M. Siméon Luce has made a special study of the conditions of French popular life at this period,[82] and the conclusions at which he has arrived may be here usefully stated in brief. It has been proved by the labours of French antiquaries that the general population of France before the great pestilence of 1348-1349, and the hundred years' war with England, was equal to what it is in the present century. Numerous villages were scattered over the face of the country, every trace of which has now disappeared. The houses, or rather huts, in which the [p055] population of rural France lived were very seldom framed of any kind of masonry, but were for the most part merely four mud, or clay, walls, and sometimes wickerwork lined, and the interstices filled in, with hay and straw. As a rule there was but one storey, although some, chiefly taverns and places of that class, had an upper floor. The roof was thatched or covered with wood or stone; windows were the exception, and where they did exist they were mere slits in the clay walls closed with wooden shutters. Even the coarse, opaque glass then made was beyond the means of the ordinary peasant and farmer, whilst just about this time even a rich bourgeois of Paris recommended the filling of windows with waxen cloth or parchment. The doors were fastened with wooden latches, and over them, according to the general arrangement, a shutter of wood was fixed which was generally left open for air, light, and to allow the smoke of the brushwood fire to pass out of the living room. It will be readily understood how the condition of life in houses such as these would not be such as to put much obstacle to the spread of an epidemic in the rural districts; whilst if such tenements were vacant even for a short time they would readily fall into decay and would present the spectacle of ruin and desolation spoken of by so many writers of the period as caused by the great pestilence.