The sittings of Parliament, of the
King's Bench, and of most of the other courts, were suspended as
long as the malady raged. The laws of peace availed not during
the dominion of death. Pope Clement took advantage of this state
of disorder to adjust the bloody quarrel between Edward III and
Philip VI; yet he only succeeded during the period that the plague
commanded peace. Philip's death (1350) annulled all treaties; and
it is related that Edward, with other troops indeed, but with the
same leaders and knights, again took the field. Ireland was much
less heavily visited that England. The disease seems to have
scarcely reached the mountainous districts of that kingdom; and
Scotland too would perhaps have remained free, had not the Scots
availed themselves of the discomfiture of the English to make an
irruption into their territory, which terminated in the
destruction of their army, by the plague and by the sword, and the
extension of the pestilence, through those who escaped, over the
whole country.
At the commencement, there was in England a superabundance of all
the necessaries of life; but the plague, which seemed then to be
the sole disease, was soon accompanied by a fatal murrain among
the cattle.
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