The Black Death (42 page)

Finally there are the plague tractates left by the doctors and savants of the period. Almost all those listed below were analysed by Anna Campbell in her invaluable study
The
Black
Death
and
Men
of
Learning.

It was towards the end of 1969, in the same year that Philip Ziegler’s
The
Black
Death
was first published, that the influential French journal
Annales:
Economies
Sociétés
Civilisations
included a substantial section on ‘Maladies et Mort’, introduced by a survey article by Jean-Noël Biraben and Jacques Le Goff on ‘La Peste dans le Haut Moyen Age’ (pp.1484–1510). And there then followed a similar concentration on
death-related
themes in the
Revue
du
Nord
for 1983, where Walter Prevenier and other Low Countries specialists – starting with Prevenier’s own paper on ‘La démographie des villes du comté de Flandre aux xiii
^e
et xiv
^e
siècles’ (pp.255–75) – discussed the comparable experience of the North-West. In the interval, Dr Biraben had presented what is still the most extended historical analysis of the West European plague in his
Les
hommes
et
la
peste
en
France
et
dans
les
pays
européens
et
mediterranéens
(Paris, 1976), and Michael Dols’s valuable study of
The
Black
Death
in
the
Middle
East
(Princeton, 1977) had been published. More recently, Ole Jorgen Benedictow’s book on
Plague
in
the
Late
Medieval
Nordic
Countries
(Oslo, 1993) has covered the same ground for Iceland, Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Each of these books contains a comprehensive bibliography of the literature on plague in many languages. What follows is a bibliographical essay on the post-1969 English-language works which may be of interest to new readers of Ziegler’s classic.

The argument about the nature and origins of bubonic plague continues. There have been revisionary books by J. F. D. Shrewsbury,
A
History
of
the
Bubonic
Plague
in
the
British
Isles
(Cambridge, 1970) and Graham Twigg,
The
Black
Death:
a
biological
reappraisal
(London, 1984). And almost everybody now agrees that plague was not the only – nor even (on many occasions) the major – killer in the late-medieval and early-modern West. Robert S. Gottfried reviewed other infections but still gave pride-of-place to plague in his
Epidemic
Disease
in
Fifteenth-Century
England,
The
medical
response
and
the
demographic
consequences
(Leicester, 1978), then following that work with a general book on
The
Black
Death.
Natural
and
human
disaster
in
medieval
Europe
(London, 1983). But smallpox, influenza and typhus earn a more prominent place in Ann G. Carmichael’s
Plague
and
the
Poor
in
Renaissance
Florence
(Cambridge, 1986), as they do again, with particular emphasis on malaria, in Mary J. Dobson’s
Contours
of
Death
and
Disease
in
Early
Modern
England
(Cambridge, 1997). For that later period, see also Paul Slack’s
The
Impact
of
Plague
in
Tudor
and
Stuart
England
(London, 1985), and the collected essays in
The
Plague
Reconsidered.
A
new
look
at
its
origins
and
effects
in
16
th
and
17
th
century
England,
ed. Paul Slack (Local Population Studies supplement, 1977),
and
in
Health,
Medicine
and
Mortality
in
the
Sixteenth
Century,
ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge, 1979). Other collections of essays include
The
Black
Death.
The
impact
of
the
fourteenth-century
plague,
ed. D. Williman (Binghamton, 1982), and
Life
and
Death
in
Fifteenth-Century
Florence,
eds. Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt and Rona Goffen (Durham N. C., 1989). And contemporary descriptions of the plague, many in translation for the first time, have recently been collected by Rosemary Horrox,
The
Black
Death
(Manchester, 1994), in a useful volume of sources.

The sufferings of local populations and how they lived with pestilence are studied by Richard Gyug, ‘The effects and extent of the Black Death of 1348: new evidence for clerical mortality in Barcelona’,
Medieval
Studies,
45 (1983), pp.385–98, Richard Lomas, ‘The Black Death in County Durham’,
Journal
of
Medieval
History,
15 (1989), pp. 127–40, R. A. Davies, ‘The effect of the Black Death on the parish priests of the medieval diocese of Coventry and Lichfield’,
Historical
Research,
62 (1989), pp.85–90, Ray Lock, ‘The Black Death in Walsham-le-Willows’,
Proceedings
of
the
Suffolk
Institute
of
Archaeology
and
History,
37 (1992), pp.316–37, Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Accommodating plague in medieval Marseille’,
Continuity
and
Change,
11 (1996), pp.11–41, and William J. Dohar,
The
Black
Death
and
Pastoral
Leadership.
The
diocese
of
Hereford
in
the
fourteenth
century
(Philadelphia, 1995). As for the medical profession, its first response to the plague is the subject of John Henderson’s ‘Epidemics in Renaissance Florence: medical theory and government response’ in
Maladies
et
sociét
é
(xiie
–
xviie
siècles),
eds. N. Bulst and R. Delort (Paris, 1989), pp. 165–86, and of the same author’s ‘The Black Death in Florence: medical and communal responses’, in
Death
in
Towns.
Urban
responses
to
the
dying
and
the
dead,
100–1600, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, 1992), pp. 136–50. John Henderson’s major book on
Piety
and
Charity
in
Late
Medieval
Florence
(Oxford, 1994) includes a chapter on
‘Charity, the Poor, and the Aftermath of the Black Death, 1348–1400’ (pp.297–353). For other Tuscan studies, see David Herlihy’s ‘Deaths, marriages, births, and the Tuscan economy (
c.
1300–1550)’, in
Population
Patterns
in
the
Past,
ed. Ronald Demos Lee (New York, 1977), pp.135–64, and the two books by Samuel K. Cohn on
Death
and
Property
in
Siena,
1205–1800.
Strategies
for
the
afterlife
(Baltimore, 1988) and on
The
Cult
of
Remembrance
and
the
Black
Death.
Six
Renaissance
cities
in
Central
Italy
(Baltimore, 1992).

Large claims are now being made for the Black Death’s primacy in world affairs, as in William H. McNeill’s
Plagues
and
People
(Oxford, 1977) and William M. Bowsky’s valuable compendium,
The
Black
Death.
A
turning
point
in
history?
(New York, 1971). Richard C. Palmer makes a similar claim for
English
Law
in
the
Age
of
the
Black
Death,
1348–1381 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993), whereas Mark Ormrod in ‘The English government and the Black Death of 1349–79’, in
England
in
the
Fourteenth
Century,
ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1986), pp.175–88, is keener to stress how little changed. That older view of institutional continuity still has much to recommend it. And a useful counter to Palmer’s book is Edward Powell’s more temperate
Kingship,
Law,
and
Society.
Criminal
justice
in
the
reign
of
Henry
V
(Oxford, 1989). However, in social history generally, Samuel K. Cohn’s recent edition of the late David Herlihy’s unpublished essays on
The
Black
Death
and
the
Transformation
of
the
West
(Cambridge Mass., 1997) is a good demonstration of how far Black Death studies have moved on. For even Herlihy, the doyen of late-medieval urban demography, had become convinced that there was insufficient evidence of a population down-turn before the Black Death to justify the belief of many historians of his own generation – influencing Philip Zieger among others – that plague was less the cause than an accelerator of social change.

Those changes had been the subject of a long-running debate in the journal
Past
&
Present,
which generated such interest that it was re-issued in book form as
The
Brenner
Debate.
Agrarian
Class
structure
and
economic
development
in
pre-industrial
Europe,
eds. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985). The debate has since been continued in S. R. Epstein’s ‘Cities, regions, and the late medieval crisis: Sicily and Tuscany compared’,
Past
&
Present
, 130 (1991). pp.3–50. And one of its concerns has always been to establish the chronology of the crisis. Guy Bois, author of
The
Crisis
of
Feudalism.
Economy
and
society
in
Eastern
Normandy
c.
1300–1550 (Paris, 1976; Cambridge, 1984) and a contributor to the original debate, had taken the view that it was the Great Famine of 1315–17 which was the turning-point. And following Ian Kershaw’s examination of that crisis in ‘The Great Famine and agrarian crisis in England 1315–22’,
Past
&
Presently
, 59 (1973), pp.3–50, a levelling-off of Europe’s population in (or before) those years had seemed established. Yet the setback, it now appears, was only temporary. In
Before
the
Black
Death,
Studies
in
the
‘crisis’
of
the
early
fourteenth
century,
ed. Bruce M. S. Campbell (Manchester, 1991), Barbara Harvey’s answer to the question ‘Was there actually a crisis?’ was unequivocal. The reverses of the half-century before the Black Death were not a turning-point, she concluded firmly, but ‘a mid-term crisis’. In reality, it was ‘the advent of plague, an exogenous factor, that transformed the economic life of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, and the changes which actually occurred after that event could not have predicted in the first half of the century’ (p.24).

It had been Bruce Campbell’s fine study of the peasant land market in Coltishall (‘Population pressure, inheritance and the land market in a fourteenth-century peasant community’, in
Land,
Kinship
and
Life-Cycle,
ed. R. M. Smith [Cambridge, 1984], pp.87–134) that had caused David Herlihy to change his mind. Campbell was clear that the crisis in Norfolk’s Coltishall was the result ‘not of economic but of biological factors’. And much of the recent work on the socio-economic history of late-medieval England has served to reinforce that conclusion. For summaries of that work, see
The
Black
Death
in
England,
eds. Mark Ormrod and Phillip Lindley (Stamford, 1996), and my own
King
Death,
The
Black
Death
and
its
aftermath
in
late-medieval
England
(London, 1996). In the specialist literature, Campbell and Bailey, Bridbury and Britnell, Dyer and Goldberg, Harvey and Hatcher, Mate, Pollard, Poos and Razi are the names to watch. Of these, A. R. Bridbury has always taken the view that there was less crisis than opportunity in post-plague England, his position hardly changing from the publication of his iconoclastic
Economic
Growth,
England
in
the
later
Middle
Ages
(London 1962) – cited in Ziegler’s bibliography – through ‘The Black Death’,
Economic
History
Review,
26 (1973), pp.577–92, to the collected papers of Bridbury’s
The
English
Economy
from
Bede
to
the
Reformation
(Woodbridge, 1992). Most historians, however, now see it differently. And there is growing agreement that it was the Black Death – more than famine, climatic deterioration, bullion shortages, or any other single cause – that first prepared the
way for the ‘long’ fifteenth century of economic recession and social change.

How the Recession ended is the subject of
The
Closing
of
the
Middle
Ages?
England,
1471–1529 (Oxford, 1997) by Richard Britnell, who has written usefully also on the earlier period in
Growth
and
Decline
in
Colchester,
1300–1525 (Cambridge, 1986), in
The
Commercialisation
of
English
Society
1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993), and in The Black Death in English towns’,
Urban
History,
21 (1994), pp. 195–210. And there are summaries of the views of Campbell and Dyer, the two most prolific authors on this period, in Bruce Campbell’s ‘A fair field once full of folk: agrarian change in an ere of population decline, 1348–1500’,
Agricultural
History
Review,
41 (1993), pp.60–70, and Christopher Dyer’s
Standards
of
Living
in
the
Later
Middle
Ages.
Social
change
in
England
c.
1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989). Valuable regional studies, each of much wider application, include Mark Bailey’s
A
Marginal
Economy?
East
Anglian
Breckland
in
the
later
Middle
Ages
(Cambridge, 1989); P. J. P. Goldberg’s ‘Mortality and economic change in the diocese of York, 1390–1514’, Northern History, 14 (1988), pp.38–55, and his
Women,
Work,
and
Life
Cycle
in
a
Medieval
Economy.
Women
in
York
and
Yorkshire
c.
1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992); Mavis Mate’s Agrarian economy after the Black Death: the manors of Canterbury Cathedral Priory, 1348–91’,
Economic
History
Review,
37 (1984), pp.341–54, and her Labour and labour services on the estates of Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the fourteenth century’,
Southern
History,
7 (1985), pp. 55–67; A. J. Pollard’s ‘The north-eastern economy and the agrarian crisis of 1438–1440’,
Northern
History,
25 (1989), pp.88–105; L. R. Poos’s ‘The rural population of Essex in the later Middle Ages’,
Economic
History
Review,
38 (1985), pp.515–30, and his
A
Rural
Society
after
the
Black
Death:
Essex
1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991); and the many West Midlands studies of Zvi Razi, beginning with
Life,
Marriage
and
Death
in
a
medieval
parish.
Economy,
society
and
demography
in
Halesowen
1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), and including his two imporant papers. ‘Family, land and the village community in later medieval England’.
Past
&
Present
, 93 (1981), pp.3–36. and ‘The myth of the immutable English family’,
ibid.
, 140 (1993), pp.3–44.