The Black Death (18 page)

Professor Stengers, the Belgian historian, referred wistfully to the riches of the English archives as being the envy of every
continental
medievalist.
17
Envy certainly; and yet it would be
surprising
if the continental historian did not sometimes feel a certain relief and the proud possessor of this treasure-house occasionally view his national glory with apprehension as well as pride. The knowledge that untapped reservoirs of knowledge exist, ready to confound the over-confident and ensnare the unwary, is
sobering
even to the expert and downright intimidating to the
amateur
.

This seems particularly true when material about the effects of the Black Death is in question. The most complete source, though by no means the most comprehensive, is the ecclesiastical
records
. Cardinal Gasquet relied almost exclusively on these for his study of the Black Death. The principal series which he used were the Books of Institutions, showing dates of appointment to the various livings, together with the Patent Rolls which listed,
inter
alia,
‘royal grants, licences and presentations made by the Sovereign to such vacant ecclesiastical livings as were at the time in the royal gift’.
18
The value of such records is obvious but, as will be seen later, so also are their limitations. For the moment it suffices to say that, as a rough guide to the date that the Black Death was raging in any particular area and to the relative
damage
which it did in one place or another, better evidence is rarely to be found.

Among the lay documents, those which are of immediate
relevance
for a study of the Black Death are the manorial Court Rolls. From these, in ideal circumstances, it is possible to
establish
how many householders died in any given period and whether there were relations left to inherit or the holding
escheated
to the Lord. Though once again such lists pose problems when it comes to deducing from them a comprehensive total of plague victims they are of the utmost value in that they show the incidence of the Black Death in each manor. Read in
conjunction
with the Account Rolls they provide an amazingly detailed picture of life on the medieval manor. But many fewer of them are left than is the case with the ecclesiastical documents and, as a general rule, they also tend to be less well kept and less accessible. A series is necessary to enable valuable deductions to be drawn – yet too often the series is interrupted and only
isolated
numbers survive.

With the help of the ecclesiastical records, it can be established that the plague was rife in many parts of Dorset by October 1348, reached a peak in December and January and was on the wane by the end of February. New vicars had to be appointed at Shaftesbury on 29 November, 10 December, 6 January and 12 May and Wareham lost the head of its Priory in October and had two new vicars instituted in December, one in May and another in June.

Exactly 100 institutions to Dorset benefices caused by the death of the previous incumbent were made during the seven months from October 1348 to April 1349. The numbers did not return to normal until the autumn of 1349.
19
From other sources one learns that Poole was particularly badly affected and that a tongue of land projecting into the sea and known as ‘The Baiter’ was bought by the town-councillors and set aside as a burial place for the victims. At Bridport, though the plague was not so bad as to interfere with the supply of cordage to the royal navy,
20
two additional bailiffs had to be appointed to cope with the extra work.

In January 1349 Ralph of Shrewsbury, Bishop of Bath and Wells, circulated a letter to all the priests in his diocese which shows up vividly the demoralization in the infected areas:
21

The Bishop concluded:

Even with this exception, it is clear that the Bishop was
authorizing
a very considerable relaxation of the normal rules.

The authority to hear confession has, in all periods of the Church’s history, been restricted to the priesthood. To throw it open to laymen and even to women, though not in defiance of canonical authority, was a step to be taken only in case of
extreme
emergency. It was a confession on the part of the Church that the crisis was out of control and the normal machinery no longer able to cope with it.

The most revealing phrase in the Bishop’s letter is the one in which he refers to the lack of priests willing to take on new parishes or to visit the sick ‘perhaps for fear of infection and
contagion
’. The implied rebuke would have come better if Ralph of Shrewsbury himself had ventured a little farther into the battle. From November 1348 until 13 May 1349 the period in which the Black Death was at its height in all parts of his diocese, the Bishop remained at his house at Wiveliscombe, a remote
village
in the corner of his territory.
22
It is true that it was his
normal
practice to winter at Wiveliscombe and also only justice to say that he seems in no way to have neglected his duty or
shunned
direct contact with visitors from plague-infested areas.
Indeed
, a stream of priests came to his retreat to receive their letters of institution. No doubt he had good reason to argue, like Pope Clement before him, that the best way he could serve his flock was by staying alive and not indulging in false or, at least, futile heroics. But, when all is said and done, one would still have slightly greater respect for the Bishop and sympathy for his
railing
at the reluctant clergy if he had paid a single visit to Bristol, Bath or any other important town in his diocese while it was suffering the agonies of the plague.

However reluctant some of the priests may have been to
expose
themselves, the clergy of Somerset, another county in the Bishop’s diocese, did in fact suffer greatly as a result of the Black Death.
23
Institutions to new benefices rose from a more or less normal figure of nine in November 1348 to thirty-two in
December, forty-seven in January 1349, forty-three in February, thirty-six in March, forty in April and then fell away to
twenty-one
in May and a mere seven in June – the month in which the Bishop thought fit to set forth on his travels again. So extreme was the confusion that the Bishop felt it necessary to insert a saving clause in all his appointments protecting his position in case, in a moment of excusable aberration, he instituted a priest to a benefice which in fact was not vacant at all. It would be most unwise to generalize on the basis of a single county but it is fair to say that the evidence of Somerset shows no tendency on the part of the parish priests to shirk their terrifyingly perilous
responsibilities
.

Such data needs closer analysis before they can provide more than an indication of a general trend and often the material for such an analysis does not exist. Though Gasquet himself does not mention the fact it seems, for instance, that in the case of Somerset about a quarter of the new institutions were the result of the resignation of the previous incumbent rather than his death. But, in its turn, for this figure to mean much one would have to know what inspired the individual resignation. Was it reluctance to face the dangers which confronted a parish priest during a lethal epidemic, the economic impossibility of soldiering on in an anyway poor parish which had now lost the majority of its more prosperous parishioners or, perhaps most probable, the translation of the incumbent to another, more important parish which had lost its priest? Even among those who died the statistics are not wholly conclusive since one or two at least may have been the victims of old age, accident or other disease rather than the Black Death. Such facts will never be established: the historian is lucky even if he finds proof that the vacancy was caused by death, let alone information about its cause.

Professor Hamilton Thompson has pointed out other
considerations
which throw doubt on statistics of this kind. For one thing, the place of death is rarely specified. If a Yorkshire parish priest died of the Black Death while on duty in Canterbury or a priest from a rural Hampshire parish preferred to tend his flock from his comfortable house in Winchester, then it would be
misleading
to quote his death as evidence of the mortality in his
proper county or his proper deanery. Another flaw is that a few institutions were not recorded in the Register, presumably
because
of the muddle and stress caused by the hurried
appointment
of a quite abnormal number of new priests at a time when the officials responsible were themselves leaving their posts
vacant
with alarming speed. For certain important areas, too, the records are not available. And finally, it has proved virtually
impossible
to establish a list of benefices which can categorically be stated to be complete.
24
Calculations made on such a basis still possess great value, but almost always they must be used with caution and a certain scepticism.

A
fortiori
this is true when figures for the mortality among the clergy are extended to cover laics as well. It would be
extremely
rash to accept unquestioned Cardinal Gasquet’s firm
assertion
: ‘It cannot but be believed that the people generally
suffered
as greatly as the clergy, and that, proportionally, as many of them fell victims to the scourge.’
25
It can be contested that the beneficed clergy, with their education, high standard of
living
and less cramped living conditions, were much better placed to survive than their unfortunate flocks. But, on the whole, the arguments which suggest a higher death rate among priests than laics are more convincing. For one thing there was the nature of their work which, if conscientiously carried out, brought them into constant contact with the infected. In particular in the areas where the pulmonary form of the disease was rife, this must have been close to a sentence of death on any priest
resolved
to do his duty. For another, as Professor Russell has
pointed
out, the fact that the average age of the clergy was higher than that of the population as a whole meant that, in any given year, a higher proportion of priests were likely to die.
26
And
finally
, though the smaller size of the priestly household reduced the chances of infection, it seems also to have been the case that, once such a household was infected, the chances of any survivals were proportionately less. One rat family to a houshold and three fleas to a rat seems to have been the norm; the greater the
number
of infected fleas in proportion to potential human victims, the smaller the chances of escape.

No final answer to this conundrum will ever be forthcoming.
But it would be reasonable to state as a general rule that the
proportion
of beneficed clergy who died in any given diocese could not possibly have been much smaller than the corresponding figure for the laity and is unlikely to have been
very
much
bigger
. Arbitrary limits of 10 per cent less and 25 per cent more seem to provide a reasonable bracket within which the correct figure must be encompassed.