The Phoenix of Albion: English Renaissance in the Wake of the Pestilence of 1348

Many nations go through periods of great cultural or social change. During the latter half of the fourteenth century, and the entirety of the fifteenth, England went through such a period of change. Out of the ashes of tragedy an English phoenix was able to rise. This period radically transformed England from a feudal aristocracy to a thriving mercantilist society, sowed the seeds of the Protestant Reformation, and laid the foundations of the British Empire.