Page:The Net of Faith.pdf/55

14 seventy-two cities were destroyed by the sea in one night and 200,000 people were drowned in one year. The Black Death, the Asiatic Cholera, the Athenian Plague, and famine killed thirteen million people in China and reduced the population of France and England by one third. The common people was impoverished, ill-fed, ill-housed. Yet at the same time the secular and ecclesiastic princes lived in a byzantinesque luxury which only accentuated their aloofness from the common. While the peasants complained that they "haue the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynd in the feldes," the doorways of the castle of Vincennes had to be raised in order to accomodate the three-foot tall head-dress of Isabelle of Bavaria.

A rigid caste system, perpetuating itself by a ruthless exploitation of the common people, was entrenched on the whole continent of Europe, upheld by secular powers and sanctioned by the Church. The iron hand of authority and the cramped hand of plague were the two clutches which held Europe in a deadly embrace. "Those ancient astronomers, the Chinese, said the fourteenth century had excessive sunspots." I am indebted for most of this barometric information to an excellent book in this field,  , by Roderick Peattie (New York: Stewart, 1940). At the same time I do not subscribe to the isobaric determinism of history which it often approaches rather dangerously.

See, Book ii, ch. iv.