The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (44 page)

There had to be an answer to such a brute
disease: something to do. You see it in the pictures between the prayers in the
Très
Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
from the early fifteenth century: not just the
processions of hooded men beating themselves with chains and cords, trying to make up
for sin, but also the other processions, the dragon of plague being taken out to burn,
the cross being carried back to show the devil dragon is dead. You could pray in all
four directions, against all of the winds that carried clouds and mists of sickness. The
Sorbonne doctors told Philippe VI, called the Lucky, to get out of town; they prescribed
three words to chase the plague away, ‘
vite
’, or quick, for
‘leave quickly’; ‘
loin
’, or far, for ‘get a long
way away’; and ‘
longtemps
’, or a long time, for ‘keep
going’. If anyone stayed in Paris, the doctors suggested perfumes and spices to
keep away the poisoned air, bleeding and purging, and a light diet. They had few ideas
about what the community could do to save itself, but they were watching the horse
slaughterers, the pigsties and the pig butchers, anywhere rotting flesh might stink
above ground and corrupt the air. The butchers were too obstinately useful to move
without a royal decree; only in 1415 were they finally pushed out of town to the
Tuileries,
which was close to the Louvre but
just beyond the city limit. Trenches were dug there to collect the blood.

Nobody had moved a whole profession out of
town before, or made such a drastic decision about the plan for the city; that was a
consequence of plague. The moves were not even about basic hygiene, just about making
the air seem breathable. The same decree that worried about the waters of the Seine in
Paris told the people of Orleans to throw all their rotten meat into the Loire. Nobody
knew about the fleas that rats carried, and the sickness the fleas carried; so plague
persisted.
³
In time, quarantine and isolation may have helped control its spread in
north-western Europe, fewer ships landing without being checked, but what made the
disease disappear in the eighteenth century was largely accidental. People started to
change their clothes when they went to bed at night, and to wash with a serious soap,
the Marseilles soap made with olive oil, which kept down the fleas and lice. The price
of arsenic tumbled, so there was a poison to dispose of mice and rats. But most
important, and nothing at all to do with human beings, the bacterium that seems to cause
plague,
yersinia pestis
, mutated into a close relative that was far less
deadly; rats caught the mutant much as human beings would be immunized against diseases,
and rats in Europe no longer carried plague. The rest of the world was not so
fortunate.
⁴

Until then there was no answer that worked,
no solution, so the plague cut much deeper than other pandemics. Like terrorism, like
AIDS in our time, it settled in memory and panic and stung a sense of guilt into
life.

Plague had to be given a shape because you
can fight something with a shape.

In plague legends from Sweden, Denmark and
Norway plague can be a black mist, a blue vapour or smoke, as clearly ominous as clouds
before a storm. It can be two children walking, or an old woman who carries a broom or a
rake; she sweeps in front of houses where people will die, and if there are going to be
survivors, she counts out the number of the dead by hitting the door with her broom.
Young persons dancing in a barn all night meet a three-footed goat called Hel,
and the next morning they are sick and
plague gallops off across the land, now in the shape of a white horse. Sometimes plague
is an animal that nobody has ever seen before. It takes away the young, the old, the
sick and the women and it leaves whole districts barren. Since it took a hundred years
for the population numbers of Scandinavia to recover, and four hundred in the case of
Norway, you can understand why so often the stories try to end with a couple: the only
living person on the north side of a fjord is a woman, the only one to the south is a
man. ‘They moved in together,’ the story says, ‘and were
married.’

The sickness is sometimes a stranger, a
foreigner, almost always a man: a merchant off the ships. There are stories of ships
that ran aground with the crew all dead and their bodies blackened, occasionally a
survivor, and when the bodies are buried and the cargo stolen, the people on the land
start to die. The stories sometimes say ‘the plague crept out of the cargo’,
just like rats. The image of the dead ship and black bodies is still with us; it is
Dracula coming ashore from a silent ship at Whitby in the Stoker novel or the Murnau
film. Sometimes the landing place seems unlikely – a death ship beached on the open
Danish shore is very possible but a ship could hardly drift unmanned through the islands
and channels that lead to the harbour at Bergen – but the stories agree that plague
comes by sea.

The same images struck the writers of
chronicles. Matthias van Neuenburg lived through the plague, and he wrote of
‘pestilence – the greatest death rate, unheard of since the time of the
Flood’. He libelled the Jews for poisoning wells. He ignored the sins of people
like him, which would usually take the blame, but he mentions the sins of others:
wandering holy persons flogging themselves for penitence, as though that were the
natural consequence of any epidemic. He was mostly struck by a single image:
‘ships out at sea, loaded with cargo, but with all the crew dead and no
master’.
⁵

Once ashore, plague goes about sometimes in
a red shirt and sometimes a blue jacket: a woman carrying a book where she can read who
will live and who will die. The written word had terrifying authority in a world where
not everyone could both read and write; you could never escape the written record.
Plague goes slowly and erratically
overland,
which makes its progress somehow more uncanny: it comes suddenly, kills suddenly,
village by village. Children are left yelling alone in empty valleys. The bells ring
out, fires are lit if there is anyone left to signal. Survivors go wandering, carrying
with them the spirit of the plague; so they have to be burned alive, or else buried
alive so the plague will stay with them and stop travelling. Children without parents,
not known in the valley, begging for food: they were buried. So was a girl who watched a
grave being dug, obediently got into the grave when the gravediggers asked her to see if
it was deep enough yet; then ‘they reached for the spade and buried the girl alive
in the grave with the heaped up dirt’. A village is saved by killing an innocent
young man who is then left in the road because everyone knows that plague cannot cross
his body. Sometimes the solution is rather more rustic: in one story the woman who
drives the dead to the cemetery does not get sick ‘because she smoked a chalk
pipe’.
⁶

Nobody knew quite what plague was. We
don’t, either; there is room for debate about exactly what organisms, or what
deadly marriage of organisms, caused the Black Death. We can agree, though, that rats
matter, because they carry infected fleas and they move: slow, but persistent, always
onwards.

Rats are missing from the archaeological
record around the North Sea right into the early Middle Ages. To thrive in large
numbers, rats need store cupboard places, tightly packed with people and food, and those
were scarce. It is possible they came into Northern Europe on the Viking ships plying
down the great Russian rivers from Byzantium; the first rat bones in York are from the
time of Viking settlement, and there are no bones at the great trading centre of Birka
in Sweden until around 810
CE
, when the Viking routes were opened wide.
Their timing was excellent. The growing cities and towns were full of opportunity. Rats
do not like crossing wide streets, and the new towns were busy and cramped. Houses with
several floors and wooden frames were just going up along London streets in the
fourteenth century: boxes of people, and sewage and garbage,
⁷
‘heaped up
together, and in a sort smothered with many families of children and servants in one
house’, as a royal proclamation in 1580 noticed,
trying yet again to stop new building and families sharing,
and failing yet again.
⁸

The almost universal curfew at night suited
rats because they have sensitive ears and like quiet; they stay away from any workshop
where there is hammering. They have a human taste for warmth, and in the North, unlike
the Mediterranean, they need houses and food stores, warm and solid structures, perhaps
even the bathhouses; and in the busy North, shipping grain and wool and cloth about,
there was constant transport for them, in and out of towns, between towns, out across
the sea. Better still, their enemies were ruined by the same steady growth of towns. As
human beings took the land that once had been forest for building streets or growing
food, so there were fewer and fewer weasels and foxes, fewer owls out hunting silently
in the night. Rats were warm, fed and safe from almost anything but the plague they
carried.
⁹

The plague was democratic: it killed
anyone. Preachers blamed the sheer weight of human sin. Doctors blamed the pestilential
air and suggested burning incense; they warned that bathing too much would open the
pores to sickness; they tried to find some event in the skies and stars to explain
everything. The astrologer Geoffrey de Meaux was in England when the plague came, and he
was struck by the way sickness seemed to skip streets or even neighbouring houses, but
he was sure he knew why: each house, street or side of a street had different stellar
influences or rulers ‘and therefore the impact of the heavens cannot affect them
all equally’.
¹⁰
His confidence in the stars was not
always shared. The Paris medical faculty was forced to concede that the conjunction of
Saturn, Mars and Jupiter in 1345 ‘cannot explain everything we would wish’.
Conrad of Megenberg decided that the conjunction had somehow made the earth tremble,
putting out pestilential vapours, and the Flemish musician Louis Sanctus blamed
‘the stinking breath of the wind’ for sending the plague travelling. The
fabric of prediction and analysis was beginning to look rather unsure.
¹¹

The plague did not undo all experts. The
sovereign remedy for plague and its symptoms was a compound called theriac, a mix which
in the beginning contained the flesh of
vipers to build up immunity against snakebite.
¹²
The thirteenth-century version was
thick and syrupy, made of wine and honey and sometimes containing eighty ingredients
like saffron and rhubarb, cinnamon and ginger, ground coral, rose water and myrrh;
theriac gives us the word ‘treacle’. The standard text on cures, the
Antidotarium Nicolai
, used in Paris from around 1270, calls it ‘the
mistress of medicines’, effective against asthma, epilepsy or dropsy, ‘the
most serious infirmities of the human body’. It could be sniffed, swallowed,
sucked, spread as an ointment or used as a suppository. Naturally it was prescribed
against plague, the older the better; evidently you laid down theriac like you lay down
wine or whisky. Nobody knew quite how it worked, but that was true of many compound
medicines, which were more effective than their ingredients taken one by one. Theriac
was supposed both to strengthen the healthy body and save the sick from the worst of
their suffering.

Theriac sounds as doubtful as the remedies
that alchemists were pursuing, the fantastical dream of finding an ‘elixir’
that would heal just as well as miracles: the quintessence of wine or of gold. Theriac
mixture can vary so much in its ingredients and its ageing that this one supreme cure
only adds to the confusion about remedies that were handed out during plagues. The odd
thing is this: theriac worked, and people knew it. What’s more, it worked for a
reason that modern pharmacists would recognize: it delivered a high dose of opium, which
was basic to the recipe. It was probably given in its fastest acting form, which is
laudanum. Opium blocked diarrhoea, calmed down coughing, relieved pain in the joints and
pain from boils and ulcers, and most of all it settled anxiety for a while; it was a
wonderful holiday from dying.

That was a huge relief for people who lived
at close quarters with mortality, and did not expect to win. The Black Death of 1348–9
followed the failed harvest of 1346–7 and the prospect of famine. Hunger was familiar.
In 1315 rain ruined the harvest and grain prices were six times normal; and the next two
summers, in a Europe slowly getting colder, were just as bad. Twenty-three prisoners in
Northampton jail died from lack of food. They were lucky in a way: there
were rumours of cannibalism, prisoners
eating prisoners, parents eating children.
¹³
Lice and the fleas on rats spread
typhus among humans, and various murrains took the cows and the oxen. Rural life was
disrupted because the workforce was weak and scarce and there were too few animals to
dung the fields and keep them productive. The greatest burden lay on the poor.
¹⁴
They
had no work to make money and not enough money to buy food if they could find any.
Anyone with money could find supplies, of course; famine is not at all democratic since
you can buy your way out.

Plague, on the other hand, takes anyone and
everyone, a true shock to elites who fancied themselves protected by law, by strong
walls, by money and other people’s obligations.

The death toll made labour scarce, which
should have pushed up its value or at least its cost; great persons who had been used to
the constant labour of women and men who were glad to earn, or else the service of
serfs, now had to contend with a whole new class of persons who thought they had
choices. Labourers once ate bread made of beans, drank water, wore grey; ‘then was
the world of such folk well-ordered in its estate’, as the poet John Gower wrote.
Now there were fewer of them, they had drinks besides water, they wanted decent food and
a good wage, they dressed well, they had money for beds and pillows; they went poaching
and even hunting. Gower worried about who would grow the food on which city people
depended since ‘scarcely a rustic wishes to do such work; instead he wickedly
loafs everywhere’. The thirteenth-century Bartholomaeus Anglicus, from the
universities of Paris and Oxford, had warned about this. The peasantry, he said, usually
kept down by various and clashing duties and charges, living with wretchedness and woe,
would change if ever their circumstances changed: they would ‘wax stout and
proud’.