Moreover, in 1346 the "Black Death," most terrible of all the repeated plagues under which the centuries previous to our own have suffered, began to rear its dread form over terror-stricken Europe.[16] It has been estimated that during the three years of this awful visitation one-third of the people of Europe perished. Whole cities were wiped out. In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed, humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable them to stop.[17] France and England were also in desolation. The long "Hundred Years' War" between them began in 1340. France was not averse to it. In fact, her King, Philip of Valois, rather welcomed the opportunity of wresting away Guienne, the last remaining French fief of the English kings. France, as we have seen, was regarded as the strongest land of Europe. England was thought of as little more than a French colony, whose Norman dukes had in the previous century been thoroughly chastised and deprived of half their territories by their overlord. To be sure, France was having much trouble with her Flemish cities, which were in revolt again under the noted brewer-nobleman, Van Artevelde,[18] yet it seemed presumption for England to attack her--England, so feeble that she had been unable to avenge her own defeat by the half-barbaric Scots at Bannockburn. But the English had not nearly so small an opinion of themselves as had the rest of Europe. The heart of the nation had not been in that strife against the Scots, a brave and impoverished people struggling for freedom. But hearts and pockets, too, welcomed the quarrel with France, overbearing France, that plundered their ships when they traded with their friends the Flemings. The Flemish wool trade was at this time a main source of English wealth, so Edward III of England, than whom ordinarily no haughtier aristocrat existed, made friends with the brewer Van Artevelde, and called him "gossip" and visited him at Ghent, and presently Flemings and English were allied in a defiance of France. By asserting a vague ancestral claim to the French throne, Edward eased the consciences of his allies, who had sworn loyalty to France; and King Philip had on his hands a far more serious quarrel than he realized.[19]