By 1415, Jan Hus was burned at the stake, and fifteen years later Joan of Arc followed. The Black Death had ushered in the era of the modern world before anyone had even realized it. Thus the old medieval tripartite division of society into those who fought (the nobility and knights), those who prayed (the churchmen) and those who labored (the peasants) was never the same again" (James). The Black Death had been the impetus for change - rather than a test of faith, it proved to be a reason for changing the way that faith was held: "Perhaps Cardinal Gasquet was right when he noted long ago that the plague led to the emergence for the first time of a middle class (who chatter and challenge authority) funded by accumulating the wealth of those who had died. Through the arts, a new kind of information was disseminated, and through the rise of technology (like the printing press the following century) that information had no trouble reaching more hands than in any previous era. All of these events came to a head: plague, death, new order, wealth, Renaissance, and protest. The support of the new Protestant ethos was found in the new class that arose as a result of both the Black Death and the increase in trade markets through Italian ports, where East literally met West and the merchant class came to wealth rapidly. Such ideology had no problem spreading through the whole of Europe - and it did so, just as the plague had done, igniting the flames of Protestantism and doing to the spirituality of Christendom what the Black Death had done to its corpus. The hero of the Revolt, of course, was Wycliffe - whose doctrine allowed the partakers to rationalize their violence: those in authority had sinned against God, therefore their authority was extinguished. TOPIC: Research Paper on Black Death an Analysis of AssignmentThe disruption in economy, however, was not balanced by such measures, and thirty years later - shortly before Chaucer would set about chronicling the changing face of English Catholicism - the Great Revolt of 1381 "flared through much of England the Kent and Essex men invaded London, chopped off Archbishop Sudbury's head and terrified the 14-year-old Richard II into agreeing concessions on the Poll Tax…an unsuccessful attempt by government to combat the effects of plague by changing the basis of taxation" from communal to individual (James). Despite the shortage in the workforce caused by the plague, workers were ordered to take wages at the levels achieved pre-plague" (James). This law sought to prevent laborers from obtaining higher wages. Nonetheless, government - like the one in England - attempted to stymie the economic impact of the Black Death: "Within a year of the onset of plague, during 1349, an Ordinance of Laborers was issued and this became the Statute of Laborers in 1351. Those who could still work saw well the opportunity to amass a small fortune from those who had likely come into an early inheritance themselves. The demand for labor increased - and so did the requested wage. As faithful abandoned notions of right and wrong, religious abandoned traditional ecclesiology, and laborers abandoned traditional models of the worker/overlord relationship. Men like Jean Wycliffe sought answers - and those answers often went against the traditional teaching of the Church. Paper NOW! The reality was much more harrowing than any common consciousness can give it: this was a plague of Biblical proportions - as such, religious faith was tested. Some treated each day as if it were their last: moral and sexual codes were broken, while the marriage market was revitalized by those who had lost partners in the plague (James). We also know that the mortality came to an end in the first outbreak soon after 1350 contemporaries could not have known this would happen - so far as they were concerned everyone might well die. We know, as 14th century people suspected, that the mortality caused by the bubonic plague of the Black Death was the worst demographic disaster in the history of the world. Looking back on it, James gives a somber perspective: " Elsewhere come reports of the stench that arose from the mass graves of churchyards or the trenches in London.