The Black Death (23 page)

In January 1349 shortly before Parliament was due to
assemble
, the King prorogued it on the grounds that ‘… the plague of deadly pestilence had suddenly broken out in the said place and the neighbourhood, and daily increased in severity so that grave fears were entertained for the safety of those coming there at that time’. The King’s concern for his legislators was proper and, in the event, well justified but seems a little premature. It may well have been little more than a pretext.
8
In January 1348 Parliament had proved recalcitrant and, when they
eventually
and grudgingly granted a subsidy for three years, they made it clear that they felt the burden of taxation to be
unreasonably
heavy. With his subsidy safely in his pocket the King would have jumped at an excuse to be spared the grumbling of his legislators. The epidemic came just in time to furnish it.

The existing graveyards were soon too small to meet the
demand.
A new cemetery was opened at Smithfield and hurriedly consecrated by Ralph Stratford, Bishop of London. But the
second
of the two new cemeteries, founded by the distinguished soldier and courtier, Sir Walter Manny, has provided historians with the greatest confusion. Early in 1349 Sir Walter leased for twelve marks a year and subsequently bought some thirteen acres of unused land to the north-west of the city walls at a spot called Spittle Croft. He built a chapel on the site, dedicated to the Annunciation, and threw it open for the overflow of victims of plague within the city.
9
Eventually the Charterhouse was built on part of the ground. The confusion arises over the number of
dead which the new graveyard accommodated. Robert of
Avesbury
says that two hundred people were buried there almost every day between the feast of the Purification (2 February), and Easter (2 April).
10
If this is taken to mean that burials took place at this rate during what must have been the worst months of the plague and it is assumed that they continued at a reduced rate for the next few months, then a minimum of seventeen or eighteen thousand victims must have found a home there. This figure is enormous but still trifling compared with that put
forward
by the London historian, Stow,
11
who recorded that he saw an inscription in the churchyard which read:

He claimed that this figure had been confirmed by his study of the Charters of King Edward III.

Camden claimed to have seen the same inscription but, in his recollection, the figure was an almost equally startling forty thousand. There is no indication that these new cemeteries were intended to replace rather than supplement the existing
churchyards
, one and probably two other new ones were opened; it would seem therefore that Manny’s site could not possibly have taken more than half the victims of the plague, and probably a great deal less. If Stow’s figures were correct, this would mean, therefore, that a minimum of one hundred thousand people died of the Black Death in London, a figure credulously adopted by Rickman in his Abstract of Population Returns.
12
Even if Robert of Avesbury’s figure were accepted the total of the dead could hardly be less than forty thousand. Figures above fifty thousand have frequently been bandied about. Yet all these totals seem
unreasonably
high when set alongside a population of sixty or seventy thousand. The ecclesiastical registers, which might have provided a more accurate check, do not survive but such snippets of information as exist – as, for instance, that three out of seven benefices in the gift of the Abbey of Westminster fell vacant in the spring and summer of 1349 and both those in the gift of the
Abbey of St Albans – suggest that casualties in London were more or less in line with those in other cities. Certainly there is no reason to think that it suffered less. A total of between twenty and thirty thousand dead, probably closer to the higher figure, is likely to be as accurate a guess as one will get unless some further source of satisfies is discovered.

Though, as everywhere, the poor suffered most, there were quite enough deaths among the rich and powerful to show that nobody was immune. John Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury, died at his manor of Mayfield in August 1348. It is quite probable that he was not a victim of the plague but there is no doubt about his successor, the Chancellor, John Offord, who died in May 1349 at Westminster before he could even be enthroned. Clement VI then appointed the great scholar Thomas
Bradwardine
but, he, in his turn, died in the Bishop of Rochester’s London palace on 26 August 1349. A former Chancellor, Robert
Bourchier
, died of the plague in London and one of his successors, Robert Sadington, died in 1350, though of uncertain cause. The royal family seems to have kept out of trouble, the only casualty being the King’s daughter Joan who died at Bordeaux on her way to Portugal, but Roger de Hey ton, the royal surgeon, died on 13 May 1349.
13
There were heavy losses among the dignitaries of the City. All eight wardens of the Company of Cutters were dead before the end of 1349. Similarly, the six wardens of the Hatters’ Company were all dead before 7 July 1350 and four wardens of the Goldsmiths’ Company died in 1349.
14

The great Abbey of Westminster did not escape. Simon de Bircheston, its truculent Abbot, who had been prosecuted for assaulting a royal stonemason some twenty years before, took refuge in his country home at Hampstead. But in spite of his precaution he was an early victim
15
and twenty-seven monks accompanied him to the grave. A large black slab in the southern cloister of the Abbey probably commemorates their death and may even cover their remains.
16
By May, Simon Langham, who had been appointed a prior only a month before, was the only monk left deemed fit to administer the monastery.

The many deaths in the countryside and the natural
reluctance
of the carters to venture into the inferno of London meant
that the usual supplies of food often failed to arrive. The Black Death prevented anything near a famine developing by rapidly and substantially reducing the demand but it was still often difficult for a citizen of London to know where to turn for his next loaf of bread. Piers Plowman noted:

Many Londoners went out into the adjoining countryside in search of food and so spread the plague among those who had sacrificed a profitable market in the hope of escaping it.

*

London survived. Probably, indeed, it recovered as quickly as any city in England. In 1377 the population of the city itself seems only to have been about thirty-five thousand but this was after further attacks of plague and takes no account of
population
growth in the immediate vicinity.
17
The fact that all the chancery and exchequer work continued to be done in London was a powerful magnet and there was no city in which the villein, anxious to escape the attentions of a vengeful lord, could bury himself with greater confidence. Dr Creighton probably goes too far when he says that we may be sure ‘from all
subsequent
experience; that the gaps left by the plague were filled up by influx from the provinces and from abroad in the course of two or three years’,
18
but it is likely that, even in so short a period, much of the lost ground was made up.

And yet the mark left by the Black Death was not to be seen only in the new cemeteries. The sharp fall in moral standards which was noticed in so many parts of Europe in the years after the Black Death was nowhere more striking than in London. Such accusations of degeneracy recur throughout the ages – this time they may have had slightly greater justification than usual. Knighton reported that criminals flocked into the city
19
and John of Reading told of the great increase in crime, in particular crimes of sacrilege.
20
From this period, the city began to enjoy a doubtful reputation in the eyes of other Englishmen –
a city of wealth but also wickedness; of opportunity, but
opportunities
to earn damnation as well as fortune. Walsingham
denounced
the Londoners roundly: ‘They were of all people the most proud, arrogant and greedy, disbelieving in God,
disbelieving
in ancient custom.’ Those who live in great cities are
traditionally
believed to be harder, more sophisticated and more rapacious than their country cousins but the Londoner certainly acquired his reputation the hard way and probably went a long way to deserving it. Any city which suffers as London
suffered
and rebounds rapidly to even greater prosperity can be
excused
a certain fall from grace during the years of its recovery.

S
USSEX
and Kent were assailed from every side as the Black Death moved across from the West, spread south from London and made its independent entry at half a dozen Channel ports. In Sussex the absence of episcopal registers makes any
generalization
difficult. A few details, selected more or less at random, show that the county did not escape more lightly than its
neighbours
. Only five brethren survived out of a total strength of thirteen at the Priory of Michelham.
1
The Abbot of Battle had secured permission to fortify his Abbey only ten years before, but no moat or ramparts could save him from the plague which carried him off with more than half his monks.
2
At Appledram, almost in Hampshire, the number of customary reapers was
reduced
from two hundred and thirty-four to one hundred and sixty-eight, a drop of 28 per cent; at Warding, right at the other end of the county, twelve freemen and villeins died in March 1349, and a further sixty had perished by October, twenty-five leaving no direct heir.
3

For the Black Death in Kent there has fortunately survived the account of William of Dene, a monk of Rochester, one of the few English chroniclers who handles the events of the day with anything like the impressionistic brio of his continental counterparts.
4

‘In this year,’ he recorded,

‘To our great grief,’ went on the monk,

The chronicler probably had his facts right so far as the details of the Bishop’s establishment were concerned but his
qualifications
are less impressive as an observer of the agricultural scene in Kent or, still more, ‘the whole realm’. The reference to ‘more than a third of the land’ lying idle had as little statistical
significance
as similar statements that half or three-quarters of the population were dead. It was certainly exaggerated; but quite as certainly it was a tribute to the very real dislocation which had afflicted the farming lands of Kent and the forlorn and unkempt air which they must often have presented.

The priory and convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, suffered little in the epidemic, only four inmates dying. Thorold Rogers attributes this to the good water supply and efficient drainage system which had been installed by an earlier prior. It is hard to accept any very direct relationship between bubonic plague and pure drinking water,
5
but the fact that the establishment was clean and free from rats would certainly have helped to keep
infection at bay. It is surprising that the flow of pilgrims to
Canterbury
hardly slackened even when the plague was at its worst.
6
It might have been supposed that the mortality among putative pilgrims and the obvious perils of travel in time of pestilence would have been enough to scare off even the most devout.
Presumably
those who had already survived an outbreak wished to give thanks for their deliverance while those who were yet to experience one hoped to accumulate merit in advance. In neither case was the result likely to be wholly satisfactory. No doubt their determination was welcome in Canterbury, since every visitor was a source of income, but as each wave of arrivals brought in fresh infection even the most avaricious of citizens must have asked himself whether the blessing was an unmixed one.

Somehow the old and decrepit Bishop Haymo of Rochester managed to survive while all his retinue perished around him. Reference has already been made to the long-established belief that the Black Death struck down the strong in the prime of their life and spared the children and the aged.
7
In this, as in all things, it would have been like the Bishop to seek to conform to
tradition
. But such evidence as exists does not support the theory. Analysing five hundred and five inquisitions post-mortem, Professor Russell found that by far the heaviest mortality, 46 per cent, occurred in one of the most senior age-groups, those
between
fifty-six and sixty.
8
The oldest age group of all, those above sixty, suffered next most badly, with mortality of almost 40 per cent. It is, of course, true that a higher proportion of this group would anyhow be likely to die within any given period even without the Black Death to help them on their way. But the
incidence
of mortality is still strikingly higher than among those in the prime of their life: only 20 per cent for those between twenty-one and twenty-five; 19 per cent for the twenty-six to thirties; and 28 per cent for the thirty to thirty-fives. Tradition does seem to be right, however, in maintaining that the children were spared. Only 7 per cent died of those between six and ten and 15 per cent between eleven and fifteen.

By these rules the Bishop was fortunate to have outlived his priests and outstandingly lucky to have survived his pages. After
such hazards one might think that he had earned a tranquil old age. But new troubles beset him. Even when the worst of the plague was over he found that his clergy hesitated to do their duty in their parishes; preferring either to remain prudently at home or to abandon their flock to their fate and retreat to what they hoped might prove a safer area. The phenomenon was by no means peculiar to Kent but it seems to have been particularly remarked on there. Stephen Birchington of Canterbury also
referred
to the fact that ‘… parish churches remained altogether unserved, and beneficed parsons turned away from the care of their benefices for fear of death …’
9

Dene of Rochester in his turn commented on the decadence which had overtaken the country under the stress of the Black Death. His strictures on workmen possessed by the spirit of
revolt
have already been noted but worse was to follow: ‘The
entire
population, or the greater part of it, has become even more depraved, more prone to every kind of vice, more ready to indulge in evil and sinfulness, without a thought of death, or of the plague which is just over, or even of their own salvation … So, day by day, the peril in which the souls of clergy as well as people are to be found has grown more dangerous …’

One sees Dene of Rochester as a crabbed, reactionary figure, passed over for promotion, embittered, filled with the darkest doubts about the younger generation. But there are too many similar reports to leave room for doubt that he had grounds for his grumblings.

*

There is not much to delay one in the other counties of the south. In Hertfordshire, March and April were the worst months. But many cases occurred even when the summer was over and there seems to have been a second, milder outbreak in the course of 1350. In certain manors, where the ravages of the plague had been particularly ferocious, it became the custom to head future schedules of expenditure with ‘an enumeration of the lives which were lost and the tenancies which were vacated after the great death of 1348.’
10
The archdeaconry, an area considerably larger than that of the county, does not seem to have suffered
particularly
badly. In the low-lying fen district, St Ives lost only 23
per cent, Holland 24 per cent and Peterborough 27 per cent of the beneficed clergy.
11
Marshes and fens, perhaps because of their association with mosquitoes, are generally linked in the popular mind with fever and disease. In the case of the Black Death they belied their reputation. One possible explanation is that they were often remote from the sea and the main lines of
communications
and therefore to some extent sheltered from infection. Another is that such damp and sparsely inhabited areas held little appeal for the wandering rat. But the impact of the plague was too spasmodic to allow even exceptions to the general rule to be defined exactly and certain areas of fen country suffered as badly as any in the country.

To quote statistics which show that Hertfordshire suffered less severely than other counties is not to detract from the agonies which the inhabitants endured: to the victims it mattered
remarkably
little whether the mortality was 37 per cent or a mere 34 per cent, the risk and the pain of death seemed much the same. A scrawl on the wall of the church of St Mary, Ash well, somehow catches the black horror of the plague. ‘Wretched, terrible, destructive year …’ the unknown scratched in the stone
sometime
in 1350, ‘… the remnants of the people alone remain …’
12
There are plenty of examples in the county of almost complete disaster. At Standon, six miles north of Ware, thirty-two
customary
tenants were supposed to mow the lord’s hay. In 1349 no men went to mow, went to mow a meadow and the hay was left to rot in the fields.

But where an analysis has been made of a group of manors big enough to provide a reasonable sample, one is once again struck with the amazing speed of the countryside’s recovery. Dr Levett, whose individual contribution to the history of the Black Death, though in some respects now seen to be too
extreme
in its conclusions, has done so much to bring sanity and cool scientific reasoning into a sphere peculiarly rich in
ill-supported
fantasy, has studied,
inter
alia,
the manors of the great abbey of St Albans.
13
The plague, it is true, was at its worst on these manors in April and May, which was the least dangerous period from the point of view of the rural economy. The corn crops could safely be left to take care of themselves until what
was left of the population had time to attend to them, and
weeding
and ploughing dispensed with for one year without serious consequences. But, granted this minor stroke of luck, a serious setback to the manors’ economy might have been expected. So indeed there was, but as Dr Levett puts it:

Once the worst of the shock was over, energy, discipline and intelligent administration quickly got the wheels of agriculture turning once again. The St Albans’ manors were well run and prosperous, on good farming land and with the power and wealth of the Abbey to sustain them. They had little difficulty in luring away labour from other, less fortunate estates. It would be a great mistake to assume that what was true of them was true of the majority of English manors but, equally, they were by no means unique.

The Abbey itself suffered rather worse than its manors.
14
Michael of Mentmore, one of the greatest of its Abbots, was struck down after thirteen years in office on 2 April 1349:

The neighbouring archdeaconry of Bedford lost 38.6 per cent
of its beneficed clergy.
16
At Millbrook, to the south of the town of Bedford, the lord of the manor Peter de St Croix was among those who died. At the inquisition it was said that all the
bondmen
and cottars were dead and, a few months later, his son and heir Robert followed his father.
17
With incidents such as this a commonplace it is not surprising that Bedford, whose main function was to serve as a centre for the agricultural lands around it, lost drastically in prosperity. Certainly the general decline of the English rural economy began long before 1350 and would probably have continued even if there had been no epidemic but, in the case of Bedford at least, the County History believes the plague to have been the decisive factor. It took the town a hundred and fifty years to recover its former strength.