The Black Death in London (16 page)

Table 1. Husting will-makers whose dates of death are known. Bold entries indicate exact dates of death; others are dates by which we know the individual had died.

There are no documents which establish the day-to-day experiences of Londoners as the plague took hold. How the city coped is visible only in its administrative accounts, contained in the Letter Books and court proceedings. It is clear that the administrative structures of the city remained functioning throughout the entire outbreak, and that the mayor, aldermen and other officials continued to conduct business as required. A summary analysis (see
Table 2
) of the evidence indicates that on average, officials met in some capacity almost five times each month, with a barely perceptible reduction in frequency in January and February 1349. Administrative work focused on the enrolment of wills and deeds relating to property but also covered such matters as guardianship, the swearing-in of officials and guild representatives, and, from July 1349, the prosecution of cases arising from the Ordinance of Labourers. The single longest break in the year was for twenty-five days from late March to late April which, while it coincided with the highest rate of will-making, was probably more to do with the normal break in sessions for Pleas than the effects of the pestilence.

Table 2. Summary of the frequency of civic administrative business recorded during the first outbreak. (Source: CLB, CAN, CPMR, CHW, Husting Deeds). It is not always clear how many aldermen and other officials attended the meetings, but each one mentioned above had at least two officials in attendance.

The (almost) regular weekly sessions for Common Pleas and Pleas of Land dealt with the enrolment of all the deeds and wills in the Husting court; the number of enrolments and their purpose provide a snapshot of the changing nature of the business from month to month (see Fig. 7).
²⁷⁹

This summary shows the proportions and numbers of enrolments relating to wills, property deeds enrolled specifically by executors of those who had died, and other enrolments concerning property. Several points are clear. First, the increasing number of wills being enrolled as a result of the plague is very obvious (April, August and September were traditionally free of sessions), but there is no consequent reduction in enrolling other deeds. It must be assumed that the sessions sat for longer to conduct the business. Second, the enrolments of deeds (as opposed to wills), and particularly those not apparently associated with the execution of bequests, demonstrate that property transfer continued unabated during the plague. Third, executors came in increased numbers in July and October 1349, a point which supports a general belief that the plague had slowed by July.

National judicial apparatus also had a base close to London. The Court of the Common Pleas (the Common Bench) was based at Westminster Hall and the sessions generated a number of rolls during the year.
²⁸⁰
These were ordered in four terms (Hilary, Easter, Trinity and Michaelmas), in which sessions were conducted, and so the crude level of business of the courts can be established by examining the trends in the number of folios for each term in each year. The folios and the numbers for 1346–53 are set out in Fig. 8. Even allowing for the immediate disruptions to die off in 1349 and 1350, the number of folios entered in the rolls in 1351 was 43 per cent of the average for the three pre-plague years, and had returned to only about 60 per cent of that average by the mid-1350s. While it is clear that a range of factors must have influenced the number of cases being brought before the Bench (and each year after 1349 the numbers are gradually rising), and while it must be remembered that the court dealt with cases from all around the country and not just London, the strong impression is that there were simply far fewer plaintiffs or defendants than there had been before. And so civic and national administration carried on: the city was by no means paralysed.

Burying the Dead

As with the living, no specific description exists of the range of people who died or the manner in which London managed the burial of its dead, but we do have tangible archaeological evidence from which to draw. For the Pardon churchyard and Newchurchehawe cemeteries this is currently limited to traces of burials: in the former, a group of five undated and disturbed burials near Great Sutton Street, and in the latter, a single burial of probable fourteenth-century date within Charterhouse Square, and a possible medieval burial on Glasshouse Yard.
²⁸¹
However, for the east cemetery of the Holy Trinity we have much better evidence. In 1986 a major excavation conducted by the Museum of London revealed a very significant portion of the East Smithfield cemetery founded by those unknown ‘substantial men’ of the city in January or February 1349. The excavation revealed no fewer than 787 burials that could be directly linked to the 1349 outbreak, along with a number of later burials, some of which were related to Edward’s abbey and some of which, it will be argued, were related to later outbreaks of pestilence in the fourteenth century. It remains, worldwide, the only major excavation of an emergency cemetery which was set up during this first (and greatest) outbreak. It provides our only window on the city’s numerous poor, those largely invisible in the story set out in
Chapter 2
, and sheds important light on the manner in which London’s emergency cemeteries were conceived and operated.

The cemetery of the Holy Trinity lay immediately east of the city wall adjacent to the Tower of London. It was bounded on the north by Hog Street (Hoggestrete), now Royal Mint Street, and on the south by East Smithfield. Two specific areas were set out in this cemetery for burial (see Fig. 4). The western area was rectangular and measured 76m by about 35m. At a distance of some 40m to the east, a second plot consisted of a long, narrow area measuring at least 125m by 12m. The third component of the cemetery was its chapel, a building now known to have been constructed as early as April 1349. A small fragment of a chalk wall foundation was located south of the western burial plot; its later association with the earliest cloister of the Cistercian abbey of St Mary Graces makes it highly likely that this was part of that chapel, reused as the first, temporary abbey chapel. If so, the cemetery chapel stood in the south-west corner of the cemetery, about 20m south of the western burial plot and 45m west of the eastern plot. In total, then, the cemetery as used comprised an area about 132m by 82m (approximately 2⅔ acres). This sits adequately within the larger footprint defined in the Cartulary of Holy Trinity priory, which had an area of about 170 m by 107m. The cemetery was surrounded by an earthen wall, of which no archaeological trace was found, and was provided with a gatehouse at some point before 1359,
²⁸²
which opened westward on to Tower Hill itself.

The archaeological evidence that this cemetery provides is very rich. It allows us to consider three key issues in some detail. Firstly, the state of the corpses (whether there was evidence for clothing or a wooden coffin, for example) imparts considerable information about how families and communities prepared the victims for burial before transport to the cemetery. Second, the disposition and character of the graves and mass trenches tell us how the cemetery itself may have been managed. Third, the frequency of burial, and the demographic information revealed through the study of the skeletons themselves, provides us with a novel means of looking at the kinds of people who became victims, and a way of considering the rate at which they died.

The most helpful place to begin the archaeological enquiry is with some general facts and figures about the nature of the people buried. Altogether, the skeletons of 787 men, women and children were excavated from the first, 1349, phase of the cemetery. Of 636 of these, some aspect of the age, sex, or both, could be determined by osteoarchaeological inspection.
²⁸³
In the remainder of cases, the bone did not survive sufficiently well for study or identification, having been degraded by industrial waste leached from the later Royal Mint works.

Almost 34 per cent (216) of those buried there died before they had reached maturity (before the age of around 16), and we cannot tell their sex from the bones. Of these, a third were infants (below 5 years) and two-thirds children or teenagers. Of the 420 adults, ninety-seven could only be described as adult. The remaining 323 could be grouped into those whose sex we can determine, whose age we can determine, or both. A total of 290 adults were sufficiently well preserved to allow us to establish their sex: 65 per cent were male and 35 per cent female (a ratio of 1.86:1). Of 298 skeletons whose age could be estimated, 22 per cent were young adults (under 26 years); 71 per cent were mature (up to 45 years); and just 7 per cent were considered elderly. Age and sex could be estimated for a group of 268 adults (see
Table 3a
). If this pattern could be extrapolated for all 420 adult skeletons, and combined with the evidence we have for the 216 infants, children and teenagers, we might attempt a generalised guess at the original age and sex distribution of those buried in the cemetery (see
Table 3b
).