The Black Death in London (25 page)

Land transactions and construction by no means ceased during these worst weeks of the outbreak. For example, on 25 June Nicholas, prior of Holy Trinity priory, Aldgate, leased to Nicholas de Donmowe, a carpenter, a tenement with garden in the parish of St Olave by the Tower of London, with a condition that they rebuild the entire street frontage to one storey’s height within five years.
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Many transactions were indeed triggered by plague deaths. William de Preston, one of those who had left money to the common hall of the chaplains at St Paul’s, also bequeathed lands in Rotherhithe and Bermondsey to his two sisters, Sarah and Isabella. He died after 24 May, his will being enrolled on 16 June. Three weeks later, on 7 July, his sisters, both now widows, formally granted the land to Thomas Pykenham and Simon Lincoln, citizens, in front of a gathering of several witnesses.
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The importance attached to the role of the fraternities in celebrating funerals is clearly set out in the will of one John de Eneveld, penned on 1 April and proved in Husting on 20 July. Leaving a significant property to the fraternity of the Blessed Mary and All Saints in the church of All Hallows by the Wall, of which he was a member, he:

wills and ordains that the brethren and sisters of his fraternity … attend his funeral at the church of St Audoen, and that born bondmen go to his houses and tenements in Smethfeld after his funeral and there eat together, and by so eating take seisin [possession of the property] for the said fraternity, for which purpose he bequeaths a certain quantity of bread, corn, and malt.
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The virulence of the epidemic began to diminish as summer turned to autumn, and will-making dropped to single figures. Only seven wills were drawn up in August, nine in September and six in October, and of this total, four were made by people dwelling in Essex, Middlesex and Kent rather than London. After this period, matters returned to a ‘normal’ level: collectively the city was no longer in a panic about mortality. The closure of the Husting court for the harvest period of August and September delayed proceedings, and we see a spike in October of twenty-eight enrolments, followed by elevated but diminishing numbers in November (fourteen) and December (eleven).

Among other signs of a return to normal city business was the resumption of the recording of witness of land grants in the City Letter Books. The earliest which survives is one dated 21 September of a lease by Robert Alyen to John Blake, blader, of a brewery and shops in Thames Street in the parish of St Botolph Billingsgate.
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Enrolment of October’s total complement of twenty-eight wills included just four that had been drawn up before the plague erupted in this year, and only one will that had been written in October itself: the plague had begun to recede. Of the ‘plague’ wills, sixteen had been made during August and September, when the courts were normally suspended, leading to the large number. Curiously, despite this backlog of work, enrolment of all twenty-eight wills was delayed a further three weeks until the 25th of the month for a reason now unknown. One will proved that day was that of Johanna Hemenhale. She, like Alice de Northall (above), was a plague widow, surviving Edmund Hemenhale, the city sheriff, who had died in the first outbreak. Succumbing in this second pestilence, she left an extensive bequest to found an important chantry in the church of St Martin-le-Grand, and references to this give us the date of her death as 5 September.
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By November the plague was clearly faltering. Only two wills were drawn up this month, and of the fourteen enrolled, five had been drawn up well before the plague’s outbreak (in one case eighteen years before) and the others were probably remaining backlog. This is demonstrably true for over one-quarter of December’s relatively high enrolment total of eleven wills. Among them was that of John Stable, a mercer, whose will dated December 1360 but came to Husting on 13 December 1361. He had died being owed money, and his executors were chasing one debt of £33 15
s
6
d
as early as 1 May. The writ of that date sent to the sheriff of Essex by the Mayor of London described him as ‘citizen of London, now deceased’. Robert de Guldeford, already mentioned, had died by 27 May, but his will was enrolled on 10 December; and finally, the Bishop of London, Michael de Northburgh, had died on 9 September, his will being enrolled at the same court as Stable’s.
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We may assume a similar story for many of the others.

The plague appears to have affected the clergy of St Paul’s Cathedral significantly. Upon the death of de Northburgh, the king, empowered by the vacancy to appoint officers and to confer prebends, immediately began filling positions. From this we can see that at least six, and possibly as many as nine, former holders of prebends had perished between July and October 1361, out of a total of thirty. These were principally non-resident canons, but significantly, the majority held prebends in proximity to London (such as Hoxton, Wilsden, Mapesbury and Rugmere, near St Pancras). In addition to this, the treasurer and the Archdeacon of Middlesex had both died (as well as the almoner in May). The office for binding the cathedral’s books also fell vacant during this time, one William de Mulsho providing the replacement at the king’s request.

Other religious houses probably fared no better, but evidence is scant. December saw the appointment of a new master for the hospital of St Thomas in Southwark. The election devolved on the Bishop of Winchester and former treasurer William Edington, ‘owing to the death of all the brethren save one’. At the important Hospitaller monastery of St John Clerkenwell, it is significant that in 1361 the number of serving clerks and chaplains at Clerkenwell was well below strength, and at Westminster Abbey the reduction from fifty monks to less than thirty appears to have persisted until the late 1370s. In 1378 the community comprised the abbot and twenty-seven monks, with one more by 1381, though by September 1390 the figure had once again risen to forty-nine monks and the abbot.
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The outbreak thus lasted from the middle of April to perhaps the end of October, a total of over six months compared with the nine months of the first main outbreak. It was, therefore, a major event, only eclipsed in the literature and in the records by the magnitude of what had preceded it twelve years earlier. To fully understand the wider impacts on London’s population over the century we need to understand better the death toll of this second plague.

Archaeological Evidence for the Pestis Secunda

There is good reason to believe that the East Smithfield cemetery of the Holy Trinity was reused for the burial of some victims of the second pestilence. In March 1350 Edward had presented to the Cistercian order of monks the land adjacent to the cemetery of the Holy Trinity for a new abbey. The cemetery chapel was almost certainly granted to the monks, since in 1351 King Edward made reference to the Royal Free Chapel of the Holy Trinity and of St Mary Graces,
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but as far as the burial area itself was concerned, the situation is more complex. John Cory, the clerk involved in the cemetery’s original foundation, continued his acquisitions and transfer of land to the king for the new abbey, and in August 1353, Edward was able to make a grant:

[to] the house of St Mary Graces of the Cistercian order, founded by the king in the new burial-ground of the Holy Trinity by the Tower of London, of all the toft and place of land newly dedicated for the said burial-ground and all the messuages, houses, garden, curtilage and lands at Estsmethfeld and la Tourhull … which tenements John Cory granted to the king in fee, to augment the endowment already made them by the king of messuages at la Tourhull which he likewise had of the grant of the said John.
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By 1353, the Cistercians owned the land. However, the cemetery remained as a separate entity in the minds of Londoners until at least 1361. In December 1351 Johanna Cros made bequests to the ‘new sepulchre of Blessed Virgin without Aldersgate’ and to the ‘like work of the Holy Trinity towards the Tower’; and in 1361 Richard de Moire’s will likewise specified ‘Holy Trinity de la Newchurchehawe near the Tower’. The fact that the monks built their first, small cloister to the south of the chapel, away from the cemetery, despite the relatively confined space available,
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suggests that they too were respecting this entity. The answer to this lies in the fact that the land occupied by the cemetery had been passed to the abbey, but rights of burial and the income resulting, held by the prior of Holy Trinity Aldgate, had not. The latter were, in fact, held by the prior until 1364, when Simon, Bishop of London, ruled that ‘oblations arising from the cemetery newly consecrated close to the Tower … shall be converted [from Holy Trinity priory] to the use of the abbey of St Marys Graces’. Thus, during the second plague, the cemetery was directly adjacent to, but remained administratively separate from, the new abbey.

The confusion in the popular eye caused by this odd situation is neatly captured by Richard de Walsted’s will of July 1365, leaving money to the ‘abbey of Holy Trinity near Towrhille’.
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The cemetery was still available for burial without recourse to the new abbey, the rights of burial residing with Holy Trinity priory as they had during the first outbreak. After 1364, the monks owned and managed the land outright, and no further surviving wills make reference to the cemetery of the Holy Trinity. It is believed that the plague cemetery area was no longer physically available for burial by 1405, since a tenement belonging to William and Katherine Somers existed by that date to the north of the Great Court and abbey church door (and thus in the area of the plague cemetery), and included a garden that took in part of the abbey churchyard.
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This provides us with a ‘latest date’ for any burials made following the 1349 outbreak.

Archaeologically, burials encountered on the site of the cemetery and abbey split into three principal groups: those which certainly dated to the 1349 outbreak, already discussed; a later group of 228 graves lying above the western 1349 cemetery plot and in many cases cutting into the mass trenches and individual graves; and a group of ninety-seven burials lying in a separate space between the western and eastern 1349 plots, centred on a stone churchyard cross base (see Fig. 14). It is the group of 228 overlying the 1349 cemetery, previously considered to have belonged to the abbey cemetery, which were most probably buried in the
pestis secunda.

The features which suggest this interpretation are physical location, archaeological dating evidence and, most suggestive of all, the similarity of demographic make-up and burial practice between the group and the earlier, underlying burials from the first outbreak. This area of burial was at a significant distance from the site of the abbey church – the nearest known burial from the group was over 30m to the north of the church. A separate burial area (of ninety-seven graves) which most certainly did function as the abbey cemetery lay 12m to the east of the group. It lay in the land which had been unused at the time of the first plague, and was centred on a churchyard cross. The group has the appearance of a completely separate entity.

The archaeological dating evidence from the group of 228 graves is very slender. In the absence of any radiocarbon dating, the only burial which could be dated was that of a man buried clothed: a pair of breche buckles was recovered from the grave, and these are fairly securely dated to no later than
c
. 1400. Dating evidence from the adjacent abbey cemetery was equally thin, but what we do have suggests a later period: an adult whose bones have been radiocarbon-dated to 1402–1625;
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and an older man buried with a shoe buckle which is thought to be of fifteenth-century date. The proposed chronology of the area of the plague cemetery is not refuted by the evidence. However, it is the nature of the people buried there and how they were buried which provides the sharpest contrast between this group and those clustered around the abbey cross. First, the demography shows marked differences. The proportion of children in the latter was much lower – 17 per cent of the total as compared with nearly 33 per cent in the group overlying the plague cemetery. The number of women around the cross was also lower – 25 per cent compared with 40 per cent in the plague cemetery area. And, as
Table 4a
shows, where age and sex can be compared together, those buried around the cross were likely to have been significantly older at the time of death – one in four were in their forties, compared to one in eleven in the plague cemetery. The group of 228 are, therefore, simultaneously very different from those buried around the abbey cross and very similar to those buried in the earlier plague cemetery.

This comparison is reinforced when the use of coffins for burial is examined. Coffins were used to bury nearly 49 per cent of all the dead found on the plague cemetery site, a close comparison with the figure for the individual graves from the 1349 plague, but very much greater than the figure of 23 per cent for those buried around the cross. Taking a wider, national perspective, the demographic and cultural pattern displayed by the plague cemetery groups (both that of 1349 and the later group) is dissimilar to any other published cemetery to date, while the general structure of the group from around the churchyard cross is repeated at a number of monastic sites.
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