Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 459: The Black Death Part IV - Meet The Flagellants!

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

On part four, we meet the merry band of self-harming religious zealots who roamed Europe during the Black Death. Then, we travel to jolly ol' England to see how they handled things when the plague descended upon them.Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Man, I watched a lot of footage of Filipinos whippin' themselves. Did you learn anything? I learned, number one, they don't say ow, because I figured I want to go back over all of the Filipino flagellant movement that's still going on now, they still walk around, they still whip themselves with the bushels. It's like a parade or something, isn't it? Yes, they walk through and we're going to talk about that today, but as they slap themselves, I just want to see someone going ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.

But I guess it shows weakness in the eyes of the Lord. Oh, this is my impression of a Filipino-Canadian. I'm sorry. Ow, I'm sorry. I didn't make any sense. No. Yeah, because they're sorry for when they whip themselves. The whole point is that they're apologizing for God, for daring to be human.

You took them on a Canadian flagellant. Yeah. All right, whatever. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, everyone. I am Ben, hanging out with Henry, Ed Marcus, Marcus's back is sore with the whip. Yeah. And also, Henry, if we are doing this whole flagellant thing, if the men are whipping themselves, remember, they're not going to say, ow, remember, this is an actual act

of ecstasy, so they would most likely, more likely to go, oh, oh, oh, it is an act of pure, pure ecstasy. So is the active recording last podcast on the left. No kidding. I feel like that. This is huge. I am so excited. We finally got to our, I'm going to say maybe our favorite chunk.

Yeah. Is this our favorite chunk? I love this chunk. This is a fantastic chunk because this is when we really get into the reaction of the black plague. All right. My favorite chunk is Grumpy Cat. Hello.

I love that. Grumpy Cat is dead. I know Grumpy Cat is, I know Grumpy Cat is dead, but I still have a pair of socks with him or her on it. Okay, everyone. Today we are on to- Oh, it doesn't have its pussy on it? No. Today we are on to Black Death Part Four.

So when we last left the Black Deaths march across Europe, it had completely devastated France and it was just about to make its final hop over the English Channel to ravage the British Isles. You know what really hit me through this chunk was how news traveled about the plague and how scary that must have actually been when you are an island nation, right? Because England at this point had only kind of heard tell that something else was going on, but they started apparently getting news as the plague hit city after city after city. And so you're hanging out.

Like while it did kind of occur somewhat simultaneously, they still got like word that like people were dropping dead from an invisible force just miles away and that it would just come city by like it was so you watch the wave come at you. I feel like today's news is more scary than that because now it's like everyone's dead and then it cuts to a commercial for your play and I'm like what am I supposed to believe here? And I finally have all the 9-11-2 your play deals. Well, we're getting to like how the British saw the plague coming later, but for the most

part the attitude was we're an island. Fuck those people. Oh my god. Jaman. Like I know that technically we're English, but Jaman. Wow. You nailed the island culture. But before we delve into England and the Middle Ages, let's stay just a bit longer in mainland

Europe, specifically in the Germanic regions where the reactions to the plague were among the most bizarre on the entire continent. Rather than a straight God did it explanation for the plague, Germanic and some Scandinavian peoples approached the Black Death from a more mystical folkloric point of view. This is where you really get all of the best music video imagery. What is this joke? What do they mean? Do they think gnomes did it?

No, gnomes are innocent. Whoa. The hill deferk have only ever helped, they've tried to guide humankind and yes, do they kidnap you and essentially put a baby inside you that then slips out as a tiny like half known, half human changeling that you can never trust and you look at it forever like you know we need to say something about Kevin, what's the name of that fucking movie? Yes, something like that. Technically that's just old thing, that's the only thing the hill deferk did.

Oh, I think I'd rather have the Black Death. In Vienna, where a third of the population would die of the plague by the end of 1349, they began telling tales of a plague spirit called Pest Jungfrau, which translates to either little plague girl or plague virgin. I can't wait, I can't wait. I am searching plague version as soon as we're done on Pornhub. I just want to see what comes up when I search plague version. According to legend, Pest Jungfrau was a malignant plague goddess in the shape of a young woman

who had emerged from the mouth of a plague victim upon their death, spewing forth in a glowing jet blue flame to infect everybody around her. Oh my god, I feel like that's what happens when Grimes has an orgasm. That's referent, that's moderately up to date. Sort of. It sort of is, it becomes one of those electric gliders that you get at the weed, smoke, store. Of course.

The ones they used for mess. Is that what they're for? Yeah, Meth and Crack. Cool. They work. I didn't know. I thought they were for cigarettes. No.

I'm pure. There's actually also a real connection to the plague children, right, that one idea of plague children. This is actually, in my mind, one of the first examples of black-eyed children, because sometimes when whole families would be wiped out, the ones with the strongest immune systems, the children, a lot of times would be left behind, even though it did kill children with the same percentage as it did adults, sometimes they would be the only ones that were left. So they would kind of go from town to town, they would see these beggar children, and

eventually it became frightening to see them, because the beggar children would not only bum you out, but they would also spread plague, so that sometimes they would be carrying it for a long time and not knowing it, but it's just them coming out being like, is it time to eat yet? They're doing the same shit. Cheese, roaming, gangs of death kids. That's awesome! Yes!

I still find children scary, and they're the ones that carry the COVID now. Oh my. Well, besides the stories people told, nature itself seemed to respond to the almost supernatural efficiency of the black death. According to the stories, even after the shepherds who tended to sheep flocks died, the wolves turned and fled back to the wilderness, completely avoiding the deadly miasmas that haunted the fields of the Germanic nations. But perhaps both the strangest, and certainly the most public reaction to the black death

in Central Europe, was the rise of a traveling troupe of weirdos called the flagellants. Yay! We made it! Oh my god, it's Murder Fist! Wow, look at that great sketch comedy troupe, the flagellants. Oh, it seems to me there's too many of them for them to ever have a television show. Ah, that's been going on throughout history, apparently. Now, the flagellants were exactly what you'd expect them to be.

Basically, they were groups of men who traveled from town to town, whipping themselves as punishment for both the sins of mankind and their own personal sins. And of course, this implied that the flagellants didn't need a priest for absolution if they beat the shit out of themselves instead. And that's the most beautiful part about the flagellants, is because even though they did horrible things that we cover as well, at the same time, that independent spirit, that go get them grassroots campaign, yes we can. I love it.

They should actually, we should see that poster with the flagellant, with the big dunce cap on, with the hope underneath it. I love this ECW religion, it's so hardcore and extreme, all the blood and the guts, I love it. They cut their own faces open. Wow. They cut a fun, they're screaming, warbling maniacs, and they put on a great show. Say what you want about the worst century to be alive, but this is pretty freaking

kickass. This is my favorite part. Yeah. Now, group public flagellation as atonement for collective sin was not a new invention for the Black Death, nor was it an invention of the Germans, because the Germans seemed to respond to flagellation in far greater numbers than any other people. No. I don't know why, but the Germans keyed into this shit.

Yeah. Because it made them come. It was the only, it was like the most slippery slash sticky floor of all time. You are not wrong because a lot of times they did experience what Marca said, pure total pain ridden ecstasy. All right. Flagellation actually began almost a century earlier than the plague in Italy after a series of epidemics, wars, and famines, but while the original Italian branch fell under the

control of the church, which half defeated the purpose of the flagellants, the German wing, which was much more anarchistic, didn't recognize church authority, and were therefore banned within a couple of years. I need your fucking goat. I've got my own. It's called blood and sword and jets, and sometimes what I'll do is, well, the friend he'll kneel down, my fault in his face, and he says, thank you, and he comes up and he's inhaled the fault in his mouth, and he blows it in my mind in a bit of a brown snowball,

if you will. Oh, my goodness. It's for God. I love that book, How to German for Idiots. With their whole shit, man, we don't need a priest. We don't need a priest for absolution. It's in here. It's in here.

I was reading a really interesting master's thesis. You're welcome. I did read a fucking whole one of these by McLaureen Zetner, which is the Black Death and its impact on the church and popular religion, and part of what they said is the humanization of the priest during this time period destroyed their standing. The priest was viewed as sort of like a superhero at the time, uses this untouchable, unknowable, the only person who has direct access to God, and then you started watching them die just as hard as you.

It seems like God wasn't chosen to save them, and you think he would if God had X-Men that he would save them. Absolutely. Jean Grey sacrificed her life, I think, in one of the movies, actually, somebody sacrificed something. That's good. You've got a tenuous grasp on the Phoenix saga. I'll allow it.

Thank you. Well, while the German flagellants laid dormant for those hundred years between 1260 and 1348, they didn't die, because every time there was a mass disaster in the Germanic nations, such as the famine of 1296, the flagellants would pop up, and then when things got better, they just as quickly fade away. Anybody got any band-aids? Honestly, it's been a lot of fun, and we've all been out for good time with the shows and all, but I'm having a bit of burnout, and I mean, I can see my spine.

Absolutely. You're going to want to sleep on your tummy. When the Black Death entered Bavaria in 1348, a flagellant movement that lasted an entire year swept across Central Europe from the Germanic regions, and what that movement left behind was a trail of blood, plague, and thousands of murder victims. Yeah, dude. What? Yeah, because.

They had an agenda. Yeah, something happened inside of the flagellants. I think it's because it's like the gun church that we covered a little bit that's going on down. The air are 15 lovers. Yeah, that was going down in Texas, where it just seems to be like, once you get all the props, once you have all the whips, and you have all the knives, and the swords, and the crucifixes, and you have all the shit, and for a while it's satisfying to keep it

within the group, but eventually, if you like that violence that you're doing all the time, it spreads. Yeah. You kind of see like, oh, I kind of want to whip somebody else for a change. Sure, but how do they have the time when they're whipping themselves so much? One for you, one for me. Oh, they do the one for me, one for you. That makes sense.

That's the thing, well, the flagellation is only three times a day. And so there's like, and that takes, in each flagellation takes, I think it seems like it takes about 30 minutes to an hour, so man, you still got 21 hours of the day to kill other people. Okay. I wish I could be there for the moment. We'll talk about this a little bit later, but when the show's over, and then everybody has to go back and take off their costumes and be like, oh, well, I got a meeting in

15 minutes. This has been fun, guys. Oh my God, they sound like a bunch of roaming Cenobites, they kill everybody. That's exactly it. They totally are. Yeah. From what the legends say, the flagellants of the Black Death arose from a planetary alignment on the third hour after midnight on March 12th, 1349.

And this precision gives you somewhat of an idea of what kind of lens the flagellants were seen through. Because people were fascinated by the flagellants at the time. They were obvious because they were fucking, that was the show to see. Well, the other thing about this time period, at least as far as like, you know, that through the lens of Christianity, is that it was the pipeline to God was man to priest to church. And part of what the flagellants showed is that they took the priest out of the pipeline and it was just man to God.

It was somewhat the beginning of like mysticism in the Middle Ages, like a personal mysticism where it's not like a wizard or anything like that, it's just like any man or woman can talk to God and can speak to God. And so the people who can speak to God are seen through a mystical lens. You're talking about people that accidentally stumbled upon the real secrets of the secret schools, right? The idea that it gives you agency and connection to the Godhead. Not to be a total chill for capitalism, but isn't it just direct to consumer?

Sure. Isn't it just they get rid of the middle, middle, and end up just like, go right to God. Okay. Yeah, it's P to P. Yeah, if you want to use agent talk. From what was said in the legends, three weeks after the planetary alignment, a group of gigantic women arrived in Germany from Hungary.

And as soon as they arrived, they stripped naked and began singing strange songs while they beat themselves with rods and sharp scourges. I don't know what it is, man, but I'm loving this plague. You know what's for me? It's the songs. It is good songs. But of course, that was the legend. In reality, this group of flagellants called both the brotherhood of the flagellants and

the brethren of the cross. This was an organized movement with strict roles as to how one might enter the order and strict roles as to how one would conduct themselves after admission. There was taught choreography. Yeah. How did you join? We'll get into it. Dude, we'll get into it.

This is the show of the 14th century. This is the number one stage show. This is fucking Hamilton. This is what the plague, this is the one, yeah, except it's a total violence. You know what, again, I can't even say it's a positive because it's not, no, because Jewish people, they all end up killing, but there is something about the idea of the plague made. It's one of the weird reactions that the plague inspired, like people just jumped into it

and it became such a massive, nations-wide movement. So they have, everyone is dying all around them, but they took the time to choreograph? You'll see. Yeah. Like the sound of music or something? Well, I think with the flagellants, I mean, one thing that we certainly learned over the last five years is that when there are dark times, people want dark entertainment. And the black plague was the darkest time in human history, so therefore, the entertainment

was the darkest entertainment there was. Oh my God, the real Housewives of Glasgow. Imagine that. I just see a lot of people just getting pint glasses broken off in their mouths. That's how you know they're real Housewives. Yeah. Well, to join the brotherhood of flagellants, an applicant must first obtain permission from their spouse if they happen to be married.

Then, the applicant was required to make a full confession to the master flagellant, telling all of the sins they had committed since the age of seven. Oh my. The master flagellant just has one hand that has been replaced by a whip. It's so fucking sweet. There's something also very, it's comic book-y, but also very everyday. Like the idea of having to go to your wife, like you have your dunce cap on and you're like bloodletting as you're already been covered like all scarred and well, bullshit

covered in barbs. And you have to go like, is it okay if I go to my group today? Like, age gotta go. I know we were supposed to do brunch, I guess it's mostly just these rotten eggs. Oh, that's horrible. I don't like the dunce cap. I just watched a biography on Ozzy Osboard and he was growing up, he had a hard time learning and they made him wear the dunce cap in the corner, but then he fucking made

a song called Warpigs. Yeah, buddy. He killed everyone in his head. Yeah, fucking rhymin' masses with masses. Genius. Shut up. Okay, Marcus Parks. I can't believe you just did that.

I can't, you're coming for Ozzy today of all days? Once those requirements were out of the way after they asked their wife permission and after they confessed all their sins, the new recruit then pledged to whip themselves three times a day every day for 33 days and eight hours, which echoed the 33 and a third years that Christ lived on earth. Have you gotten a flagellap? Have you gotten flagellap? Have you gotten flagellap?

The new app for flagellap? Yeah, it counts my whips and honestly, it's so nice to have somebody there, some kind of accountability and I can share it to Facebook. Oh my God, that's so great. That's what they say is good for dieting is you tell people that you're going to lose a bunch of weight, then you let them yell at you if you get fat again. I love that. However, these people weren't just whipping themselves privately in a room, nor were they

just all gathering together in a room and whipping themselves. Instead, those 33 days of whipping were spent on marches across Europe, where the flagellants became plague super spreaders because they were also forbidden to bathe or change their clothing. So they did the thing that there was the opposite of what they were trying to do. They didn't end the plague, they actually made it worse. It really does not seem like it's going to work. The original version of flagellants, I keep wanting to say it's flagellants.

It's flagellants. Flagellants is a fart flagellant. I keep saying flagellants. I see flagellants. Every single time I look at it, I'm going nuts. I was actually going to compliment us for not making the easy fart joke. Yeah, it's already here. But that was more of an, that was more of like, isn't that word similar?

So that was just kind of a comparison. Yeah, this is me. This is me. Henry Zabrowski, American humorist. Explain to you why something is funny. Oh my. But the original version of like, you're supposed to do this in private, technically what they said, because you're supposed to wear something like a cerise, I believe it

is called, or a ceriche, the hair shirt. A hair shirt was actually the original version of this, where you hurt yourself or God, where you wear ostensibly something like steel wool under your clothes, where you wear it and it scratches you all day long and you wear your clothes specifically over it because it's not supposed to be seen because they viewed for a long time that if you were punishing yourself in public, that that's actually the sin of pride, that you're doing it to show everybody, look how sorry I am, look how I do this for God, I punish myself, look how incredible I am.

Meanwhile, that's one of the biggest rules that the flagellants broke to, according to the church, which is that they did this in public. They love it when you do this in private. Interesting. But you doing it in public shows that you're like, you're making a show out of it. Sure. It's like David Blaine, why don't you drown on your own time? That's suicide.

Yeah, one time's a suicide attempt and the other side is magic. It does remind me very limitedly, but I remember when I was playing basketball growing up, people used to wear rubber bands around their wrist and if they would miss a shot, they would snap their little wrist with the rubber band. It's kind of similar as a form of punishment. I'm just saying humans haven't changed that much. Oh yeah, believe me, sometimes I'll want pork, but I eat tofu. You slap yourself in the back?

No, no, no physical pain whatsoever, but that's my version of being a flagellant. You can actually have more fat than a piece of pork sometimes. That's absolute total horseshit. Yeah. I interviewed somebody at Top Hat who was an animal. That is a lie. That is a lie. I know it.

To you, they're lying. Oh man. Wow. Wow. Now the flagellants, Jesus Christ, the flagellants had begun with an implicit message, which is that priests were unnecessary for salvation. That was kind of, you know, that was under the radar. But as the Black Death took its toll and society fell apart very quickly, the message that

priests were obsolete became explicit. This was something that was, because before it was implied, now the flagellants are going from town to town and saying, you don't need a priest. You don't need the church salvation as a hand. We're bringing it to you. The longer the flagellants march, the more they began to see themselves as more than simple sufferers who were doing penance on behalf of a wicked humanity. Instead, they began bestowing upon themselves power reserved for priests, popes, and saints.

They would do this like pump-up routine. They'd get it. We'll get into the show part, like when we describe the actual show, but it is crazy how they started like being like, I can see the future. I can talk to cats. This is completely real. You know, if I'm a priest, I say, fine, I'm keeping all the wine, because the priests have all the wine.

They have all the bread. They have all the good times. So all the priests during the Black Plague became Cathy hammered. That is actually one of the big reactions that they said was interesting about the plague. They don't know if it's rumor or not, but the idea that all of the monasteries started getting hammered and everybody started blowing each other. That was one reaction to the plague. That is true.

But also, it's a smaller reaction than whipping yourself, actually, getting hammered and blowing each other is just as good, if not safer, than drawing blood. Honestly, they would just, because they could at least all stayed together, also the one phenomenon of brother taking sister as wife was also very common during the plague. What a phenomenon. What the flagellants were essentially doing is that they were telling people like, you don't need the church. You know, like they've got too much power.

You have the power, but what in reality what they were doing is saying like, they were just transferring the power from the church to themselves. They were saying that they were taking power away from the church, but really they were just stealing power from the church and lying to the people and telling them like, oh no, you have the power because you've given us power. It's the same shit that's always happened. Any single group that tells you that they're the only ones with the solution want to become the new dictators.

Yes. Yeah. The flagellants went on the offensive against the church and began disrupting masses, driving priests from their ecclesiastical seats and looting church property in the process. Yes. But that was the mission of the older, more conservative flagellants. When they started dying of the plague, they were replaced with a younger, poorer and more criminal membership who began focusing almost completely on the Jews.

Yeah, this seems to happen across how many movements have we covered in the entire span of last podcast on the left? Just our UFO episodes alone. I don't know how it always ends up with Jewish folks. What the flagellants say, where it transferred is that where the flagellants started was we are to blame for the plague. Man is responsible for the plague, all men are responsible for the plague. And then once the older members who had that message started dying off, the younger members

kind of went with the hip new opinion, which was, oh, the Jews are to blame for the plague. We're actually okay. Like, yes, we send and everything like that, but really it's the Jews that are responsible so they can take all that anger. What Henry was joking about earlier is not that far off, it's just taking that anger and transferring it. So there was like a hipster vice magazine out during the black plague and the flagellants were the Jews and then they talk about like hats and stuff afterwards, the original flagellants

was Twitter, the new, I believe antisemitism would be called the tic-tac of the black plague. Right, where they were super obsessed, it was the new thing and everyone was real excited about it. Okay. Now, before the flagellants came along, the initial wave of pogroms against the Jewish population in central Europe have begun to die down. But as the flagellants spread out across the Germanic nations, that flame reignited. What if it's more like the pilot light never went out?

Yeah. Roving packs of scourge-wielding maniacs killed Jews en masse. And in Erfurt, the flagellants were partially responsible for a massacre that killed up to 3,000 Jewish people in a single day, after which the flagellants burnt homes and divvied up the Jewish goods amongst themselves. Can you imagine, first of all, you are a Jewish family that makes it first, you make it through the first pogrom, right, where the, your mayor and all the town folk got together to kill all of you, right?

And they kill a bunch of you and then all of a sudden they're like, we're done. Yeah. And then we're like, all right, we're cool now and you have to like sit there as a Jewish family like, I guess we're cool now, we're just gonna go back to our lives and do shit and be like, so it started from inside the house. And then all of a sudden, you see men, the only way to describe is dressed as characters from Silent Hill coming over the rich, right? They're coming with the crucifix in front, screaming, wailing, beating each other.

First of all, you're like, I hope that stays over there and not over here, like somebody screaming at a bus stop, just being like, I just, you just stay over there, comical, sir. Don't come into my backyard. And then all of a sudden you look and you see and they're like, Jews, that's bad. Jesus. It's also just so strange because you know, these people, if you are a Jewish family, you're like, they look like maniacs.

And in the people's minds that are maniacs, they're like, look at those crazy people sitting in their house. And it's like, you need to, everyone should have a little mirror and they need to put their face up to it and they need to look at themselves. Have you been called Bill Franken? Dog on it. People like me. And this wasn't a smile.

It wasn't like this was like five, 10 guys groups of flagellants would be anywhere between 50 and 500 strong, like it could be a small army coming to town. But despite these horrific acts or most likely because of them, the public just couldn't seem to get enough of these wacky flagellants every time they came to town to bloody up the square. Do you remember when America was obsessed with flash mobs? Of course, improv everywhere. Just improv nowhere.

Yeah. Never. Improv never. We're doing improv right now in many ways. Yeah. But we're seasoned. At least we're pickled. In 1340, Strasburg had a new pilgrimage of flagellants every week for six months.

And in a town called Tournai in Belgium, a new pilgrimage swept through town every few days in just two months, 5,300 flagellants traveled through Tournai and just whipping and having a show every few days. It's like a podcast during quarantine where like the beginning of the black plague, these 5,300 flagellant movement started up real hard. Then two weeks later, only about 10% of them stayed. Sure. I mean, sometimes you realize similar to Twitter and also podcasting.

If it's just you and a buddy, just call them. Send them a text. No one needs to hear it. But it does seem to be like they egged each other on. There's a lot of group response during the plague, which I think speaks to the fact that we really are a herd animal. I wonder, because the secret history of consciousness by Gary Lachman, he was talking about that concept that we started more psychic as a animal, and that what we called psychic was

actually just innate instinct that we just were more like on a network locked in. I wonder if there's more examples of that. Like nowadays, I feel like the internet kind of divides us up. There is herd mentality, but they also direct it, like corporations directed with algorithms and shit like that. Where now I wonder if that's just a chicken and the egg thing, like are we always reacting en masse like this? It's just them riding the reins of it.

Like I mean corporations, or is that changed and are they driving us? Why do all of these things in the plague all happen spontaneously all at the same time? I have no idea what you're talking about when we're here, we're family, and we're eating good in the neighborhood, and I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to do it, and I am not susceptible to advertising. Life from your grave. Now as John Kelly put it in his book, The Great Mortality, the genius of the flagellants, and the reason why the flagellants were such a popular show was because they were able

to transform erotically charged private self abuse into public theater. Oh my God, so it's just a bunch of Roy Coens, that lawyer from McCarthy just out there in the town square performing? Yeah, man. No. I mean this is an, this is a BDSM show in public in the town square for Jesus. It's actors. It's actors.

It's theater. Alright. See, when a troupe of flagellants arrived in town, like I said, anywhere between 50 and 500 of them, they would announce their arrival with a lusty chorus of deep throated singing. Who's ready for a big red bottom? Who's ready for a big red bottom? Who's ready for a big bad bottom?

It's me. It's me. It's me. I love tomato tom. Technically, it's like one of those, was the stomp lines? Yeah. The just stomp, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. I heard the church bells would ring, everyone would drop whatever it was that they were doing and they'd all rush into the streets. And this is not only despite the plague. This was especially if the plague was raging because the flagellants had come to help. That was part, that was part, that was half and half. It was like half great show, half like, oh thank God the flagellants are here. We lost 15 people yesterday.

They'll know what to do. Yeah. They'll fix it. The power of theater. Yes. The illusions of help since 17,000, I don't know what time the theater started. Once the crowd was gathered, the people would hold hands and sway in rhythm as the flagellants entered the town square, hooded and dressed in filthy white cloaks featuring a red cross

on the front and a red cross on the back. Oh. And as the people wept, women swooned and the Jews ran for their lives, the flagellants would sing a short song asking God to transfer his punishment from the pestilence into their whips. And with that, the show would begin. Now, this is my question about rehearsal because they have to learn this, they have to learn these songs.

Right. Because they did have collective songs and all, and I wonder if they just did it while they were walking or if the flagellants truly got together and were like, okay, you got the three pronged sword. You buddy, you got the dunce caps ready and he's like, good and pointy, sad. Do they just, do they have costumers, do they sit and figure they should not? They must. Yeah.

I mean, remember, they're doing this three times a day every day. So they're essentially doing one performance and two dress rehearsals every single day for 33 days. You're going to be on, but that fucking show is going to be on point by the end of it. That will be tight. I can't wait to get back on the road. Yes, indeed. So each flagellant would begin by stripping himself down to the waist, walking in a circle

around the churchyard two by two, and they'd lash themselves individually about the body and arms until blood was pouring from their backs and limbs. That's the opening. We do have a modern flagellant movement that kind of pops up a lot of times around Easter and like certain specific high Catholic holidays, but they use these kind of like bushy things that kind of cut you over time. These guys were using ropes that had knots in them with metal barbs inside of them. So each one would click, we would stick in the skin and then pull it back out.

So it wasn't easy like it used to be. Like it is now. Now it's easy. Yeah. Well, that actually that tool was reserved only for the master flagellant. Like he had the coolest accoutrement. Each individual guy, they had, they definitely had their scourges, you know, their whips, the, the big spiky, the big spiky balls.

That was a master flagellant thing. You had to work up to that. Yeah. I'm sorry. You had to be flagellant of the month. Several times. I didn't know that. That's hard to get.

And suddenly the flagellants would fall to the ground as the crowd cried out in surprise. And they would fall. Whoa, they're doing it. They're fucking doing it. Dude, it's my favorite part, bro. Make sure you get back with those Coors lights quick, man. And once they fell, they would fall into a prostrate position that was supposed to be symbolic of the sin that each flagellant was most guilty of committing.

Hey, Gary, why are you sucking your own dick, dude? No reason. Weird. Adulterers laid on their stomachs to approximate copulation, murderers laid on their backs for whatever reason, I have no idea why, and perjurers laid on their sides with three fingers extended above the head, again for reasons that I can't figure out. There are certain symbolic things that I don't think we have the reference for anymore. Yeah.

They might, a lot of times they also would lay in the position of the cross where they would they would act as if they were being crucified. But just the idea of these like stinky flagellants, like all pretending to fuck each other, being like, this is the sin we committed, like, I think you're just getting horny again. It sounds like it. But this was just the second act. The next phase of the show featured the flagellant master walking amongst the prostrate men lashing them with that three-tailed, spiky scourge that we talked about earlier.

These spikes were about the length of a grain of wheat, and they'd sink so deeply into the flesh of the flagellants that sometimes they had to have another flagellant come and pull it out with a special tool. Oh man, this reminds me of Sunday school. My teacher, or whatever the hell that person was, probably God knows what a felon. They talked a lot about Jesus, and it wasn't just a whip. It was a very sharp whip, and then they went into great detail about having to pull it out and everything like that.

And I was like, this is awesome. And then they kicked out. That's why they used those whips was because it was the it was the whip that was used on Jesus before he was crucified. And but just that must throw off the rhythm of the whole show. Oh, it's got to be hard. He sticks it in one dude and he's like, come on, mother fucker, come on, mother fucker. And then they have to wait because they're building momentum.

Of course. You know what I mean? I mean, one of the flagellant boys has to run over and grab it and just go like, I'm truly, I'm truly, you got to lose some back fat, Murray. Oh, I'm alone. I mean, honestly, if this all doesn't end with a ritual suicide, it's still nicer than the than the Broadway show Cats. Oh yeah, because they all worship death.

Yeah. That would be incredible. Well, I'm sure the I'm sure they had some sort of like pause in the show. They had something built in when the second flagellant had to come out and remove the spike. Kind of like, you know, how Def Leppard used to have like that big, gigantic stage show with the underground tunnels. And one guy would keep everyone busy while the other guy went downstairs and like did

a bomb of cocaine and like for a second, so it's that same thing where it's like distract them over here while we get Jerry to come and pull the spike out of the other guy's neck. No, absolutely. The ancient grandfather of Rob Trujillo from Metallica come out and do a baseball. Well, they just sat there just like, we'll have to be like, good baseball. It does sound like I can hear Vince McMahon's great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather being like, more blood, dammit, more blood.

And then came the finale, the collective flagellation. Yeah, man, it's a big number. It's when all of the everybody that's been playing all night, they all show back up and they all play the was a time on their side, knocking on heaven's door. What's the other big song that everybody thinks? Well, goodbye, Yola Brick Road was the song that Elton John is closing his new concerts with. Don't spoil it.

It's fine. I think everyone knows. I already got the email. Oh, did you? Oh yeah, he's coming back. He's not allowed to rest. Thank God. Well, on the command of the Flagellant Master, the troop would form a circle around three

specific members who, for a lack of a better term, were basically cheerleaders. That's the role I want in all of this. I would love to just be like, you go, you bleed. You guys are crazy. You got waters, waters. Anyone gatorade? Then as the rest of the members began whipping themselves rhythmically about the back and the chest, the cheerleaders would yell at each individual flagellant to whip harder,

which of course kicked off. And that of course kicked off a contest of self abuse to see who could hurt themselves the most. They weren't yelling to whip me. They were yelling, whip yourself, you fucking cunt. Oh my God. You think you love Jesus? You think you love Jesus?

Well, fucking Jerry over there. He seems like he loves Jesus more than you do. I love you, Jesus. I'm coming. Oh my goodness. I don't know, Jesus likes a weird stage show. Jesus liked sexy women. I guess.

Yes, he does. He did like all you dudes beating each other. He hung out with Mary Magdalene. Have you talked to him lately? I keep calling him. No one's answering. That's the funny thing is the flagellants would sometimes say like, oh yeah, we have lunch with Jesus sometimes.

Seriously, belly. Oh yeah, dude. They were like, yeah, Jesus came and hung out and he was just like, that whip, bro? Whip's kind of short. And I was like, sorry, Jesus. I don't even embarrass myself here at lunch. Apparently, yes. Which is also weird because of medieval times, they didn't eat lunch.

They didn't eat lunch? No. They didn't even, yeah. No, but that. Maybe that's why they were so angry. How about you fucking piece of shit? They were angry. While all this was going on, the crowd watching the whole thing would begin singing a song

of their own called the ancient hymn of the flagellants, which couldn't have been that ancient since the flagellants had been around for less than a century at that point. But regardless, the people saying a message that the flagellants had helped them all to escape from a burning hell, i.e. the plague, while the flagellants rose from the ground again and again to beat themselves more and more until they could no longer stand up. Another day, another dollar. They eventually have to pack up their shit. I know.

This is horrible. And then came the crowd participation. Oh my. I think this is why I can't never sit front row of a stand up show because you are the joke. You will get covered in blood. Actually, I would say instead of crowd participation, this is more the meet and greet part of the show.

Yeah. The IP package. Once the flagellants were all spent, the townsfolk would walk amongst them and dip their handkerchiefs into the raw oozing wounds, all while plague fleas left from the robes of these filthy masochists into the clothes of the faithful. It sounds like a Marina Barankovic performance art shit. Oh my god. You can just see like Humphrey Bogart blowing his nose and then just dipping it in the blood

of some flagellants back or a flagellants back. Some guy coming by with some crusty bread. Oh, I just watched the whole thing on bone marrow. It made me feel that very same way. Don't like bone marrow. Okay. Well, once each handkerchief was suitably soaked with the blood of a flagellant, every person in the crowd would spread the blood of the flagellants on their cheeks.

This is not going to help. Spreading the plague even further and spreading whatever nasty shit these dudes were carrying around besides the plague. Yeah, because you remember it wasn't just the plague. You had, there was still airborne tuberculosis, there was that kind of shit. There was the weird AIDS disease that was also a bunch of diseases being transferred via blood. There was smallpox, the red plague that was around.

You always think like if I went back in time, I could, I could advance civilization so fast and in reality, you just stare at these people and just be like, what the hell are you doing? And then you probably just get killed. Yes. Actually, the great courses had really good advice if you ever time traveled back to the year 1348. Good.

She said to get to Scotland and then get on a boat to Iceland because Iceland didn't get the plague for like 20 years. No kidding. Well, finally, the master flagellant would read a letter that was supposedly written by God in 1343. God had written a letter and like left it in Jerusalem for people to find and read and feel bad about. This is direct missing from Gold himself.

Sapphomies, how's your box doing, Saul? Good. I've been noticing from my telescope up here that you've been beating yourself very soundly. Congratulations. A lot of blood. Good work. Okay. Talk to you soon.

God. God's cool, man. And the letter told the townsfolk that the plague had been their fault because they'd send, but especially because they hadn't kept Sundays holy as per the fourth commandment. Every single fucking, every single asshole in the religious world, they all had their own like pet reason why the plague had hit everyone specifically hard. At least if it wasn't like, oh, it's because Jews exist. It was also because of like, oh, you didn't keep the Sundays holy.

No one's, everyone's fucking doing shit on Sundays. And this is what happens. After reading the letter, everyone would disperse carrying plague fleas from the flagellants and carrying fresh infections from their neighbors that they had fucking hooked arms with and saying with earlier. This was all because they had to see the best show that 1348 had to offer. I can't wait for that new Pixar movie, plague fleas. It's going to be so funny seeing all the different personalities with the fleas.

We need to write it. Yeah, we do. But even though the Holy Paloi of Central Europe adored the flagellants coming to town, the officials in Europe, both municipal and ecclesiastical, recognized that the flagellants were not only a threat to the status quo, but were also murderous savages. It must have been slightly scary, you know, because the clergy thought that they had things under control for so long, right? You know, like we control the messages that God gives to them because the church used to

send out missives in only Latin, right? Like they used to send it out specifically so that only priests who knew how to read Latin could read what it was, yes, and the missives would come not only with the lessons that they're supposed to teach, but also the notes on this is how we tell the morons how to do the shit that we do. And it wasn't until they started releasing things in English was when they realized like, oh, they started releasing things in English to show like, there's a massive problem here. Like everyone actually needs to know this information.

We have to talk about the plague. And this is the type of shit that was like happening because they kept shit from people for so long. And all of a sudden, you're just a normal priest thinking like, I'm the superhero of this town. I'm the spiritual sheriff. Right. Everybody's afraid of me.

And then you see a guy with a fucking chain in his hand and another guy nailed to a crucifix going, hi! He's like feeling good about it, excited about it. Oh my God. What do you do against that? I don't know. It sounds like the movie The Warrior is mixed with like the seventh seal or something like that.

It's very scary religious marauders. Yeah, it's awesome. Well, the things about like all this anti-Semitism is that it's not like every single person in Central Europe was a raging anti-Semite. There were a lot of people that were very much against the gigantic pogroms that were going on day after day. Pope Clement VI, the fancy horny pope that we talked about last episode, he was very, very much against any sort of anti-Semitism.

Yeah, they tried to stop it, you know, in his way. He did sort of like a stop it, okay, we did the naughty boys. Yeah, but it was, you know, it was hard to get control of these like spontaneous pogroms that were happening, but with the flagellants, like you had an organized group of people showing up specifically to kill all of the Jewish people in your town while they put on a show. You can do something about that, you know, and so they did. I mean, in Erfurt, where the flagellants helped kill up to 3,000 Jewish people, they closed

their doors to flagellants. They said, you're never coming back. Oh yeah. You're never coming back here. King Philip declared France a flagellant free zone, and the king of Sicily threatened to kill any flagellant who set foot on the island. Oh my goodness, but you know, the French didn't stop the flagellants. Hello.

I did it. You congratulated yourself and us on not making that joke. You joked the seal. I guess that is true. I did open the hole. Yes, indeed. Oh, I love when you opened that hole, Henry. I did it.

Well, you know, Pope Clement VI, he did actually tolerate the flagellants when they first came to town. And by one report, he even took part in a flagellant procession. Oh yeah, but he was with just like, with like just one rope and no barbs on it, just being like, it's the spirit. I'm here as a part of the spirit. It's kind of he was doing the no kink at Pride thing. Yeah.

But when Pope Clement VI discovered that the flagellants were killing Jewish people in great numbers, he publicly denounced them. And when the Pope publicly denounced them, they mostly disappeared just a year after they arrived. And that was also that was always how the flagellants were. It was never like a long lasting thing. It always popped up for a year or two and then just disappeared and no one knew where the fuck they went.

But John Kelly described them as midnight ghosts. Wow. They just, I mean, if they flamed out like the plague, they kind of, it was the same thing where the movement blossomed and then kind of burnt itself out. I think because it found less and less places to go. Maybe they also all found out that we're never going to get to level four and they were never going to make it to Saturday Night Live and they were like, you know what, this improv stuff, it's not for me.

I'm going to go back to make money in banking. I'm sick of paying for friends. But, you know, that wasn't the only, I want to briefly talk about just the fact that the other big mass like delusion that was happening was all the dance mania. The dance mania. The, what was it called? The term is a choreomania. This is like that was happening, which is true spontaneous giant groups of people dancing

until they fell down. I love that dance dance revolution game that added the whip. That's really a fun portion of it. This is the opposite. This is them just, this is what they, some people believed that there were, they was either spontaneous like the concept of like St. Vitus's dance that like there was either a disease or it was some kind of allergen or it was ergot poisoning or like that causes people to do this spontaneously.

There was also some belief that they were organized where hundreds of people would get together and just dance and dance and dance and they would fall down. This was the thing that would pop up again and again through history, but the black plague was a high point of choreomania. Was there like a Steven Sondheim of the time just being like, dance it away? I don't know. Honestly, but they created the, if you ever go to a place in Germany, they do this thing called the Schauffertons.

Oh, that'll be a fun dance. A dance they still do to this day. But what it is, if you see it right here, they kind of just kick. It is kind of. Like if you watch the Schauffertons. It's fancy goo stepping to be honest. It is just like, that's the one thing about medieval dancing. I sort of like, I wanted, I went down a rabbit hole medieval dancing and it's a lot of just

ha ha. Oh, they just lift knees, but kind of not even that high. They touch palms a lot and they spin in a circle and they're all like the wild medieval dance. And there's usually a wreath involved. Yeah, they're holding, they're just holding an arch. Oh, that's cool. They're like human hummels.

While the flagellants were highly popular in central Europe, there was one country that merely looked upon their passion plays with puzzlement and a vague disdain. Those people were the British. They didn't like the theater? They looked at like, they said like, hmm, foreigners. Wow. They just couldn't, they just didn't get it. They didn't get it at all.

The people that brought us Monty Python and faulty towers couldn't even understand this simple theater. Well, they thought it was a bit much. Okay. It was. It is. They are right about that. That's good on the British for recognizing it.

It's like one thing they got correct. And it's with this that we finally bring the plague to the shores of merry old England. Oh. Get your face. Get your face. Really perfect impression. Now, unlike their mortal enemy, France, England was actually in pretty good shape when the Black Death reached the British Isles, at least comparatively.

The Hundred Years' War against France was going well, and England was in love with their new king, Edward III. See the reign of Edward's father, Edward II, had been marked by military defeat in Scotland against Robert the Bruce, had been marked by famine, and had been marked by political turmoil, partly caused by Edward's close and controversial relationship with a knight named Piers Gaviston. We've been gay since the sun started shining. But more because of the famine, military defeats, and an increasingly oppressive rule, rather

than his sexual orientation, King Edward II fell victim to a coup, and by legend was killed when a hot plumber's iron was inserted into his anus. And that's what got him there in the first place. You never see, you know, the interesting thing. You've seen Clogpipes one through nine. I love Clogpipes one through nine. It's amazing how hot you can get something before you shove it up someone's ass. You can see the people talking in the bar just being like, I don't care that he fucks

guys, but we gotta start winning these wars. Okay? I don't care. You can just see people, but then that's like the cherry on top. No, I mean, it's so funny how that whole, that legend, because that, of course, that's not how he died, but it's so funny how that legend comes up again and again with a hated gay man. You know, he's not hated for being gay, but look at Jeffrey Dahmer.

Jeffrey Dahmer was killed by being beat to death with a barbell. What did we all hear that Jeffrey Dahmer was killed by when we were kids? He was killed by a broomstick being shoved up his ass. It's this weird thing that people have again and again and again when it comes to a hated gay figure. How must he die? He must die with something getting shoved up his ass. There's some sort of weird homophobia, retribution punishment that's not a lot of it.

We're also scared of the butthole. We are scared collectively as a society of the butthole because the poo-poo comes out of it. I think we don't like it. And then some people don't understand it because the butthole's got the man's clit in it. Maybe we're just really scared of it. Every single time they accidentally sat in a pine cone and they came in their fucking

brace, which is the medieval form of underpants, like if they did do that, then they'd be like, oh, this is evil because that's not, my wife, my wife. I always knew that Jeffrey Dahmer died from the dumbbell because that was in the papers, but there was always that stupid rumor about jumping off a refrigerator with a broomstick up your ass. And I have no idea who started that. That is a real thing that happened in the NYPD did to a guy where they... No, this is different.

This is true. That is true. That is true. That is true. Yes, the NYPD. The original flatulencer. Flatulencers. Yeah.

But remember, Ben, you were right next to the news source on that one. You were in Wisconsin when that happened. I was in Texas, so I'm getting games to telephone. Ben and Ben's like, you Jeffrey Dahmer guy that killed by having a broomstick shoved up his ass. And it wasn't just my weird little community that thought that. I talked to other people. They're like, yeah, that's totally how Jeffrey Dahmer died.

Did you hear that Jeffrey Dahmer died from cum poisoning? Yeah. Also, did you hear that like fucking Troy Aikman had eight gallons of semen like pumped from his stomach? That is true. Yeah, I haven't heard anything. I haven't snoped that, but we'll see if Snopes debunks it. A King Edward son, however, captured the English imagination when he became king in 1327 at

the age of 14. Oh my God. And his bold reign brought an era of good feeling to the British people while also establishing England as one of the most formidable military powers in Europe. Kill everyone. Yes, King. I can just see a father right now driving in his Honda Civic looking at his 14 year old son, picking his nose, just being like, what the hell is wrong with you?

Some kids are 14. We're kings. I mean, but that's the thing that at 14, that's really not that big of a deal because let's go through just a little bit the lifespan of an Englishman in the Middle Ages. And of course, the lifespan of a man in the Middle Ages, like it varied greatly depending on one's wealth and class, and it also depended on if you were a man or a woman. On average, half of all medieval English adults died before the age of 50, and only 5% lived above the age of 65.

But people like Edward II, Knights and Kings, they often survived well into their 80s. But for those at the bottom, medieval English boys started working at the age of seven. And since they were considered men of a sort, they could also be hanged for theft, starting at the same age. Yep, all right, ladies and gentlemen, now it's time for our cute hangings. Come on, boys. Yay! I got a seven-year-old, watch it, a seven-year-old hung.

I can't, or hanged or whatever, that's, that's, that's beyond. I mean, at the time, it wouldn't have been, at the time, you'd have been like, oh, look how small they are. Wow. Geez, what can you even do with seven to deserve that? The best sport is you can use less rope. Oh my goodness. Usually, boys got married at 14 years old, while their wives were usually of round 12.

And as far as those women went, women were considered in their prime at 17, mature by 25, and old by their mid-30s. Yeah, that's called porn ages now. Oh my goodness. Most produced five or six kids by the time they were 25, with the full expectation that half of those children would die. And most women just kept having kids until they themselves died from complications during childbirth.

Geez. That's why 35 was old, because that's when the complications started getting pretty fucking rough. You know, now women who have babies at 35, they get C-sections back then, it's like, well, she's done. Get another. God. All right.

Yeah, women were treated like animals back then. Poorly. Poorly, yeah. I want to read the Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England has a pretty good chapter on just how fucking horrifically women were treated in the Middle Ages. You get the feeling of Jeffrey Epstein time traveled back there, he'd be like, finally. Oh, sure. I found my time period.

For certain. This is built for him. Yeah. But even though life was kind of horrible, the feelings in England were pretty good. And in fact, they were so good that when reports of the Black Death devastating France reached England, the English very quickly adopted an attitude that it couldn't happen there. It happened to a Frenchman. Yeah.

Fuck the Frenchman. What is that like? What does that remind me of? You don't have to develop any medicine. You develop the attitude that it's not happening. What is it that's not happening? I think my eyebrow hairs are falling out. And the English, you know, back then were a particularly insular community who considered

themselves a breed apart from the rest of Europe, nowhere near how English people are now. No. No. What a humble group. They are humble with their breakfast food, I think. Love to join with the rest of Europe and share and just be a part of the community. You're like us now, England.

You're better than us, England. The Englishman back then would regularly dismiss Frenchman, for example, as funny walking, effeminate, fancy boys who spent too much time fussing with their hair. Oh my goodness. Wait until you get a load of what Americans think of you. We love the English. We love the English. Times have changed.

Times have changed. We were popular in England before we were popular in America, so we'll always love the English for that. You got great taste. I think it's 100% English. 86% English. And I believe that your asshole is 100% English. But even though the English found the French to be beneath them, that didn't stop Englishmen

from sending back enormous amounts of French war spoils back to England from the first phase of the Hundred Years War. English women were seen walking the streets in the finest French dresses. French homes were draped with French furs, linens, and sheets, and all of these goods were infested with hundreds, if not thousands, of plague-carrying fleas. I just kind of feel like in the horror movie when someone's like going to be like, look, check out that noise. It's like the same feeling.

You fucking morons. You just look at it and you're covered in fleas going like, ouch, because that first see a guy going like, ouch, what's it, ouch, I'm a bit by something. Weird fabric. Also, we got to make a big deal. But the first city in England that got the plague was Weymouth because they are obsessed with this news. I thought it was Malcolm.

No, it's Weymouth. Weymouth. I've certainly seen posts that have said this that they'd be better re-mentioned because it's the one thing they're famous for. They got the plague first? Yes. Okay. Congratulations, Weymouth.

That's not what John Kelly says, but you know, whatever. Let me, Weymouth has claimed it and technically, that's the only thing you're claiming and I have to give it to you. They can have it. Yeah. Well, at the very least, if Weymouth is in southwest England, then I'll give it to them because we do know that the plague started in southwest England. If it's just one of those poor cities in southwest England, fine, but I'm going to go with John

Kelly for this right here. Just so you know, I'm not trying to fuck with you, Weymouth. I'm not trying to blow up your fucking spot or fuck up the only tourism game that you have. I'm just saying, the historian that has been correct thus far says it's Malcolm. Okay. It seems like if there was a Wisconsin sign, it was like, welcome to Wisconsin, home of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein.

It's like maybe not brag about this. That's what they got. Maybe this isn't something that's super cool. You can't even cough in Weymouth though. They throw you out. Oh, I'm sure. Okay. Malcolm is an area of Weymouth in Dorset.

Okay. Yeah. It's all Dorset. It's just so, I guess all you Dorsians are Dorsetians. She called him a dorsion again. We're going to be canceled. Yeah. If you die there, does it, is it an odd dorsion?

I have no clue what happens. Well, anyway, it definitely came from Dorset. We'll say that. But at the start of the 14th century, it's estimated that the population of England sat at about 5 million, but the great famine shrank the English population by 10%. The great plague shrank it by another 30. And the after effects of the plague shrank the population by another 15. As such, England's population had dropped to 2.5 million by the start of the 15th century.

Half were just gone. They had the worst plague mortality rates in England versus the rest of Europe apparently. Something like with all of this collected together, it was like 60%. But they didn't believe it. But that didn't work. It's something about belief that doesn't seem to always carry over in the real, damn it. And then it took England another 130 years to reach 13th century levels, what they were before the great famine and the black plague and all that.

And it took another 100 years after that to surpass pre-great famine levels. Now, as far as where the plague truly entered England, it's believed that the first plague ship docked at the port of Milcombe in the summer of 1349 after returning from a battle at Calais in France. Like Kaffa, which had brought the plague to Europe in the first place, Calais had suffered through an 11 month long siege that produced enormous amounts of filth and rats that then hopped on ships headed for England after the English broke the siege. While the plague entered first in Milcombe, the port city hit hardest and fastest by the

black death was Bristol, where the plague took only two days to spread through the entire city. When word that the plague had hit Bristol reached Gloucester to the north, the Gloucester town gates were closed and all residents of the seaport were banned from entering the town. That however didn't work in Gloucester any better than it worked elsewhere, and by 1350 one could see a message painted on the Gloucester church wall that said, miserable, wild, distracted, the dregs of the people alone survive.

Jesus Christ. Is that a haiku? It's just the end of the world scenarios. I kind of want to keep reminding people that because I have to think about it myself, they thought that the end of the world was here. Yeah. Well for everyone that died it was. Well when you watch people just drop dead hard in two days, like they just come in all

of a sudden, everybody you know is dead, it's very, very scary. But then if you look at the bright side, probably someone that you hated died too. Sure. Well it's like it was in 28 days later, like you know that when he goes to the church and it has the end is very fucking nigh painted on the wall. England was covered in those, like these little poems and these little statements of just the world has ended. Fuck me.

That's the, that was the general sentiment. We were sucking a lot of dick too. No I mean like fuck me. Like not fuck me. Fuck me. Honestly, you might as well have fun with it. That sounds like it's a meme. What they wrote on those.

Absolutely. It's a meme. Sure. That is 100, he is actually 1000% right on that. It is a meme. Fuck you. Fuck you. I know.

I'm going to grant you this. I'm just saying he gets more than a sure on that. He gets a, he gets a way to go Ben. Way to go Ben. Wow. Isolate the footage. Well from Bristol, the Black Death spread across England along a network of roads heading east where the Black Death met another strain of the plague that was coming north from Malcolm.

Hey, how are you? How are you? Black Death. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Nice to see you. Nice to see you.

Good to see you. Nice to see you. And especially priests that got in its way. Now there's quite a bit of debate as to whether or not priests died at greater or lesser numbers than the general population because priests were, after all, older and more exposed to risk if they did their duties. But priests were also better fed and better housed. So in the end, it kind of evened out.

Either way, so many priests died in England that Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury bent the rolls and ordered that if no priests could be found in town, Holy Communion could be administered by deacons. And people were instructed to confess their sins to each other if they got sick or were at risk of getting sick. I know, Kiesel, come here Kiesel. There was one time when we used to get milk together when I had to bring milk from the centre.

All the time. There was one time, and I hate to say this to you Kiesel, I hate, but I put some shit in it. One time. You put shit in my milk? And yeah, you drank it up, and I knew there was shit in it when you were drinking it. I'm so happy you're about to die. Hey Jaws, near the absolution depictions.

Open your mouth. I didn't even notice the shit in my chocolate milk. But how embarrassing must that be, that you have to confess to your, like usually with the priest, you can tell your priest whatever weird shit, like I stuck a finger up my ass the other day and it felt good. Now you gotta tell your neighbour that. And then the priest is like, ooh, gonna put that in my spank bank for later. Another solid memory.

I stole a PTSD from going to the priest and telling him I jerked off. I don't know. What did he do with that information? I went to Catholic school. He jerked off. He jerked off. But while an extraordinary number of English priests died in the Black Death, 50% of priests in Southwest England alone, they were a fair amount who simply abandoned their posts.

And the aforementioned Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury was just such a priest who cut and ran. Oh my God, I feel like- But that's to be fair to Bishop Ralph. He had just come from America. He didn't know that he was in line to be a bishop, but all of a sudden he was just in Cleveland. He was in line with the movie King Ralph. Very nice.

I feel like he looks like the mayor from Nightmare Before Christmas, just like super fat with little legs, just like scampering away. Every priest that is in this story, I imagine, looks like the deacons of the deep from Dark Souls 3. Big, fat, horrible, scary assholes. Pushtillers. But that was the only advice anybody really had, which was run as soon as it showed up. But the priests weren't supposed to run.

The priests were supposed to stay. They were supposed to stay behind, do their duties until they died, but there were a lot of priests that were kind of in it for the money and were in it for the power and weren't really in it for the right reasons. Get out of here. Some of the priests just straight up like, wouldn't I just be so much more useful in an executive position that you need, there can be a leadership gap. Someone has to tell people what to do and shouldn't my mind be safe.

I'm with you. I'm with you, Mr. Ralph. Yeah, well, Bishop Ralph retreated to the countryside in January of 1348. But what he actually said, how he tried to justify it, he goes, I go to the countryside every winter. Why am I going to stay? This is just what I do. Oh, God.

Do you want to fuck up the rhythm of Bishop Ralph? This is my life. This is what we do. I hate the reference because these are timeless episodes, but I think you referenced Ted Cruz the other day. Oh, yeah, last week. Really, that is the definition of it, where it's like, I travel all the time. This is what I do.

This is what I do. And when Bishop Ralph returned from his rural exile to the town of Ueval, healthy and plump at the head of a majestic entourage, the plane. Congratulations for seeing me. Oh, congratulations for seeing me again. The plague-stricken townsfolk quickly formed an angry mob in what sounds like a very British type move. Like, I could just see an entire, just a group of British men, one guy yells, Oi, and then

it's fucking on. It's game. No, I love that. Oi, oi, oi. Good for them. Hooliganism is very real. Yeah. But the bishop disappeared into the local church in fear, but the angry mob armed with

bows, arrows, stones, and farm tools burst inside and beat the bishop's crew half to death. Didn't kill him. Just wanted to make him hurt. And then they held them captive for days until a neighboring community showed up and convinced them to calm down. It took a whole other town. I mean, I get it, man.

They must have been pretty pissed. He ditched them. Yeah. However, it doesn't seem like the priests who stuck with their communities were much of a help either. The English clergy in particular were fond of saying that the plague was the English people's own fault, with one friar blaming it on beautiful young women corrupting public morals by attending jousting tournaments in provocative clothing.

Wait, so how did they blame women and Jewish people for this? This one was because women wore snaps. Wow. They literally had, it was extra buttons. They didn't like them and that the clothes were too tight. Even for that time, this sounds stupid. It was stupid. However, John of Reading said that it was no wonder that the British were dying in droves

given the empty headedness of the English, who remained wedded to a crazy range of outlandish clothing without realizing the evil that would come of it. They thought it was clothes? Yes, it was like you remember when, was it Fallwell saying the 9-11 happened because we allowed gays to live in America? Mm-hmm. Same shit. Fallwell, yes indeed.

Honestly though, the English church tried spinning the plague into an opportunity for salvation, with Bishop Ralph himself saying that quote, Almighty God uses thunder, lightning, and other balls to scorch the sun he wishes to redeem. That's great. Wait, where's my french fries? I know what you want, Ralph. That's my tagline.

Thank you, say, where's my french fries? That's really, that's classic. But as a result of all this, the church came out of the plague far weaker than it was when the plague began. Not just because of their behavior, but mostly because the plague had proved that the church, like everything else, was an all too human institution with no divine power. Yeah, God wasn't helping them and they were the ones with direct access to God. So if it was God's punishment, shouldn't they technically have been gotten first?

Yeah. Even in a way, they all should have been the first ones to go, if it was directly from God to punish everybody for not believing enough, obviously you've got to fire your employees first. Well, to be fair, it's very corporate. Before you blame the customer, you should fire the employees. It's very corporate though, and you know in large corporations, things take time. It's got to go through age.

Yes. It's got to go through so many people passing the buck and passing the blame. Yeah. Well, it's funny because it wasn't just that people lost faith in God. They didn't lose faith in God at all. Their faith in God increased because to them, the proof that God existed was right in front of their face. It just decreased their faith in the church.

The church had told them forever that they are superheroes, that they will protect them, but then the church proved to be completely useless, like people would go to church and they would die in church, and then the priest would also die. So people started, this was actually the beginning of private churches, like smaller churches. Instead of everyone traveling to town to go to mass in a gigantic cathedral, now people were building their own churches, just having church in a barn. So it really is the beginning of religion being taken away from these big corporations essentially and going to a more DIY type of thing.

Yeah, going indie. All DIY shit goes, and eventually it gets made into its own corporation. Indeed, small D, democratization of religion, perhaps. But then they would all go on massive pilgrimages. That was like the big thing, too, is that the pilgrimages increased, but also the way they did it increased. Some people would just crawl towards Jerusalem, literally. They would just go towards the east, on their hands and knees, thinking it would help.

I would assume this also led to different splinter cults, different splinter religions at this point. Yeah. Was it still, everyone was still pretty Catholic? Oh, yeah. Everyone was still pretty Catholic. But they were kind of going off in their own way. We're still a little ways away from Martin Luther.

We're still a little ways away from Protestantism. But this is also, mysticism is starting to become, like I said earlier, mysticism is starting to become a much more commonly accepted thing, where people are having personal relationships with God. Right. It's going back to its pagan roots. Yeah. Basically what it did is it started to break the faith mechanism down to just, like,

I have agency, I can control the universe. They called it God and all that kind of shit. But really it's about that being like, we have access to our own salvation. We don't need somebody else. We don't need the middleman. Absolutely. Now, in keeping with our worst century to be alive theme, England was also besieged by never ending rainfall when the Black Death hit, and a twin epidemic of rinder pest and

liver fluke spurred on by the damp, annihilated entire herds of sheep. Now rinder pest and liver fluke are just IPAs you can get from Portland. Come on guys. Oh, you go there. You went there like this. And when it came to the type of people who died of the plague in England, the demographics shook out as they normally do. Since the wealthy tended to live in stone houses, they were more protected from the rats.

Therefore, only 27% of the aristocratic class died of the plague in England. Prease came out much worse than the aristocrats with a mortality rate of 45% on the high side of estimation. But priests were also still well fed, and they lived in reasonably nice dwellings. For the peasants, though, who lived in poorly built rat-infested houses that had to be replaced every 30 years, the mortality rate was at least 40%, while some reasonable estimates say that 70% of English peasants died in the Black Death. Yes.

I mean, that would make sense. But even though the wealthy were indeed shielded, some of them still died through sheer arrogance and stupidity. The best example was Princess Joan Plantaginae, youngest child of King Edward III. Plantaginae! Oh, Plantaginae, the hermon cane of their time. She definitely, it was interesting, because it's almost as if the overwhelming death does create a sense of complacency, too, because if you believe, if you're in your own little

world of the aristocrats and you don't see as many people dying as everybody else, maybe you do think that the plague's overblown. So you, in your own mind, because you have just the reference point of your surroundings, you don't understand that it's out there killing fucking everybody. So they decided, a lot of times, like we talked last week with Queen Joan, it's like, the aristocrats were still just like traveling and trying desperately to be like, all right, though, let's get back to normal, let's get back to normal, like getting very similar to what we've gone through now, which is the idea of like, you know, they are on track,

like our lives have not changed. What about yours? Mm-hmm. Now, Princess Joan, all of 15 years old, was set to sail to Spain in the middle of the plague to marry Prince Pedro of Castile. Oh. But along the way, the royal company decided to stop off in the port city of Bordeaux, France, for unknown reasons.

What we do know is that the mayor of Bordeaux, Raymond de Biscoy, met the royal company at the docks to tell them that the city was chock full of plague and that they should under no circumstances enter the city. Don't come in here. But perhaps owing to Princess Joan's royal arrogance or her companion's inability to take Frenchmen seriously, all of them brushed his concerns aside and entered the city anyway. Yikes. Within a week and a half, most of the wedding party was dead, including Princess Joan.

Well, you're saving money on burner plates. Yeah. Those charger plates are really good. Yeah, charger plates. That's right. And her body was burned when the mayor of Bordeaux ordered the harbor to be set on fire, where the flames spread to the building where Princess Joan had died. Honestly, that's a fun day to be a leader, though.

It really does. You're just like, light it ablaze. Light it ablaze. Now, with so many people dying in England, there was, of course, the question as to where all these dead bodies were going to go. Like everyone else, the English used plague pits, but in England, the clergy actually used them in one case to turn a profit while also pissing off everyone in town. I will say the plague pits in England supposedly were a little bit more organized than you'd

find in the rest of Europe. They very much were. They tried to show more respect for the dead, for some reason, there. No, they didn't 69 everyone. Not every time. Only when it was a fun grave. Oh, my. Well, in England, it all depended on how busy the body carriers were that day.

Yes. So they would lay them all in one direction, a lot of times facing towards the church. They would like try to do it in a kind of respectful manner, like honestly, that kind that did seem to be a thing throughout Europe. They would try to start the plague pits in order to make them nice. We have to make sure to lay them in one direction. Make sure they're in sync. Oh, this one, never mind.

He's a backstreet boy. I quit. I quit. Oh, man. You two. 98 degrees out here. This is so early in the morning, it's unbelievable, I feel like I'm walking on the sun. Well, in England, as far as the plague pits went, like they how much effort they put

into the burial all depended on how many people were dying. You know, when a lot of it when say something like two, three, four hundred people were dying in a day and the carts that the plague carts just never stopped coming. Yeah, it was a bit of tossing. You know, it wasn't there wasn't a whole lot of organization to it. But if say, you know, 10, 20 people were dying a day, then people would get wrapped in sheets. You know, they would put charcoal to make sure the bodies didn't smell quite as bad.

They could put a lot more effort into it. Yeah, they did the last rights. Yeah. So they just all depended. But they did make an effort when they could. When in Winchester, a Bishop Eddenton objected to even the digging of a plague pit outside of town, because he argued that's unconsecrated ground out there. And if you bury people on unconsecrated ground, when Resurrection Day comes, they might be

overlooked and the church can't have that. No, because you're losing numbers for heaven. Yes, you are. You moved the tombstones, but you didn't move the graves. But while the Bishop hemmed and hawed, plague bodies were stacking ever higher all around town. And by the scientific beliefs of the day, people believe that those bodies were creating miasmas that were spreading the plague even further.

Can't we just sort of like put a sheet over them of something, honestly, they're all melting. It is gross, isn't it? It is supposed to be my one day a week I have a bath. I know. I am just simply, I am disgusted. Can you get me some candles? Eventually, the frustration of living with piles of rotting corpses boiled over into violence

when a group of townsfolk attacked a monk while he was saying a funeral mass. After that, the bishop agreed to the digging of plague pits, but did so in the pettiest way possible. Instead of just choosing a plot of land outside of town, the bishop chose a plot of land that local merchants had been using as a market and a fairground for over a century. He said, why don't you put your plague pit there, you piece of shit, and then he charged them 40 pounds for using diocese property. Gee, what an asshole.

Alright, I guess we're digging up them all. Wow, that's amazing. No more spin-sas. I guess you'll have to go get your erotically themed birthday gag gift somewhere else. Over the hill. Yeah, it's a fucking 80s movie where the ski lodge is getting shut down, the summer camp is getting dug up, but it's set in the black plague. This is what I want to see.

That's the screenplay I'm writing. That's the whole thing. Good lord. I mean, out of all the things happening, do we need the pettiness? Yeah. I mean, that's the biggest crime of all. Being a hypocrite. Yeah.

Now, the legend of the plague in England is that hundreds of villages were completely wiped off the map by the Black Death, and that's partially true. I mean, these days, you might come across a single stone wall that might well have been part of a town centuries ago, but really, while some towns took centuries to rebuild after the plague, the towns that the Black Death wiped out were already on their last legs following the Great Famine from a few decades earlier. They would have died anyway. It's just that the Black Death killed it a lot faster than just time would have.

But something interesting happened in rural England when it came to how many peasants were dying. See, when one person died, everything they had went to their next of kin and so on and so forth. So you had someone die, goes to the next kin, someone die, goes the next to kin. In regular times, there might be 10, 20, 30 years between inheritances. But in the Black Death, it was two weeks, three weeks. And a whole family line would go, and so the inheritors would get more and more stuff

if each other member of the family died, as there was less and less next of kin to get the shit that was left over after the other ones died. What we all grew up with, hand me down, well, you probably didn't because you're the first born. And I was bigger born. But since so many people were dying, the survivors were accumulating enough lands and goods where they could no longer be considered peasants. But neither were they lords.

Instead, they were something new, middle class. New money, baby. Rodney Dangerfield's all over England. This is the creation of the middle class. This is where it all begins. The beginnings of the Queens Jets fans began here in these humble little towns of my father, the progeny of these towns in Poland. We'll get to Poland next week, but also, by the way, this is not the last episode.

We'll cover it. Yeah. One more to go. Furthermore, there were no longer as many people around who could do the work that the lords needed done. So the workers could demand higher wages and lower rents. In other words, the balance of power very suddenly shifted, ending feudalism and beginning the march towards the modern world.

But while rural England was changing in ways that couldn't be fathomed even a decade before, London, which was filthy, even by medieval standards, was about to get the rudest of awakenings when the Black Death breached its walls. Oh, finally, a taste of their own medicine, they're rude themselves sometimes. And it's with London and the rest of the British Isles, as well as the other unbelievable ways that the Black Death shaped our modern world that we will truly end our series on the plague. Yes.

So we decided to take a three hour episode and cut it in half because by the time we had so much shit that we still wanted to talk about with the Black Death and y'all seem to be enjoying it and we are having a fucking blast talking about it. So we decided we'll add one more show so we can really add all of the details we want about what shook out at the end of the plague, also to talk about how Poland was saved simply by its cats. Oh, that's nice. It's just a gun.

I don't know if that's true. They need to get beagles. They want to chase the cats or the cats with the one time a cat did something. Beagles chase rats. Yeah, the rats. The marmot hunters. Yeah. What?

Oh, that's why Jerry is keeping my house. It's very clean. I know. I saw Jerry eating dinner with a rat the other day. Well, thank you all so much for listening to this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. Learn something. Laugh along the way.

Oh, yeah. Fucking better half. You fucking better half. And of course, next week, we'll also talk about the massive fuck up of the Scottish. What? Yeah, dude. The Scottish really tried. The insane arrogance that brought the plague to Scotland.

Oh, man. It's pretty sweet. I love, I love World History, Castle. I'm happy that we're out of it, kind of mostly. We are better. We are. It is better to be alive now. That's for damn sure.

If you haven't noticed this summer, we're going to be doing a little bit of a history theme, but just so you know, after this episode, we're going to be doing a little bit of an icky spooky relax fit. Then after this next episode, after this next episode, then we're going to be traveling to an entirely other period of time, which I'm really looking forward to. And it sounds a little bit like, yeah, get it. Get it. Get it.

Get it. It's the old west. The old west. I don't know. So first, why did I choose to settle in this fucking desert? Why are we here? Why are we here? Why are we here?

I'm looking for a little bit of information on that. I'm going to watch Shakiest Gun in the West. Perfect. It would be a fantastic Don Knott's movie. All right, everyone. Well, thank you all so much for listening. We have some live dates that we will be telling you about as soon as our management and agents allow us.

But we promise we are going to be seeing you very, very soon, and we can't wait to be on the road with you. And yeah, anything else? Keep on supporting all the shows here on the Last Podcast Network. Yeah, Top Hat, Spun, of course, you know the shows. No dogs. What's no dogs up to nowadays, Marcus? We're on hiatus right now, but if you want to hear the full story of the Beastie Boys,

there is a six episode series available, as well as our entire first series on punk, where we covered the Stooges, Suicide, the Damned, the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys, the Screamers, the Slits, amongst others, Misfits. The names are a little bit blue there, aren't they? They're aggressive. All right, everyone. Well, thank you all so much for listening. I hope you're safe and happy out there.

Hail yourselves! Hail Satan! How healthy. Mungos Dalatians. Hail me. Don't lick a rat. I mean, you could lick a rat, but just know it's the fleas of the problem. Oh.

Also, there's Play Doctor Max. We didn't really talk about it, but they had flowers on them. Yeah, you know what they are. Everybody knows the... It's cool, you know. They're cool. They're scary. Yeah, it is cool.

It's scary. I made a point to not go into it. But then I'm certain people are, you know, interested and they've stuck around this long. There was a garlic... There was a garlic and... This is the post-credits scene. Post-credits. Yeah.

There was a garlic and... Oh, this is like... ...and a big, long nose thing. It was like smelling it, because they thought that... Okay, they had a big, gigantic long mask with the smell, with a shit in it, because they thought that the black plague was spread by smell. So if they kept their nose far away and they had other smells in their nose and they wouldn't catch the plague.

Oh, wait. That's why they had a big fucking long nose. And who is Marcus explaining that to? It's Nick Fury! What a surprise! Whoa! Remember that when Ryan rattled in Deadpool, killed himself, because he had read the Green Lantern script at the end?

I love the government-mandated superhero movies we've got. It's wonderful. Isn't it wonderful? This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. And for more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.