France in lockdown: time for virtual visits and armchair tourism

If, like me, you are not allowed to leave your home without good reason, all is not lost. Why not escape on a virtual visit to the Lauragais through the pages of a book? This part of France is blessed with an extraordinarily rich history and, except for the next 14 days, a vibrant present. When you reach Part IV - A Hundred Years of Misery, you may conclude that the current situation is not so bad, at least not from a historical perspective. Here is an extract from Chapter 18 of my book, Lauragais: Steeped in History, Soaked in Blood.

Chapter 18 - The Black Prince

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Europe’s weather took a dramatic turn for the worse. Summers were unusually cold and wet, and it was often impossible to plough or sow or harvest or make hay. In the Lauragais, one historian estimates that between 1300 and 1346 there were twenty-five years when winter reserves were exhausted before the new crops were ready to harvest.  The worst period was the Great Famine of 1315, when somewhere between ten and twenty-five percent of Europe’s population died of starvation.

It was during these times of hunger that the first citizens of Revel set to work and began to build their new town around the seneschal’s stake in the centre of the market square. They chopped down trees in the forest of Vauré and erected their timber-framed houses. From the safety of the new bastide they would be able to face the future with more optimism. The consuls had appointed guards to defend the town, and others to protect the crops in their orchards, vineyards and fields from marauders and wild beasts. One day soon they would find time to profit from Article 22 of the charter by raising ramparts and digging moats which they would stock with fish.

I can picture members of the new bourgeoisie going about their business and meeting friends or neighbours at the market or in the street. Life would improve now, wouldn’t it? And indeed, the inclement weather that had so often ruined their agriculture since the start of the century began to improve. The rain clouds became less prevalent and the temperatures began to climb, and people dared to hope the worst was behind them. But there are Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and famine was not the only one who was circling the Lauragais. Death was always close at hand, and the Hundred Years’ War had rumbled away in the north for ten years and would soon come much nearer, but first came pestilence.

In Europe as a whole, the Black Death is believed to have killed a third of the population. The causes of the plague and its calamitous effects on society have been debated and documented elsewhere, so I shall restrict myself to observing that in Revel and much of the Lauragais, the epidemic reached its peak in the summer of 1348 and gradually died out the following year along with half the population. The plague took no notice of age, profession or position. In the space of a few short months, on average, half the mothers, half the children, half the bakers, half the butchers, half the carpenters, half the stonemasons, half the gravediggers, half the town guards were all dead.

The survivors barely had time to bury all the corpses and adapt to life with one-in-two people missing before another calamity hit the Lauragais. In the Book of Revelations war is represented by a red horse, but in 1355 it manifested itself in the shape of the Black Prince. The length of his visit could be counted in days, but the unforeseen effects of his subsequent actions would afflict the Lauragais for sixty years.

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