The Black Death (20 page)

Was this a condemnation of the Englishman’s timid
conservatism
? Or a triumph for his durability and determination? Or merely a reflection of the fact that the English had had longer to get used to the idea and that fatalism had set in? The
interpretation
is a matter of taste and no formula could fail to be a misleading over-simplification. But it can at least be said that the Englishman’s reaction, or lack of reaction, was a victory for the system under which he lived. It can be argued that, in the long term, the Black Death struck a fatal blow at the manorial system and heralded the end of the Middle Ages. Be that – for the moment – as it may; in the short term the Black Death provided an impressive tribute to the system’s strength and to the readiness of the Englishman to accept the security which it offered and the limitations which it imposed.

*

Judging by the rapid progress of the plague along the coast of North Devon and Somerset, the infection travelled by boat by way of the Bristol Channel as well as by the slower inland routes. Whether it arrived first by land or water at Bristol is uncertain; the latter, probably, though any port which was the centre of such a busy traffic would have been an early victim in either case. Bristol, the principal port of entry for the West Country, with something close to ten thousand inhabitants, was the first important English city to be affected. ‘There died’, recorded Knighton, ‘suddenly overwhelmed by death, almost the whole strength of the town, for few were sick more than three days, or two days, or even half a day.’
31

‘Almost the whole strength of the town’, need not be taken too seriously, but it does seem that the plague was particularly ferocious in the city and its environs. Statistics must, as usual,
be extrapolated from scanty evidence. There were ten new
institutions
for eighteen benefices – a figure which suggests that mortality among clerics was above the average for that part of England. The
Little
Red
Book
of Bristol lists the names of the town council, the ‘Forty-Eight’, for 1349. Of the fifty-two
members
which the ‘Forty-Eight’ whimsically contained, the names of fifteen had been struck through to show that they were dead. If all these died of the plague the mortality rate would have been a little under thirty per cent; an unusually high figure for what must have been the cream of the city dignitaries. Things were undoubtedly a great deal worse in the crowded and stinking warrens in which the poor were forced to live. Boucher, the city historian, estimates an overall death rate in Bristol of between thirty-five and forty per cent and there is no reason to believe this figure exaggerated.
32
‘The plague’, according to an old
calendar
, ‘raged to such a degree that the living were scarce able to bury the dead…. At this period the grass grew several inches high in the High St and in Broad St; it raged at first chiefly in the centre of the city.’
33
Cardinal Gasquet mentions the
difficulties
of the parson of Holy Cross de la Temple who had such
urgent
need to enlarge his graveyard that he took over an extra half acre without waiting for a royal licence. It is comforting to know that the King’s pardon was subsequently forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Exeter had also been afflicted. According to one local historian of the nineteenth century, ‘this dreadful calamity continued until the year 1357, when it happily ceased’.
34
Happily, indeed; but in fact there is no evidence to suggest that the plague in Exeter lasted longer than the usual span or that there was a renewed outbreak within the next few years. Another Exeter historian more prosaically states that the Black Death ‘
arrested
the building of the cathedral nave … paralysed our woollen trade and all commercial enterprise and suspended agricultural pursuits.’
35
Certainly, for two or three months, transportation in the area must have been reduced if not largely suspended, but Exeter, like every other English town in the fourteenth century with the possible exception of London, could live comfortably off the farms in its immediate neighbourhood. Though food may sometimes have been hard to buy for want of middlemen to
carry, prepare and sell it, there is no reason to think that the threat of famine was added to the city’s miseries.

Inexorably the plague moved on through the West. It seems to have taken three or four months to complete its march but, by the middle of 1349, there can hardly have been a village in Devon and Cornwall which had not received its visit. At the isolated village of Templeton on the moors to the west of Tiverton there was no churchyard to accommodate the dead so that they had to be taken by cart-loads during the night to the other church at Witheridge.
36
The deanery of Kenn to the south and
south-west
of Exeter is believed to have been the worst affected in the whole of England; eighty-six incumbents perished from a deanery with only seventeen parish churches.
37

One casualty, luckier than most in that it survived, though seeming near to death at the time, was the tin industry of the west country. By the time of the plague the ‘free miners’ of Devon and Cornwall were a prosperous and powerful group enjoying a striking degree of local autonomy. The annual output of tin was some seven hundred tons. The death of many miners and the virtual disappearance of the market proved disastrous. In the years immediately following the plague production
dropped
away to almost nothing. As late as 1355 no tin at all was being produced in Devon. But in the more important mines of Cornwall recovery was more rapid and by the end of the century output had reached a peak which had only once been exceeded before the Black Death.
38

For the historiographer concerned with the Black Death in England, 1349 is a year of which there is much to be written, for it was in the course of this year that almost every town and
village
was afflicted. At first it is possible to visualize the plague conducted, as it were, like a military operation. The initial attack on the Dorset ports; the bold thrust across country to the north coast so as to cut off communications between the western
counties
and the mainland; seaborne landings at points along the coast to outflank the defence; the slow mopping up of what
opposition
was left in Devon and Cornwall; and the main thrust towards the Thames valley and London. But after March 1349 the analogy with a controlled campaign can no longer be
pursued.
To change the metaphor, the dykes were down and the water was everywhere. The infection no longer advanced
regularly
from point to point but sprang up simultaneously in a hundred places; reaching its peak, for no reason that can be
established,
in Norfolk and Suffolk before Cambridgeshire; in Hampshire before Surrey; in Warwickshire before
Worcestershire
. By July it was spreading across the northern counties, by the end of the year nowhere had been spared. Through winter and summer, through flood and drought; against old and young, weak and strong; the disease went imperviously on its way. To track its course with any precision would be a hopeless task: the most that is possible is to register its impact in the various
regions
and to highlight its workings at a few points where fuller detail is available.

When the plague turned eastwards after reaching the Bristol
Channel the first city to be threatened was Gloucester. The town council, horrified at the tragedy which had overtaken their
neighbours
in Bristol, decided to seek refuge in isolation. An embargo was placed on all intercourse between the two cities and the gates closed to any refugees who might carry with them the seeds of the plague.
2
But even if it had been possible to keep out every infectious human, and there is no doubt that the plague had been present in Bristol in its most virulent and infectious form, the citizens of Gloucester could have done nothing to protect themselves from the plague-bearing rat, making its way along the ditches or travelling in the river boats that plied up and down the Severn.

Bishop Wulstan Bransford remained on his country estate, occupied in the endless search for new priests to take the places of the dead. Between March and September alone eighty
vacancies
had arisen, almost all caused, according to the County
History
, by the death of the previous incumbent.
3
The Bishop
himself
died on 6 August 1349. At Ham, a manor belonging to the Berkeleys not far from Cheltenham, so much land either escheated to the lord because of the tenants’ death without an heir or was abandoned to look after itself that the bailiff had to hire the equivalent of 1,144 days’ work to get the harvest in. The figure is impressive but so also is the fact that the extra labour was forthcoming, though no doubt at a considerable price.
4

*

In so far as any pattern can be detected in the advance of the plague from west to east across England it seems to have struck from Bristol into Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire and from Southampton and the West across Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Surrey towards London. The first prong of the advance
provided
some of the most fearful devastation of the whole epidemic.

The worst months for Oxfordshire were March, April and May, though there must certainly have been many cases before and after this period of maximum destruction. The county was, at this time, an archdeaconry within the vast diocese of Bishop Gynewell of Lincoln. Professor Hamilton Thompson’s
enormously
valuable analysis of the Registers of the diocese shows that, so far as mortality among the clergy is concerned, the south
of the county escaped lightly. In the deanery of Henley only a quarter of the beneficed clergy died and in Aston a mere 19 per cent. But in the city of Oxford itself, 43 per cent did not survive, in the deanery of Woodstock 42 per cent, in Bicester 40 per cent and in Chipping Norton 29 per cent. In the whole archdeaconry just over 34 per cent of the beneficed clergy perished, well
below
the 40.7 per cent which was the average for Gynewell’s
diocese
.
5

Applying the suggested margin of error, one arrives at the highly speculative conclusion that total mortality in the
archdeaconry
should have been between 25 per cent and 37 per cent. The Cartulary of Eynsham Abbey provides evidence to show that, in that part of the county at least, the lower of these
estimates
was well below the mark.
6
The Abbey itself, between
Witney
and Oxford, seems to have suffered badly enough. Abbot Nicholas had been deprived of his office by the Bishop because of some now forgotten offence. Bishop Gynewell nominated two administrators to look after the Abbey pending the nomination of a new Abbot but on 13 May two of the senior brethren
arrived
to report that the first of his nominees was dead and the life of the second despaired of. He named in their place the two monks who had brought the news and sent them on their way. His new appointments met with no greater success; both monks were dead before they reached the Abbey. In despair Abbot Nicholas was forgiven and reinstated.

But the manors of the Abbey suffered still worse. Common tradition in England ascribes to the Black Death the
responsibility
for the disappearance from the map of many villages,
leaving
the church, usually the only solidly constructed building, as a solitary monument to the past. Certainly the Black Death helped the process of depopulation and so weakened many
communities
that they were unable to survive the economic and social vicissitudes of the next two centuries. But very few
villages
can be shown to have been finally and completely deserted as a direct result of the Black Death.
7
One of the exceptions was the Abbot of Eynsham’s manor of Tilgarsley (or Tilgardesle) where the collectors of the lay subsidy reported in 1359 that it was not possible to gather the tax because nobody had lived in
the village since 1350. There is no reason to think that Tilgarsley was either rich or thickly populated before the Black Death but the fact that the tax was fixed at 94s. 10d. suggests that the
community
was reasonably prosperous or, at least, far removed from starvation.
8

Another Eynsham manor, that of Woodeaton, went near to sharing the fate of Tilgarsley. ‘In the time of the mortality of men or pestilence which befell in the year of our Lord 1349’, reads the Cartulary, ‘scarce two tenants remained in the manor and they would have departed had not Brother Nicholas of Upton, then Abbot, … made an agreement with them and the other tenants who came in afterwards.’ The bargain which the Abbot struck, giving the tenants a somewhat higher rent but less arduous feudal services, is an interesting example of the methods to which landlords were to have recourse in the years following the Black Death. He was only partially successful. By 1366 there were twenty-seven tenants in the village but six cottages still stood vacant.

At Cuxham, some seven miles south of Thame, only two reeves had been appointed to administer the manor in the whole period between 1288 and 1349. The old reeve died in March 1349. His replacement died in April. His successor, a bailiff, died in June. His further successor died in July, and the fifth in line died or, at least, departed from the scene a year later in July 1350. By 1360 the lord had given up any attempt to farm the manorial demesne and was seeking to put all his land out to rent.
9

When the plague reached the city of Oxford, records Wood:
10

The problem of what happened to the University during the Black Death is particularly bedevilled by suspect statistics. Richard Fitzralph, who had been chancellor a little earlier,
recorded
that ‘in his time’ there had been 30,000 students but that, by 1357, the total had shrunk to a mere 6,000. He blamed
the fall, however, not so much on the plague as on the
machinations
of the friars who lured students away by ignoble means.
11
Thomas Gascoigne, writing in the middle of the fifteenth
century
,
12
confirmed Fitzralph’s figure, saying that he had seen the figure of 30,000 cited in the rolls of the early chancellors as the student strength of the University. Wyclif raised the earlier total to 60,000 and reduced the latter to 3,000; not surprisingly
attributing
the mischief to the inflated worldly prosperity of the Church.
13

Even in the bloated Oxford of the 1960s the total student body only numbers a little over ten thousand. No one today would accept as a reasonable estimate for 1348 a half or even a tenth of Fitzralph’s figure, let alone of Wyclif s army of 60,000. Even at its peak of 1300 it is unlikely that the university held more than fifteen hundred students; 3,000 would be the outside limit.
14
Given the number of potential chroniclers whom the
University
must have contained, it is curious how little evidence survives to show what happened to this population during the plague. If the experience of the larger monastic houses is any guide, then those students who elected to see out the epidemic from within their colleges paid heavily for their rashness. It is highly unlikely that they fared better than the townsman and probable that they did a great deal worse.

*

Berkshire was in a poor state even before the arrival of the plague. An exceptionally hard winter followed by sheep disease had set back the county’s economy a few years before and, though things had improved by 1349, recovery was not
complete.
The impact of the plague was devastating but, except in certain areas, transitory. At Woolstone, almost on the borders of Wiltshire, the landlord in 1352 was forced to engage dairy women to do the milking and extra labour for weeding and most of the mowing. Yet by 1361 customary tenants were again
established
and paid labour largely dispensed with.
15
Of the
Berkshire
villages for which records exist, only in Windsor, a royal manor and as such likely to be given special treatment, were the changes introduced by the plague made permanent and all remaining villein services commuted for a money payment by
1369. Otherwise the pattern is one of losses made good, of a
system
strained but unbroken. Resilient and traditional, the manorial communities of England quickly put themselves back on an even keel and carried on, to the casual observer at least, as if the storm had never broken.

Buckinghamshire, where the Black Death was at its worst from May to September, does not produce a very different picture. In Wycombe a startling 60 per cent of the clergy died and it seems improbable that more than half the inhabitants stayed alive.
16
And yet by 1353 the town had recovered to the point that
vacant
plots for building were being sought by would-be
householders.
This however was true only of the town and not of the surrounding countryside, Wycombe’s renewed prosperity did not filter through to the Manor of Bassetbury on its outskirts where, even fifty years later, the water-mill was in ruins, the fulling mill and dye house untenanted, the barns of the manor in need of repair and the tenants generally enjoyed larger holdings and paid lower rents.
17
Meanwhile, at the manor of Sladen, near
Berkhamstead
, in a deanery which suffered comparatively lightly, a jury in August 1349 declared that the miller was dead and his mill anyway valueless since there were no tenants left to need his services. Rents to the value of
£
12 were no longer paid since all the cottagers were dead. One cottage, where a certain John Robyns survived and dutifully paid his 7s. 0d. a year, was the only part of the manor deemed still to be of value.

One is left therefore with the curious situation that a town in the centre of a deanery which lost almost as high a proportion of its beneficed clergy as any in the country, had largely recovered within three or four years, while a neighbouring manor was still in difficulties fifty years later and another manor, in a part of the county which seems to have been far less seriously afflicted, was virtually wiped out. One moral to be drawn is that it is
dangerous
to generalize even about relatively small areas – one
village
may suffer disastrously; another, only a mile or two away, escape virtually unscathed. Another moral, still more defeatist, is that all statistics relating to the Middle Ages, particularly those deduced by analogy or extrapolation, should be taken with a massive pinch of salt.

But a partial and somewhat more rational explanation lies in the nature of the different communities. A town like Wycombe, if well run and energetic, could draw away labour from the
surrounding
countryside. Many of the surviving villeins in the manors of the neighbourhood were disinclined to pick up the shattered pieces of the rural economy. Others resented the efforts of the landlords to exact feudal services which, in previous years when labour was cheap and plentiful, had been allowed to lapse or had willingly been excused against a modest money payment. In a market town, anxious to encourage immigration so as to foster its thriving trades and commerce, such malcontents could find a welcome and, with luck, protection against any effort on the part of the former masters to restore the strayed sheep to its manorial fold.
Stadtluft
macht
Frei,
went the adage; and
certainly
many fourteenth-century villeins savoured their first breath of freedom in some country town seeking to restore the ravages of the Black Death. Wycombe regained its strength at the expense of neighbouring manors like Bassetbury; some at least of the lost tenants of Sladen were probably to be found at work in St Albans or Wendover. That the second half of the fourteenth century showed a progressive depopulation of the countryside is now almost a truism: that many towns showed a corresponding growth would be extremely hard to prove. But at least there can be little doubt that many of them, against the trend of population in the country as a whole, managed
successfully
to hold their own.