The great teacher who, with his transcendent genius, has done more to
create a school of English history than all who have gone before him,
who, in fact, has made English history, not what it is, but what it
will be, when his influence shall have permeated our literature, has
spoken on this subject of the Black Death with his usual profound
suggestiveness. The Bishop of Chester looks with grave distrust upon
any theory which ascribes to the Great Plague as a cause "nearly all
the social changes which take place in England down to the
Reformation: the depopulation of towns, the relaxation of the bonds
of moral and social law, the solution of the continuity of national
development caused by a sort of disintegration in society generally."
[Footnote: "Constitutional History," vol. ii. chap. xvi. p. 399,
Section 259, edit. 1875.] And yet this appalling visitation must have
constituted a very important factor in the working out of those
social and political problems with which the life of every great
nation is concerned. Such problems, however, are not simple ones;
rather they are infinitely complex; and he who would set himself to
analyse the processes by which the ultimate results are arrived at
will blunder hopelessly if he takes account of only a single unknown
quantity.
I. It is obvious that the sudden exhaustion of the large reserve
force of clergy must have made itself felt at once in every parish in
England.
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