by S. D. Sykes
Secondly, the population of Europe had grown rapidly during the previous two centuries – the so-called Medieval Warm Period. During this time of more favourable climate, the population of England had grown from somewhere around two million at the time of the Norman Conquest, to at least four million (but possibly as high as six million) by 1300. As the climate then began to cool in the little ice age of the fourteenth century, this larger population came under pressure, as inefficient farming practices and poor growing conditions caused a succession of famines. A weakened population was inevitably more vulnerable to the effects of the bubonic plague. The population of England did not recover to pre-plague levels until 1600.
Lastly, the medieval world was a dirty, smelly place where people lived cheek by jowl with their animals, their own waste, and their own animals’ waste. They had little conception of sanitation – and where there is waste and dirt, you will also find rats. However, once the local black rat population had become infected, the subsequent collapse in rat numbers meant that fleas were suddenly in need of new hosts. And who better to have turned to than the humans who lived in the same streets and houses?
After the devastation of the plague, it is easy to understand how people searched about for a cause – if only to give some meaning to this catastrophe. The predominant belief in society was that God had allowed the plague to happen because of sin. The populace considered themselves guilty of all of the seven deadly sins, but the finger was particularly pointed at the sin of pride – with many commentators blaming the ornate, impractical, and revealing fashions that had become popular in the earlier part of the century.
But if sin were not to blame, there were plenty of other candidates – most notably the Jews, who were accused of poisoning wells. Some even looked to astrology for answers. The King of France commissioned an investigation that went on to identify an unfavourable planetary alignment back in 1345. It was not until much later that the link between rats and the bubonic plague was established, and the actual bacillus was not identified until the nineteenth century by the French scientist Alexandre Yersin.
The narrative of the plague played well to the medieval mindset, which was generally fearful and superstitious. Churches were not the simple, white-washed places of later years – instead they were theatres of high drama, decorated with doom paintings depicting hideous and terrifying images of hell and purgatory. Manuscripts such as the Luttrell Psalter of 1337 were illuminated with bizarre drolleries – grotesque creatures with the heads of gargoyles and the bodies of lizards or snakes. A popular book of the time, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, tells the story of this man’s journey across Europe and into Asia where he meets all manner of fearsome people. Some have horns, some have only an enormous eye in the middle of their head, and some bear the heads of dogs. His descriptions range from the tribe who fatten and eat their own children, through to the ‘isle where the people live just on the smell of a kind of apple’. It is easy to smile at these ideas – but the fear of the unknown was very real and was played upon to great effect by the Church.
By contrast, the main character of Plague Land, Oswald, is a boy who leans towards rational thought. He is also a sceptic, even an atheist. This might seem a very twenty-first-century sensibility, but there is evidence of unbelief from those times – though it is difficult to gauge the true extent of this, as you were likely to have kept any scepticism to yourself. But even if doubts were rare, impiety certainly was not. One only has to read the Canterbury Tales to see this. The Middle Ages might have been an age of faith, but was not always an age of morality, and it seemed not everybody was willing to lead a chaste and blameless life, no matter how dire the visions of Hell and the vengeance of God.
Even amongst those who were pious, the Church itself often came under heavy criticism – mainly for corruption and the monetisation of faith. The unrestricted sale of mass-produced indulgences was used to finance the Crusades and the building of cathedrals. Cathedrals and shrines competed for pilgrims and the money to be made from the sale of souvenirs and relics. The rich could even pay for masses to be sung with the intent of hastening their passage through Purgatory. Chaucer satirises such practices in his Canterbury Tales, where the Pardoner claims to ‘preach for money, and for nothing else’. In the poem ‘Piers Plowman’, written sometime between 1372 and 1389, the writer and cleric William Langland criticizes the amount of money that the Church exacts from the poor. ‘Parish priest and pardoner share the silver’ derived from ‘preaching to the people for profit to themselves’.
The Great Plague not only had a lasting effect on the population size and psyche of English society, it also marked the beginning of the end for Norman-style feudalism. Landowners were suddenly and chronically short of labour, and were forced to offer more attractive terms to their tenants, or risk losing them to a neighbouring lord who would. For those tenants lucky enough to survive the plague, they suddenly found that better wages, better housing, and better land were available. Even the villeins, who were traditionally bound to the land and did not receive a wage for their labour, were empowered by the new circumstances, and started to question their status as un-free men vociferously.
The nobility tried to quash this new-found spirit of dissent with laws to peg wages back to their old, pre-plague levels. But these laws – the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349, and the Statute of Labourers in 1351 – were simply unenforceable. The plague had set the conditions for radicalism within the poorer strata of society, which led eventually to the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. Although this revolt was unsuccessful, feudalism had suffered a major blow and began its long decline –coming to a full stop around the time of the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries.
The bubonic plague persists to this day in the poorer regions of the world, especially in areas where the infection is endemic in the local animal population. It can be treated successfully in the early stages with antibiotics, but the infection still kills, and remains a serious public health concern.
Acknowledgements
An enormous thank you to all my early readers at Curtis Brown Creative – especially Julie Walker and Laurinda Luffman for their advice, encouragement, and dogged willingness to read my work. My thanks also goes to past supporters of my writing – my tutor on the MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam, Mike Harris; the radio dramatist Sharon Oakes; radio drama producer Gary Brown; Fiona McAlpine and Robin Brooks at Allegra productions. I would like to thank my editor at Hodder, Nick Sayers, for all his wise advice, and my agent Gordon Wise for his fantastic support. But I owe my greatest debt to my husband and family. They have never stopped believing in me.