The Black Death was a recurring catastrophe that compounded the warfare and instability confronting France during the Hundred Years’ War. Its first devastating wave, in 1348–49, carried off a third of Europe; the plague then returned roughly every decade, making recovery from one outbreak vulnerable to another.

Arrival and Recurrence

The plague came after years of military reversals: England had invaded France, won major victories at Crécy and Poitiers, and secured the capture and ransom of King Jean. France then faced civil conflict, rebellion, unrest in Paris, drought, and crop failures. The Black Death added a recurring source of loss to these existing crises. The account presents it not as an isolated episode but as a calamity that returned periodically and deepened the hardship of a country already under strain.

Fear, Faith, and the Plague’s Meaning

The account presents the Black Death not only as repeated loss but as a crisis of interpretation. Artists of the period pictured Death as a shrouded skeleton with a great scythe, while black warning flags flew from the belfries of plague-stricken villages. In this atmosphere, the plague seemed to signal that God had abandoned France. The image of Death and the flags made the danger visible, while the account’s religious framing shows how the epidemic could unsettle confidence as well as threaten lives.

That sense of spiritual abandonment appears within a wider religious rupture. The Western Schism began in 1378, dividing Christendom between rival popes in Rome and Avignon; the account places this fracture in the same landscape of fear and upheaval shaped by recurring plague. It does not present the schism as a consequence of the epidemic, but as another crisis that made the period’s religious uncertainty harder to escape.

Death in a Country Under Siege

The epidemic’s human cost is conveyed in the fate of the dead: corpses lay unburied in fields and accumulated in streets. Their presence made mortality part of the public landscape, not a loss confined to individual households. Because outbreaks returned every decade or so, the devastation recurred before the country could leave earlier waves behind.

The account sets this repeated loss within a France also exposed to raiding and insecurity. English armies were followed by bands of routiers who looted settlements and extorted tribute; amid this wider violence and anarchy, villagers raised earthworks and ditches, farmers fortified homes and barns, and towns, monasteries, and churches strengthened their walls. These defenses are presented as responses to the surrounding disorder, not as a direct consequence of plague. Together, the episodes show the Black Death recurring in a landscape where disease and armed insecurity compounded the difficulty of recovery.

A Crisis Without a Clean End

By describing the plague as returning every decade or so, the account resists treating 1348–49 as a self-contained disaster with a clear endpoint. The first wave marks the scale of the catastrophe, but recurrence makes it part of the continuing conditions under which France endured the later fourteenth century: each return threatened to renew losses before their effects had passed.