was not to be expected that they would meet with much enthusiasm on their return. It was as if Mayfair or the Sixteenth Arrondissement had emptied themselves in time of war and the inhabitants returned when the danger was passed, expecting a welcome from those whom they had deserted.

The impression that the rich escaped the worst of the plague was largely illusory. Many stayed in the cities and, of those who fled, many also found that their rural fastnesses offered no protection. But they did suffer less and their luck was obvious to the less fortunate. An isolated statistical illustration comes from Teruel in Aragon.{524} In 1342, 33.7 per cent of those citizens liable to pay tax did not do so because they had so little money that they were exempted. By 1385 the proportion had dropped to 10.4 per cent. One can accept that, immediately after the Black Death, some redistribution of wealth could have accounted for a drop in the numbers of the poor. But so sharp a fall in their numbers, continuing thirty-five years later, suggests strongly that the poor in the city must almost have been wiped out in the Black Death or subsequent epidemics. The victims did little to express their resentment – there was, indeed, very little that they could do – but a new and potentially dangerous element of class hatred had sprung up.

Professor Russell has suggested that, though the numbers of the peasants may have dropped, at least those who were left were likely to be more healthy. Even if the rule of the survival of the fittest did not apply, the extra food available after the mortality would ensure that they would fare better in future. So far as the Italian peasant, at least, was concerned, Professor Russell’s rosy vision was quickly disallowed. According to Miss Thrupp, this unfortunate species suffered, in the fourteenth century, from acute over-exposure and protein deficiency leading to asthma, quinsy, erysipelas, various digestive and intestinal complaints and bad teeth.{525} Such complaints could only have been cured by a radical change of diet and of living conditions: the only possible benefit they might have gained from the plague was a marginally larger intake of anyhow monotonous and insalubrious food. The medieval peasant, it is clear, had little in the way of material gain to set against the anguish which he had suffered.

But if one were called on to identify the hall-mark of the years which followed the Black Death, it would be that of a neurotic and all-pervading gloom. ‘Seldom in the course of the Middle Ages has so much been written concerning the miseria of human beings and human life’, wrote Hans Baron, going on to refer to ‘…the pessimism and renunciation of life which took possession of mankind in the period following the terrible epidemics in the middle of the fourteenth century.’{526} It was a gloom which fed upon extreme uncertainty and apprehension. The European of this period lived in constant anticipation of disaster. The apparition of Antichrist was announced many times and in many places. Floods, famines, fire from heaven were perpetually around the corner. The Turks and Saracens planned a descent on Italy; the English on France; the Scots on England. Medieval man, in sober fact, had more than enough to worry about. Now his imagination ran riot.

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