went to make up the ascetic ideal; on the
other hand, the fondness for whipping bare flesh and for being whipped
has a distinctly pathologic character. The subject is rather too
unsavoury to dwell upon, but it has long been established that there is
a close connection between the whipping of certain parts of the body and
the production of intense sexual pleasure.[183] And it is also clear
that the life led by monks and nuns was such as to encourage sexual
aberrations of various forms. Moreover, when once the practice of
whipping became a public spectacle, and assumed an epidemic form,
imitation, combined with intense religious faith, would operate very
powerfully.

In the fourteenth century Europe was visited by the Black Plague. In
countries utterly devoid of sanitation, where baths were practically
unknown and personal habits of the filthiest, the plague found a
fruitful soil. Nearly a quarter of the population died, and corpses were
so numerous that huge pits were dug and hundreds buried together. It was
amid the general terror and demoralisation caused by this visitation
that the sect of the Flagellants arose. Calling themselves the
Brotherhood of the Flagellants, or the Brethren of the Cross, wearing
dark garments with red crosses front and back, they traversed the cities
of the Continent carrying whips to which small pieces of iron were
fixed. England appears to have been the only country in which they
failed to establish themselves. Elsewhere their numbers grew with
formidable rapidity. At Spires two hundred boys, under twelve years of
age, influenced probably by the example of the children's crusade,
formed themselves into a brotherhood and marched through some of the
German cities. In Italy over 20,000 people marched from Florence in one
of these processions; from Modena, over 25,000. Some of them professed
to work miracles. Everywhere, while the mania lasted, they were warmly
welcomed, the inhabitants of towns and cities ringing the bells and
flocking in crowds to hear the preaching and witness the whippings.

The proceedings of the Flagellants in all countries were very similar.
They marched from town to town, men and women and children stripped to
the waist--sometimes entirely naked--praying incessantly and whipping
each other. "Not only during the day, but even by night, and in the
severest winter, they traversed the cities with torches and banners, in
thousands and tens of thousands, headed by their pries