es incorporated after the plague were founded
with the avowed motive of filling up the gaps in the secular clergy
occasioned by it. The riots between the Oxford townsmen and the clerks
of the university on St. Scholastica's day, 1354, resulted in the
victory of the former because of the recent diminution in the number of
the scholars. Yet even as regards the monasteries, it is easy to
exaggerate the effects of the plague. Five years after the Black Death,
the Cistercians of the Lancashire abbey of Whalley boasted that they
had added twenty monks to their convent, and were busy in enlarging
their church.[1]

[1] Cal. _Papal Registers, Petitions_, i., 264. Professor Tait,
however, informs me that the monks took a sanguine view of
their numbers. After the plague of 1362, we know that they were
not much more numerous than in the previous century.

Change was in the air in religion as well as in society. Along with
democratic ideas filtering in with the exiles from the great Flemish
cities, came a breath of that restless and unquiet spirit which soon
awakened the concern of the inquisition in the Netherlands. There
brotherhoods, some mystical and quietistic, others enthusiastic and
fanatical, were growing in numbers and importance. Some of these bodies,
Beguines, Beghards, and what not, were harmless enough, but the whole
history of the Middle Ages bears testimony to the readiness with which
religious excitement unchastened by discipline or direction, grew into
dangerous heresy. The strangest of the new communities, the Flagellants,
made its appearance in England immediately after the pestilence. In the
autumn of 1349, some six score men crossed over from Holland and marched
in procession through the open spaces of London, chanting doleful
litanies in their own tongue. They wore nothing save a linen cloth that
covered the lower part of their body, and on their heads hats marked
with a red cross behind and before. Each of them bore in his right hand
a scourge, with which he belaboured the naked back and shoulders of his
comrade in the fore rank. Twice a day they repeated this mournful
exercise, and even at other times were never seen in public but with cap
on head and discipline in hand. Few Englishmen joined the Flagellants,
but their appearance is not unworthy of notice as the first concrete
evidence of the religious unrest which soon became more widespread.
Before long the Yorkshireman, John Wycliffe, was