by Ian Mortimer
News of the plague spread even faster than the infection itself. Forewarned towns barred their gates against travellers, but nothing could keep out something as small as a flea when the gates had to be opened occasionally to allow in food and supplies. The plague spared no one: rich and poor, women and children, Christian and Muslim all perished. In Tunis, Ibn Khaldun wrote that ‘It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion . . . and the world responded to its call’. Agnolo di Tura described his experience in Siena:
The mortality began in May. It was a cruel and horrible thing, and I do not know where to begin to tell of its cruelty and pitiless ways . . . Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another, for this illness seemed to strike through breath and sight . . . Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices . . . And I . . . buried my five children with my own hands . . . So many died that everyone believed it was the end of the world.
Florence was among the worst-affected cities in Europe: about 60 per cent of the population died there. One eye-witness in the city observed that:
All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried; many died who did not confess or receive the last rites; and many died by themselves and many died of hunger . . . At every church they dug deep pits down to the water table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies was found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.5
The poet Giovanni Boccaccio was struck by the treatment of the deceased. He noted that ‘It was common practice of most of the neighbours, moved no less by fear of contamination from the putrefying bodies than by charity towards the deceased, to drag the corpses out of the houses with their hands and to lay them in front of the doors, where anyone who made the rounds might see them’.6 The Florentine writer Giovanni Villani himself fell victim to the plague. The last words of his chronicle were: ‘and the plague lasted until . . .’ The pestilence cupped its black hand over his mouth before he could fill in the date.
By January 1348, the disease had arrived in the French port of Marseilles. From there it moved northwards through France and westwards into Spain. Its deadliness did not diminish. In Perpignan, 80 of the 125 notaries died, 16 of the 18 barber-surgeons, and 8 of the 9 physicians.7 The town’s thriving money-lending business ceased to function altogether. In Avignon in France, where the popes had resided since Clement V had moved there in 1309, a third of the cardinals died. In Languedoc and Provence, half the population perished. And still the disease marched on, spreading in every direction. Givry in Burgundy, which uniquely has parish registers dating from 1334, saw burials rise from an average of 23 per year to 626 in just four months – suggesting a mortality figure of about 50 per cent. In England, every diocese saw more than 40 per cent of its priests perish: the diocese of Exeter lost over half its clergy.8 Death rates among peasants in rural Worcestershire averaged 42 per cent, but that bald figure masks a range from lucky places like Hartlebury (19 per cent) to terribly affected manors such as Aston (80 per cent). England’s two largest cities, London and Norwich, both saw mortality figures of 40 per cent. In early July 1349, a ship from London was found drifting in the Norwegian port of Bergen. When the authorities boarded it, they found the entire crew dead. They withdrew in horror from the vessel and headed back to shore. But it was too late: one of them had caught the disease. Thus the plague arrived in Norway.9
How many died in the Black Death? Papal officers calculated the figure to be almost 24 million Christians, which they thought amounted to a third of Christendom. Recent research has indicated that the toll may well have been much higher: 60 per cent of the population in most parts of France; possibly slightly more than 60 per cent in England, Catalonia and Navarre; and between 50 and 60 per cent in Italy.10 Obviously, death on this scale left people traumatised, as those who performed essential daily tasks – priests, servants, cooks, cowherds, harvest workers and mothers of young children – were simply removed from the equation of daily life. In 1340, few could have imagined mortality as high as that of the famine of 1316–19, let alone anything worse. From 1347, however, Europeans had to prepare for death. In fact they had to do so again and again, as the Black Death was only the first wave of the pandemic: it returned in 1361–2, 1369 and 1374–5, and then on average every eight to twelve years for the next three centuries. And although subsequent outbreaks were not as severe as the first one, they still killed millions of people. The outbreak of 1361–2, for instance, wiped out another 10 per cent of the population of England in less than a year. A century later, the major outbreak of 1478–80 similarly claimed between 10 and 15 per cent of the population. Even 300 years after the Black Death, plague outbreaks could still kill 15 per cent of the inhabitants of a medium-sized town; in large cities it could be far worse. Over 20 per cent of the population died in London in 1563, and even larger proportions succumbed in Venice in 1576, Seville in 1649, Naples in 1656 and Marseilles in 1720–1. The fourteenth century thus heralds an age of fear. People went to bed aware that every night might be their last.
In the context of this book, however, the plague’s deadliness is not its most significant feature. It is important to realise that society did not collapse. The deaths of over half the population did not mean that people threw away the rules of property ownership or abandoned the cycles of sowing and harvesting. The breakdown of law and order that occurred in some places was short-lived. In Florence, the becchini (grave diggers) robbed empty houses, extorted money from victims too scared to leave their homes and took advantage of defenceless women, but the lawlessness only lasted a few weeks. Although many prelates and magnates died of plague, they were quickly replaced. And Europe’s rulers put on a brave face. In England, Edward III announced publicly that he would travel to France while the plague was raging there, and he did actually go, albeit only for a short time. He also held a well-attended tournament at Windsor in April 1349, at which he completed his foundation of the Order of the Garter, while England itself was reeling under the plague. His message was simple: he believed that he enjoyed God’s protection. Moreover, he was determined to display his confidence in divine approbation to his people – a brave bit of posturing, given that one of his daughters had already become a victim.
It was the long-term consequences of the Black Death that mattered most, for both secular and spiritual reasons. Medieval society had been exceptionally rigid, with people seeing their positions assigned to them by God. A manorial lord was a man bred to bear arms and command followers in battle. A shoemaker was a shoemaker and nothing more, nothing less. An unfree tenant of eight acres of his lord’s land was just that. These roles were what God wanted for them. The massive population drop now caused huge cracks in this inflexible structure. Most significantly, there was a severe shortage of manpower. Working men whose families had died no longer had to accept a life of servitude: with nothing left to lose, they could simply walk to the nearest town and sell their labour. A ploughman whose children were starving no longer had to be content with farming a handful of strips of land for his lord if a neighbouring landowner was offering good wages for workers. If his lord wished to retain his services, he had to pay him better wages or reward him with more land.
Nothing separates the late Middle Ages from the earlier period as clearly as the Black Death. Although the famines mentioned at the start of this chapter meant that the optimism of the thirteenth century had fallen flat well before 1347, the plague shook the very roots of people’s understanding of their place on Earth. Some had to come to terms with the almost complete annihilation of their communities, and quite reasonably they asked why God had treated them so harshly – especially when the next village might have seen far fewer victims.
Could it be assumed that God sought the best for mankind if he killed babies in their cradles with this agonising, terrifying disease? In smashing the brittle material of society, the plague raised profound questions about the causes of disease. Many started to reflect on the decline of the papacy since the accession of Boniface VIII, who reigned from 1294 to 1303. From his time, the senior ranks of the Church had increasingly been connected with venality and profiteering. As the popes had fallen under the influence of a secular monarch, the king of France, their standing in the eyes of Christendom had diminished to a pale shadow of its former self. People began to doubt that the Church of Rome was leading them in the right direction. The plague, some suspected, was divine punishment on the whole of mankind for the corruption of their religious leaders.
The plague also changed people’s perception of death. You might think that death is one of the few great constants in human life, but it is actually subject to quite radical alteration. Death in itself does not exist – it does not have substance – therefore it only has meaning in the minds of the living: in the absence of life and in the belief that there is some altered form of life thereafter. The latter is where the changes are to be found. All over Europe there was a profound engagement with death in the fourteenth century. Literary culture was tinged with devils, Purgatory and the afterlife. The skull motif was increasingly employed in religious paintings and sculpture. In England, the religious sect of the Lollards advocated a more intense, more spiritual way of life. The wills of Lollard knights and prelates at the end of the century increasingly stressed the loathsome, sinful condition of the testators’ human flesh. Mementi mori – physical reminders of the rotting corpses that we will all one day become – were carved in stone and set up in churches and cathedrals. There was an intensification of the endowment of chantry chapels and the establishment of pious foundations – the building of bridges, schools, almshouses and hospitals for travellers. Beneath these individual acts of piety and expressions of self-loathing we can detect something even more profound: the unsettling question of mankind’s standing in the eyes of God. What if God decided to destroy humanity entirely? After 1348, the annihilation of the human race seemed a real possibility.
For some of the survivors, however, the Black Death opened up a world of opportunities. As we have seen, the beneficiaries included those peasants who found they could sell their labour for more money than they earned on their original manor. Both England and France passed legislation to prevent the free market dictating wage rates, but these measures had little effect. Peasants realised that their labour was of value to their masters; they could insist on being treated with more dignity than previously. If they weren’t, they could rebel. The peasantry had previously shown little appetite for rebellion, but as a result of the plague they acquired a sense of self-worth. This led to a number of uprisings, such as the Jacquerie in Paris (1358), the Ciompi in Florence (1378), and the Peasants’ Revolt in England (1381). Indeed, it is noticeable that throughout history, mass mortality accentuates the importance of the working man and woman, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of those who govern them.
Aspects of society that we would never have associated with the plague were profoundly affected. Marriage rights are a good example. In 1332, a bondswoman living in Doccombe called Agnes of Smallridge wanted to marry Roger the Shearman, a freeman of Moreton. The request was taken to the prior of Canterbury (the priory was lord of the manor of Doccombe). The prior refused, as Agnes would be freed from her service to the manor by such a marriage. But while in 1332 serfdom could still dictate the path of people’s lives and happiness, by 1400 that system had broken down almost everywhere in western Europe. The rents that peasants had to pay to their lords declined after the fourth epidemic of plague in 1374–5, as there were fewer tenants but plenty of land. Some lords who had borrowed heavily now found themselves in debt and were forced to lease or sell whole manors to enterprising townsmen. Women like Agnes of Smallridge were now free to marry whom they chose on payment of a fine to their lord. The feudal ties that had bound workers to the land were replaced by financial obligations. Money took the place of enforced loyalty. Capitalism began to replace feudalism in the countryside, having already triumphed in the towns.
We can only touch here on a few of the major changes arising from the Black Death. Nevertheless, in terms of assessing the period for the purpose of this book, the years from 1347 to 1352 were perhaps the most formative in our history. Arguably the only years that compare are those of the two world wars, because of the rapid social changes and technological developments that accompanied them both. But even they pale into insignificance if we imagine a time when every second person suddenly died in agony – and no one understood why.
Projectile warfare
Visiting the modern gift shop of a medieval castle might leave you with the impression that medieval knights were itching to attack each other at every opportunity. Some contemporary sources support this view. The chronicles of fourteenth-century Gascony reveal fighting on a seasonal basis. The annals of medieval Ireland are filled with tale after tale of which lord stole which other lord’s cattle or ambushed and murdered his son in reprisal for a similar attack the previous year. The reality, however, was that the military might of two kingdoms rarely met in battle. The whole business was just too risky. Most of the time armies only clashed when they had to – and generally speaking that only was when one king believed he had such a significant advantage over his enemy that he could not possibly lose. Knowing that your enemy was ill-equipped, tired, hungry, lacking in numbers, suffering from disease, low in morale or vulnerable to a surprise attack might sway such a decision, but even this knowledge did not ensure that a full-scale battle would ensue. Kings knew that everything depended on their own personal survival. For a king to be killed or captured in battle would not only mean a rout; it would be interpreted as God supporting the enemy and thus the entire cause would be lost. Even a demoralised and ill-equipped army could win a battle if they were lucky and managed to kill the enemy commander.
What really mattered in 1300 was having better-armed and better-trained men than the enemy – and more of them. Hence the importance of knights, and especially their massed charge, which had been a battle-winner since the eleventh century. Groups of highly trained knights with lances would gallop in formation across a battlefield on specially bred large horses, called destriers, sweeping everything before them: a tsunami of fast-moving hardened spear points ripping apart everything in its path. The only occasions when such a tactic did not prove decisive were when a strategic blunder rendered it counterproductive – such as when the charging knights pursued their enemy too far and became cut off from their infantry, or when the ground was so sodden that the horses slowed up and the charge lost impetus. At the end of the thirteenth century, however, the Welsh and Scots armies opposing Edward I of England found an effective defence against the massed cavalry charge. This was to arrange their troops in schiltroms: circles of men armed with spears with their backs to each other. Jamming their spears into the ground, they tilted them outwards, so that any charging horses would impale themselves or shy away. At Bannockburn in 1314, the self-proclaimed king of the Scots, Robert Bruce, neutralised the massed charge of English knights by equipping his men with sixteen-foot-long pikes and arranging them in schiltroms. Combined with the dampness of the ground, the strategy worked. The flower of English chivalry ended up using their horses to escape from the butchery that ensued.
Bannockburn proved a decisive Scottish victory but ironically it also sowed the seed for English military dominance for the rest of the century. This was because it inspired a desire for revenge in those northern English lords who had held land in Scotland. One of them was Henry Beaumont, an experienced soldier and capable leader. Another was Edward Balliol, a claimant to the throne of Scotland who was eager to press his claim after Robert Bruce’s death in 1329. In 1332, these two men led a group of English knights – known to historia
ns as ‘the Disinherited’ – to Scotland to reclaim their lost ancestral lands. Beaumont had been at Bannockburn and he knew exactly what the English should have done there. Since schiltroms were slow-moving, poorly armoured and vulnerable to archers, he made sure he took 1,000 bowmen with him.
Soon after landing at Kinghorn, in Fife, the Disinherited found themselves trapped by a massive army. Scottish chroniclers state that they faced 40,000 men; English writers say 30,000.11 Beaumont and Balliol had no more than 3,000 men in total, including their archers. On 10 August 1332, on Dupplin Moor, they fought a last-ditch stand against odds of about ten to one. Stationed equally on each flank, the archers not only broke up the Scottish schiltroms but also impeded the charge of the advancing Scots by trapping them in a killing zone between the flanks. The Scots could not retreat because their comrades were pressing them forward from behind; all they could do was clamber over the bodies of the fallen, exposing themselves to the deadly arrows. A northern chronicler noted that ‘one most marvellous thing happened that day, such as was never seen or heard in any previous battle, namely that the pile of dead was greater in height from the earth towards the sky than one whole spear length’. And, remember, in 1332, a spear was 16 feet long.12