No wonder the rats and fleas were rampant and the plague swept over the land. And as for the personal cleanliness of these crowded peoples, there was none.[21] If I wished to use another jargon than medical I would say it was a minus quantity, but personally I prefer the medical, because that means something and is exact. The Black Death revived that strange and mournful sect of the flagellants, the Brotherhood of the Cross. The spirit of man, which is capable of such wonders, must needs bow before that shadow of itself which it has projected into the infinite, and ask pardon of its anthropomorphic fourteenth-century God for the fancied sins which had brought these horrors upon the world. The quaint figures of the flagellants wandered, cross on breast, in doleful procession all over Europe, chanting dolorous hymns of misery that bore the seeds of rebellion against that very God whom they affected to supplicate. They would reach a church, lie down in circles, strip off their clothing and flog each other with scourges of nails. People crowded to watch the blood flow, while doubtless the rats and fleas rejoiced if rejoicing be possible to beings so lowly. In these flagellants probably lay the real seeds of the Reformation which was to come. They sometimes seized upon a church and rebelliously conducted Mass without an authorised priest, although the pope, Clement VI, who was a brave man and faced the plague like a hero, had given absolution in advance to every patient who should be taken sick. Man wanted his own priest, and sometimes when he sent in his last extremity his priest would not come, or was dead of the plague, so that when the epidemic had abated, and the world was struggling to recover itself and reap the neglected harvests, men were only too ready to believe the stories about the priests and their women which were even then paving the way for the Reformation. The Statute of Labourers, in England, was the herald of many of our modern political ideas. Those unhappy men who died, stupefied by plague, were really dying for humanity. We cannot make an accurate guess even at the actual number of people lost during the Great Mortality. Hecker, after taking the utmost trouble, thought that at least a fourth of the people of Europe perished, but in some places far more; thus in Avignon, of which we have the most exact information, about nine-tenths. This vast mortality in Avignon was not caused by de Chauliac and his aloes, any more than it was due to Pope Clement and his blessing. Probably de Chauliac’s treatment had no influence one way or the other; neither did the question of pope and anti-pope nor the great schism. But we know more about what happened at Avignon than anywhere else, because de Chauliac was a brave doctor who told the truth.