The Black Death in London (19 page)

– Those who made their wills during the epidemic months and whose wills were enrolled after its conclusion (n = 117)

The percentage of people who made their wills during the plague and did not survive it is 70.2 per cent. The percentage of people who made their wills prior to the appearance of the plague but who also did not survive was similar at 68.8 per cent. In other words, there is no apparent surfeit of ‘panic’ wills: the great majority of those who made wills did so because there was a real need to. Therefore, the rate of increase in the number of wills being made has a direct relationship with the mortality rate.

The number of wills enrolled (572) between 1327 and 1347, perhaps unsurprisingly, is about the same as the number made (587), an average of twenty-seven wills each year. The number enrolled during the nine months of the plague was 307, but we must recall that there is strong evidence for a considerable lag between death and probate dates, and that the court itself was closed during August and September; most of the forty-five wills enrolled in October and November 1349 should, therefore, also be attributed to the main period of the plague. Assuming conservatively that 340 wills were enrolled during the nine-month period, the crude death rate was over sixteen times its annual average. A pre-industrial death rate of about 3.5 per cent per annum for adult males over 20 has been suggested by historical demographers,
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so we can assume that this percentage of the will-makers would have died anyway during this period, and a figure of 60,000 for the population of London has been argued. Assuming that children of 14 years or less made up 40 per cent of the population (24,000), and that men and women were roughly equal in numbers, then of 18,000 men, 630 would have died per annum. If this percentage was similar for women and children, about 2,100 deaths would have occurred in a normal year. A crude death rate of over sixteen times greater than the norm would indicate a figure of 33,600 dead, or about 56 per cent of the population.

Another way into the problem lies through prosopographical analysis of a group of people whom we know were alive immediately prior to the plague, and whose fates and fortunes can be charted through the documentary evidence beyond the end of the epidemic. Barbara Megson has done just this for a group of 359 wealthy London citizens who were listed for taxation purposes in 1346, and who were alive in 1348 as the plague approached.
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Her study reveals that some 29 per cent of these richer residents definitely died during the pestilence, and that 38 per cent definitely survived. What is of most interest here is the missing 33 per cent – those who, despite having considerable wealth, simply vanish from the records during the plague and do not, as far as Megson can tell, pick up their businesses and interests once the pestilence had receded. While the simple loss of records is an obvious possibility, the range of documents in which wealthy people might have been named (as witnesses to court cases or transactions, as plaintiffs or defendants in litigation, through wills or receipts of bequests, and so on) is considerable, and so complete disappearance suggests at the least permanent displacement or, more likely, death. If just one-third of the missing group did also die in the epidemic, then the overall implied mortality would be about 40 per cent for the population at large, or about 32,000 dead. If all of the missing perished, then that figure rises to 67 per cent, a level equal to the crude calculation resulting from the rate of will enrolment.

Against another group subject to a similar analysis, a very high death rate may be indicated. Of 118 apprentices enrolled in the Goldsmiths’ Company between 1342 and 1346, 106, a frightening 90 per cent, had disappeared from the company records by 1350, many undoubtedly victims of the Black Death.
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Such a figure requires further examination and research. If substantiated by other apprenticeship records, it would provide a reasonable basis to conclude that the plague was more deadly to the young than to the old.

A further approach is to look at the mortality of the clergy in London. Despite the problems caused by the absence of Bishop Ralph de Stratford’s register for the period, there is enough evidence from alternative sources to build a partial picture of this outbreak and indeed subsequent ones (see
Chapter 4
).
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Of 111 city churches studied (including St Leonard Shoreditch just beyond the bars), the outcome for sixteen (14.4 per cent) incumbents who were alive at the outbreak are certain. Of this small sample, nine (56.3 per cent) died during the outbreak and seven (43.7 per cent) survived. Some churches lost their incumbents more than once, including St James Garlickehythe and St Mary Woolnoth. A further twenty-one churches display a suspiciously timed change of incumbent in the period 1348–50, which may also have been due to deaths, while at another two the incumbents probably survived. If we were to include these, the death rate for city clergy would rise to 73 per cent. For seventy-two churches we simply do not know who the incumbent was at this particular time. The evidence from this small sample leans towards a mortality rate of above 55 per cent.

Further sources for estimating the death toll is contained in the evidence from the chroniclers and from other contemporary documents. In this regard, Robert of Avesbury’s account of the dead being buried in Walter de Mauny’s cemetery near West Smithfield is useful. If it is anything more than a proxy for ‘a large number’, his suggestion of around 200 per day between 2 February and 12 April 1349 implies about 14,000 may have been buried there. In this same period, 192 wills were made. Using the distribution of these wills across the period to establish a ratio, as a means of slanting this average, this figure would produce about 130 burials daily in February, about 210 burials in March, and about 260 burials per day in April. Extrapolating beyond Avesbury’s timescale, using this ratio, the number of burials would have dropped to 130 per day in May, 20 in June and below 15 per day in July. These figures would suggest a total of just under 23,000 burials in this cemetery alone. To this needs to be added the victims buried in December and January in the bishop’s Pardon churchyard, up to 2,400 buried in the East Smithfield cemetery from February onwards, and all the victims buried in the dozens of parish and monastic cemeteries across the city. A reasonable estimate might be 35,000 dead – about 58 per cent of a population of 60,000. Of course, we have no idea how many non-residents had fled from the surrounding counties towards London (and indeed vice versa), or how many traders and visitors were trapped and engulfed by the disaster.

For the West Smithfield cemetery there is correspondence between de Mauny himself and the Pope suggesting a very large death toll. In early 1352, de Mauny petitioned the Pope, signifying that:

he, during the epidemic in England, dedicated a place near London for a cemetery of poor strangers
(peregrinorum
) and others in which sixty thousand bodies are buried, and built there a chapel with the licence of the ordinary. He prays for an indulgence of a year and forty days to those who visit the said place on the feasts of Whitsunday, Corpus Christi, and SS Mary Magdalene and Margaret, or who give something to the support of the said chapel and the poor who flock there.

This petition is evidently a replacement for an even earlier one, perhaps of 1351, which appears to have been lost in transit. The papal reply granted on 14 March 1352 gave him licence to endow the chapel and to erect a college of twelve or more chaplains, according to the ordination of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, and granted the indulgence as requested.
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However, this letter may also have gone astray on its way back to de Mauny, for the Pope issued a second licence on 12 August 1352, referring in it back to the same huge figure stated by de Mauny, offering ‘relaxation … of one year and forty days of enjoined penance to penitents who visit the chapel of the cemetery founded by Walter near London in which are buried more than sixty thousand bodies of those who died of the epidemic – and who give alms for the same’.
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The same papal writings were quoted in the early sixteenth century in the Register of the Charterhouse, where the whole basis for the foundation of the cemetery, and after it the monastery, was set out; a figure on a similar scale was quoted by John Stow nearly 250 years after the event, which he read from a stone cross which once stood in the churchyard:

Anno Domini 1349. Regnante magna pestilentia consecratum huit hoc coemiterium in quo et infra septa presentis monasterii sepulta fuerunt mortuorum corpora plusquam quinquaginta millia, praeter alia multa abhinc usque presens quorum animabus proprietur deus Amen.
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This translates as: ‘The year 1349. A great pestilence reigning, this cemetery was consecrated in which, and within the bounds of the present monastery, were buried more than 50,000 bodies of the dead, as well as many others since then to the present day.’ The reference to the monastery (Charterhouse) would date the now-lost cross to at least 1372. A later numerical reference to the dead in this cemetery dates to 1384. A Bull of Urban VI was issued, addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, on a petition of Simon, Bishop of London, and Walter de Mauny (who had by this date died). It signalled that the cemetery, in which ‘twenty thousand and more dead are buried, in which de Mauny built a chapel, in which certain chaplains were instituted, be transferred to monks of Carthusian order’.
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While suggesting a more modest figure than de Mauny’s own, it still implies a very large cemetery indeed.

What then are we to make of these varying accounts? First, Avesbury has shown himself to be a fairly reliable source on the date of the outbreak in London, and we should therefore not dismiss his claims for burial rates lightly. Second, the issue of de Mauny’s claim must be taken still more seriously. De Mauny was a superlative organiser, a seasoned veteran of the French campaigns and, most importantly, someone who had no need of an exaggeration to attract papal support for a new religious foundation. The specification of the cemetery for the use of
peregrinorum
could lie at the heart of this – if the city population was sufficiently bloated by refugees from the surrounding counties, we could entertain such carnage without direct reference to static population estimates for residents alone. Third, we nonetheless acknowledge that while the figures are confused, subject to some change across the later decades of the fourteenth century, they were honoured in an unusual and permanent manner suggesting something quite unique. So fourth, while the figures of 50,000 or 60,000 (equal to up to 100 per cent of our suggested resident population) in one cemetery appears entirely implausible, and while such ‘rounded’ numbers are often used as a cipher for ‘a very large number’ in medieval texts, the possibility must be entertained that many thousands, perhaps over 20,000, buried victims still lie somewhere underneath the green spaces of Charterhouse Square and the Charterhouse itself. This is a figure far in excess of previous estimates.
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Remarkably, Londoners themselves only ever mention the impact of the plague on the city once in surviving documents. In April 1357, seven years after the event, they petitioned the king for relief from taxation in recognition of the huge sums that the city had lent him to fund his military campaigns in Scotland and France. In the petition they stated that, ‘whereas by reason of the death of the richer inhabitants of the City at the time of the pestilence, and their property having fallen into the hand of Holy Church, the City had become impoverished and more than one-third of it empty’.
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While it is obvious that it would have benefited the civic authorities to enhance any claims of poverty, such a claim as this could quite easily have been checked or challenged – the king’s systems for taxation had proved effective at determining who could afford levies such as that of 1346, and the effects of abandonment should have been quite visible – but it was not. If more than one-third of the city was empty in 1357, despite the opportunities provided by seven years of recovery and immigration, the scale of the depopulation could only have been greater. Some evidence of this may exist. Of the ten tenements mentioned as paying for the maintenance of the Great Conduit in Cheapside, when the two-yearly accounts were delivered in November 1350, three were specifically described as empty, and four of the remainder paid rent during 1348–9 only. Just three were accounted as having returned a rent in the second year (from October 1349 to October 1350).
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If more than a third of the city property was indeed empty, the death toll implied is at least equal as a percentage, but probably very much higher, since it would not account for families in other tenements who were reduced but not eradicated by the plague. The smaller villages outside the city were equally badly affected. In the manor and village of Kingsbury, a few miles north-west of the city, there were twelve holdings in the early fourteenth century. In 1350 the manor court learned of the deaths of thirteen people ‘at the time of the pestilence’; the holdings were divided among the few survivors, leaving the excess properties empty.
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