Calamities such as these would assuredly have been treated as warnings
sent from on high, both in earlier times, when a Church better braced for
the due performance of its never-ending task, eagerly interpreted to awful
ears the signs of the wrath of God, and by a later generation, leavened in
spirit by the self-searching morality of Puritanism. But from the sorely-
tried third quarter of the fourteenth century the solitary voice of
Langland cries, as the voice of Conscience preaching with her cross, that
"these pestilences" are the penalty of sin and of naught else. It is
assuredly presumptuous for one generation, without the fullest proof, to
accuse another of thoughtlessness or heartlessness; and though the classes
for which Chaucer mainly wrote and with which he mainly felt, were in all
probability as little inclined to improve the occasions of the Black Death
as the middle classes of the present day would be to fall on their knees
after a season of commercial ruin, yet signs are not wanting that in the
later years of the fourteenth century words of admonition came to be not
unfrequently spoken. The portents of the eventful year 1382 called forth
moralisings in English verse, and the pestilence of 1391 a rhymed
lamentation in Latin; and at different dates in King Richard's reign the
poet Gower, Chaucer's contemporary and friend, inveighed both in Latin and
in English, from his conservative point of view, against the corruption
and sinfulness of society at large. But by this time the great peasant
insurrection had added its warning, to which it was impossible to remain
deaf.

A self-confident nation, however, is slow to betake itself to sackcloth
and ashes. On the whole it is clear, that though the last years of Edward
III were a season of failure and disappointment,--though from the period
of the First Pestilence onwards the signs increase of the king's
unpopularity and of the people's discontent,--yet the overburdened and
enfeebled nation was brought almost as slowly as the King himself to