The Black Death (17 page)

Though Portugal as a whole does not seem to have suffered particularly seriously, the city of Coimbra was devastated. It is said that ninety per cent of the population died – a statistic which need not be believed. But it seems certain that the prior and all the prebendaries of the great collegiate monastery of St Peter of Coimbra perished within a few days, an impressively clean sweep suggesting that the popular tradition may not have been totally devoid of substance.

*

Dr Carpentier has prepared a map of Europe at the time of the Black Death (reproduced
here
) showing the movements and incidence of the plague. Virtually nowhere was left inviolate. Certain areas escaped lightly: Bohemia; large areas of Poland; a mysterious pocket between France, Germany and the Low Countries; tracts of the Pyrenees. Certain others were afflicted with especial violence: cities mainly – Florence, Vienna, Avignon – but also whole areas such as Tuscany. A host of
factors
, some of them still unidentified, played their part in
deciding
whether any given area should suffer lightly or severely. The inclinations of the rats must have been the most important: a shortage of food in one place driving them on, the resistance of the indigenous rats holding them at bay in another. Climate was certainly significant; it seems that the bacillus of pulmonary plague finds it hard to survive in cold weather. The chance
movement
of an infected human could sometimes save or condemn a village. Did some people also enjoy a built-
in resistance
to
bubonic
plague? Even today the science of epidemiology cannot provide a fully conclusive answer – the problem of where and when a disease will strike next is still unsolved.

But such gradations in horror were anyway of minor
significance
. Though the density of corpses might vary, the smell of death was over the whole of Europe. Scarcely a village was
untouched
, scarcely a family did not mourn the loss of one at least of its members. As the shadow of the Black Death passed away it must have seemed to those who survived that recovery could never be a possibility.

T
HE
England of 1348, politically and economically, was not in so frail a state as some of the countries on the mainland of Europe. Indeed, viewed from France, it must have seemed
depressingly
prosperous and stable. Since Edward III had routed Queen Isabella and the Mortimers at the end of 1330 he had bestridden the narrow world of England, if not like a Colossus, then at least as a figure considerably larger than life. He managed to combine the charismatic appeal of a
beau
chevalier
sans
peur
et
sans
reproche
with the ruthlessness and lack of scruple which every medieval monarch needed if he were to enjoy a reasonable tenure of his throne. His main vice, one not immediately
apparent
to his subjects, was his stupidity; his second was
ambition
, spiced with vanity, which drove him on to establish himself as a figure of glory on the international stage. He gave England a unity and a sense of security which it had not enjoyed since the days of his grandfather. But by his determination to have his way, not only in his own country but in Scotland and France as well, he made certain that the profit which England should have gained from its stability was dissipated frivolously on foreign soil.

A conscientious chauvinist could put forward a reasonably good case for maintaining that Edward’s wars against France and Scotland were the result of intolerable provocation and
conducted
strictly in defence of just national interests. A student of politics might maintain that only by foreign victories could Edward III have hoped to win the respect of his nobles and unite his country. For the purposes of this book it is enough to note that, though the French and Scots might be defeated militarily, the English never had the strength fully to follow up their
victories
in the face of even minimal determination on the part of the enemy. Nor, though temporary truces supervened, did
Edward have either the will or the wisdom to disengage from his campaigns at an advantageous moment and settle for something short of total victory.

At Dupplin Moor, Halidon Hill and Neville’s Cross, the
English
had won spectacular triumphs against the Scots; at Sluys, Crécy and Calais against the French. By 1348 the reputation of English arms can rarely have stood higher and the King’s prestige was at its zenith. But the glory was meretricious and the cost in money and man-power mounted steadily. Edward’s crown was pawned to the Archbishop of Trier, his debts to the Bardi and Peruzzi were enormous, the rich merchants and the City of
London
had been repeatedly mulcted, taxes had been raised as high, perhaps even higher than was prudent. England was still a rich country but it was under severe financial strain and the strain was beginning to tell.

It is important not to exaggerate the progress of decay. By and large England was a thriving country. Exports of wool, by far the most important single crop, were buoyant and exports of cloth, a new and rapidly expanding trade, had, by 1347, reached a level sufficiently high to lead the King to impose an export tax.
1
The great territorial magnates, or at least the Dukes and Earls, possessed imposing riches. The Duke of Lancaster, from his English lands alone, had an income of
£
12,000 a year (translation into modern currency must be hedged around with so many qualifications as to be virtually meaningless but a very
approximate
order of magnitude can be obtained if one multiplies the medieval money by between fifty and sixty). The Bohuns had
£
3,000 a year. The Earl of Arundel left a hundred thousand marks in ready money.
2
(The mark could signify several things but thirteen and fourpence is the most usual meaning.) A leading merchant like William de la Pole could lend the King more than
£
110,000 in a little over a year – not, of course, from his own personal resources but from funds on which he could freely draw.
3

The wheat-growing and sheep-raising country of East Anglia and the Southern Midlands provided many lesser but
comfortable
fortunes. And it was not only merchants and gentlemen who were doing well out of the national prosperity. The villein,
too, might sometimes enjoy substantial wealth and employ
several
labourers to help him in his farming. In theory he could own no land and had to be entirely at the beck and call of his master but, in practice, his labour services had often been
exchanged
for a money payment. In virtually every town a
charter
of liberties had been granted to its citizens; only in a few cases, usually where the lord was a tenaciously conservative churchman, did the traditional relationship between lord and urban tenant survive unmodified.

Probably a little under twelve per cent of the population lived in cities or towns.
4
Of these London was by far the largest and most prosperous. It had eighty-five parishes within its city wall with Westminster, Southwark and other outlying villages closely associated with its daily life. It contained between fourteen and eighteen thousand households, giving it a population, that
cannot
have been far off sixty or seventy thousand.
5
Norwich was almost certainly the second city of the realm with some 13,000 inhabitants and York too may well have had more than 10,000 citizens.
6
After that came a plethora of lesser towns with
Winchester
, Bristol, Plymouth and Coventry, among the larger.

But the main unit of English life was the village. Indeed, since the isolated dwelling was almost unknown outside the Celtic fringe, it can safely be said that virtually everyone who did not live in a town or city, nearly ninety per cent of the population, was to be found in villages varying in size between the large, of up to 400 inhabitants and the small, which might contain as few as twelve families. Though the anecdotes and the striking statistics will usually have to be culled from the towns and great monasteries, the story of the Black Death in England is above all the story of its impact on the village community. It is in the society of the villages that its most long-lasting results were to be recorded.

*

In this year 1348, in Melcombe, in the county of Dorset, a little before the Feast of St John the Baptist, two ships, one of them from Bristol, came alongside. One of the sailors had brought with him from Gascony the seeds of the terrible pestilence and, through him, the men of that town of Melcombe were the first in England to be
infected
.
7

Other ports have been put forward for the doubtful honour of being the first in England to receive the plague. One chronicler, from the Abbey of Meaux in Yorkshire, believed that Bristol was infected earlier,
8
Henry Knighton opted for Southampton,
9
while John Capgrave, writing some eighty years later, recorded: ‘First it began in the north cuntre; than in the south; and so forth throw oute the reme.’
10
The latter thesis, at least, can be
dismissed
. The Black Death may well have made a separate entry into the north of England but certainly not until several months later than in the south. Indeed, there is no evidence that the plague took a firm grip in the northern counties until the
beginning
of 1349.

Many ports of southern England were in constant, almost daily contact with the continent or with the Channel Islands. It would be surprising if trading ships had not carried the plague to several of them. But the consensus of opinion seems to be that Melcombe Regis, now part of Weymouth, earned its unsavoury claim to fame. As well as the
Grey
Friars
’
Chronicle
quoted above, a monk of Malmesbury also refers to ‘a port called
Melcombe
, in Dorsetshire’,
11
and further chroniclers, no doubt in some cases copying the opinions of their contemporaries, either refer to it by name or state that the plague arrived at a ‘Dorsetshire port’ with other details which fit its description.
12

The confusion is a great deal worse when it comes to deciding on exactly what date the plague was first observed in England. The Franciscan of Lynn states that it arrived ‘a little before the Feast of St John the Baptist’ – that is to say before 24 June 1348.
Higden’s
Polychronicon
also agrees that this was the crucial date. But nobody else is prepared to put it so early. Robert of
Avesbury
says that the plague began ‘about St Peter’s Day’,
13
presumably
meaning 29 June, rather than the other dates on which the Apostle is commemorated. The monk of Malmesbury opted for 7 July. The Canon of Bridlington favoured ‘the feast of St James’, or 25 July. Henry Knighton of Leicester referred to ‘the autumn’ of the year 1348; an imprecise period but one which could hardly have begun before the end of August. The Bishop of Bath and Wells, on 17 August, ordered ‘processional stations every Friday … to beg God to protect the people from the
pestilence which had come from the East into the neighbouring kingdom’. The reference to the plague in ‘the neighbouring
kingdom
’, which can only mean France, seems to imply that the Bishop was not yet aware that the disease was already to be found in England. Yet it seems incredible that he should not have known about an epidemic which, according to others, had already been raging for nearly two months in his own diocese. Finally, Stephen Birchington deferred the outbreak to
immediately
after Christmas 1348.
14
Since, however, he reported that it ended in May 1349, it is reasonable to detect some confusion in his mind between the duration of the plague in Canterbury and in England as a whole.

This evidence is cited at somewhat tedious length not because it matters much whether the Black Death arrived in Melcombe Regis or in Southampton, a few weeks earlier or a few weeks later, but to illustrate the extraordinary difficulty of establishing with any precision the details of what took place. If the chronicles are unable to agree within three or four months on the date on which the first case of the plague was recorded, then how much more likely it is that there will be complete confusion when such complex problems as the number of thousands slain by the disease come to be discussed. Piecing together the various accounts, the most likely picture of what actually happened is that a ship bearing a victim of bubonic plague did arrive at
Melcombe
Regis at the end of June 1348; that the first case of a local inhabitant catching the disease occurred in early July and that the disease did not begin to spread or to develop its terrifying pulmonary and septicaemic variations until the beginning or middle of August. But that, as is the case with so much that will follow, is a guess and the truth will probably never be established with certainty.

If Melcombe Regis was indeed the first port to receive the Black Death it may have been brought from Calais. Melcombe was at this time a town of some importance contributing almost as many ships to the siege of Calais as Bristol or even London. It could well have been one of these ships returning from France which brought in the plague.
Prima
facie
the suggestion of the
Grey
Friars
’
Chronicle
that the plague was imported from
Gascony
is less likely since Melcombe is not known to have received many boats coming from that region. But it is by no means
impossible
; one of the ships was said by the
Chronicle
to have had its home in Bristol and this could well have been on the return journey from some Gascon port. Another, and perhaps still more probable source of infection, is the Channel Islands: Jersey and Guernsey were suffering badly from the Black Death at this time, so much so that Edward III wrote to the Governor of Jersey:
15

The letter is undated and it is not known by how far or,
indeed
, if the Black Death in the Channel Islands preceded the
outbreak
on the English mainland. But if, as seems probable, the islands were affected first, it is to Melcombe Regis more than to any other English port that they are likely to have spread the disease.

But whether by way of Southampton or by Melcombe Regis; whether in June, July or August; it was inevitable that the Black Death would sooner or later spread to the British Isles. It is tempting to think of Britain isolated behind her sea defences, remote from Europe and, with a bit of luck, immune from the misfortunes of her continental neighbours. But the truth, then as now, is that England was part of the continent of Europe and that the Channel as much linked England and France as divided them. Indeed, it was a great deal easier for men and merchandise to arrive by sea in England than to make the perilous crossings of the Alps or venture along the other land routes of continental Europe. ‘The south-east of England’, wrote Professor
Kosminsky
,
16
‘lay at a great cross-roads where the trade routes from Scandinavia, the Baltic, the North Sea, the Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean all met, as well as the great river-ways of the Rhine, the Meuse, the Scheldt and the Seine.’ Along the trade routes, without possibility of check, moved the Black Death.

From Melcombe Regis the plague struck inland across the West Country. It is not difficult to get an approximate idea of its course. England is badly endowed with the impressionistic
reporting
of such chroniclers as Michael of Piazza or Agnolo di Tura. There is even less in the way of dispassionate medical
records
; English physicians contributed virtually nothing to the ample if somewhat profitless literature of the plague tractators. But the richness of our national archives – the archives of a nation wedded to legalism and the virtues of precedent and, still more important, of a nation which has had the good fortune never to suffer subsequent foreign invasion – offers a fuller
picture
of the progress of the Black Death than those which any other country can provide.