by John Kelly
The historical evidence also suggests a link between the Great Famine and the Black Death. A connection between the two events should be reflected in plague deaths. Areas that lost large numbers of children in the famine should have suffered less during the Black Death because they had fewer vulnerable adults in the population—adults with congenitally defective immune systems. In medieval Flanders, the mortality pattern fits this paradigm. The region, which lost a great many children to epidemics during the Great Famine, experienced fewer plague deaths than many neighboring regions.
The imbalance between food and population was not the only disease risk factor in the medieval environment. Long before the weather turned and the land gave out and the grain became covered with mold and fungi, the continent was producing more garbage than it could dispose of. Circa 1200, the medieval city was drowning in filth, and in the postboom decades, the situation may have worsened as thousands of dispossessed peasants flooded into urban Europe, animals in tow. By the third decade of the fourteenth century, the amount of refuse on the medieval street was so great, it was literally driving men to murder. One morning in 1326 an irate London merchant confronted a peddler who had just tossed some eel skins into the lane outside his shop.
Pick up the eels, the merchant demanded.
No, replied the peddler.
Fists flew, a knife flashed; a moment later the peddler lay dead on the street.
As the state of public sanitation worsened, public outrage grew. There was a tremendous hue and cry about outdoor slaughterhouses and backed-up street gutters, and an even greater hue and cry about the swarms of black rats that lived off the filth. A fourteenth-century English-French dictionary illustrates just how ubiquitous the rodent was in the Middle Ages. “Sir,” goes one passage, “. . . I make bold that you shall be well and comfortably lodged here, save that there is a great pack of rats and mice.” Medieval people were also quite aware that the rat was a dangerous animal. Antirodent remedies like “hellebore in the weight of two pence” and “cakes of paste and powdered aconite” were quite popular and widely used. However, what people did not suspect is that
Rattus rattus, the black rat, was involved in human plague.
This is not quite the ahistorical judgment it sounds like. Premodern peoples had keen powers of observation. During an outbreak of pestilence in Antiquity, the Roman governor-general of Spain offered handsome bounties to local rat hunters. The folklore of medieval and early modern India and China also contains several references to the connection between
Rattus rattus and
Y. pestis. An example is the Indian legend of the beautiful Princess Asaf-Khan of Punjab.
Walking through a courtyard one day, Asaf-Khan is said to have seen an infected rat staggering drunkenly. “Throw him to the cat,” she ordered. A slave picked up the wobbly rat by the tail and threw it to the princess’s pet cat; the cat promptly pounced on the animal, then just as promptly dropped it and fled. A few days later, the cat was found dead outside the princess’s bedroom. The following day the slave who picked up the rat died; then, one by one, the rest of Asaf-Khan’s slaves died, until only the princess was left alive.
A few centuries later a Chinese poet, Shi Tao-nan, wrote an ode to the relationship between
Rattus rattus, Y. pestis, and man.
Dead rats in the east,
Dead rats in the west! . . .
Men fall away like . . . walls. . . .
Nobody dares weep over the dead . . .
The coming of the devil plague
Suddenly makes the lamp dim.
Then, it is blown out,
Leaving man, ghost and corpses in [a] dark room.
Europeans first became aware of the biological relationship between
Y. pestis and
Rattus rattus during the Third Pandemic of the late nineteenth century, when the rat (along with the flea) was identified as a key agent in human plague. In subsequent years, a great deal has been learned about
Rattus, including its age and origin. The black rat first evolved in Asia, probably India, sometime before the last Ice Age. At a weight of four to twelve ounces, it is only half the size of its first cousin, the Norwegian brown rat—also an important vector in human plague—but
Rattus more than makes up for its unprepossessing physical stature with incredible powers of reproduction. It has been estimated that two black rats breeding continuously for three years could produce 329 million offspring, as long as no offspring died and all were paired (fortunately, all very big ifs).
Rattus also has some other remarkable qualities that make it a formidable disease vector. One is great agility. A black rat can leap almost three feet from a standing position, fall from a height of fifty feet without injury, climb almost anything—including a sheer wall, squeeze through openings as narrow as a quarter of an inch, and penetrate almost any surface. The word “rodent” derives from the Latin verb
rodere, which means “to gnaw,” and thanks to a powerful set of jaw muscles and the ability to draw its lips into its mouth (which allows the incisors, or cutting teeth, to work freely),
Rattus can gnaw through lead pipe, unhardened concrete, and adobe brick.
A wary nature also makes
Rattus a wily vector; the black rat usually travels by night, builds an escape route in its den, and reconnoiters carefully. This last behavior seems, at least in part, learned. During a foraging expedition, one young rat was observed taking a reconnaissance lesson from its mother. It would scamper ahead a few feet, stop until the mother caught up, then wait as she examined the floor ahead. Only after receiving a reassuring maternal nudge would the young rat advance. Rats also have another rather unusual, humanlike trait: they laugh. Young rats have been observed laughing—or purring, the rodent equivalent of laughter—when playing and being tickled.
Rattus is, by nature, a very sedentary animal—usually. A city rat may wonder what lies on the other side of the street, but studies show it won’t cross the street to find out. Urban rats live their entire lives in a single city block. The rural rat’s range is a not much larger—a mile or so. However, if
Rattus were phobic about long-distance travel, it would still be an obscure Asian oddity, like the Komodo dragon lizard. Rats do travel, and often for reasons that highlight the role of trade and ecological disaster in plague.
For example, on occasion an entire black rat community will abandon a home range and migrate hundreds of kilometers. Research suggests that what makes the rats override their sedentary impulses is a craving for grain germ—and perhaps more particularly, for the vitamin E in the grain germ. Under normal conditions, rat migrations are infrequent, but under conditions of ecological disaster one imagines that they might become quite common.
For distances beyond the multikilometer range,
Rattus relies on its long-time companion, man. The stowaway rat is the original undocumented alien. In modern studies, it has been found in planes, in suit-jacket pockets, in the back of long-haul trailers, and in sacks carried by Javanese pack horses. Trade has also been a boon to
Rattus in another, more subtle but very significant way. In the wild, when rat populations grow unstably large, nature can prune them back with a prolonged period of bad weather and scarce food. The advent of camel caravans, pack horses, ships—and, later, trains and planes and trucks—has weakened this pruning mechanism. Once commercial man appeared, the highly adaptable rat was able to escape to places where food was abundant.
The date of
Rattus’s arrival in Europe is a source of controversy. Some scholars believe the black rat first appeared in the West during the Crusades, which would mean sometime in the twelfth century. However, this view ignores the Plague of Justinian and the Roman statues of a
Rattus-like creature, which date back to at least the first century a.d. More credible is the theory of French biologist Dr. F. Audoin-Rouzeau, who dates
Rattus’s arrival to sometime before the birth of Christ
. Given the rat’s affinity for trade, its entry point may have been the deserts of the Silk Road or the high mountain passes of Central Asia, where agents of Rome and China met occasionally, or the trading station the Romans maintained on the Indian coast.
Two significant dates in
Rattus’s European history are the sixth century, when the Plague of Justinian decimated the rodent—and human—population of the Mediterranean Basin, and the year 1000, when a resurgent Christendom began to produce enough food and waste to support a large demographic rebound. Three hundred years later, overcrowding, town walls, and primitive sanitation had turned the medieval city into a haven for
Rattus.*
Pigs, cattle, chickens, geese, goats, and horses roamed the streets of medieval London and Paris as freely as they did the lanes of rural Broughton. Medieval homeowners were supposed to police their housefronts, including removing animal dung, but most urbanites were as careless as William E. Cosner, a resident of the London suburb of Farringdon Without. A complaint lodged against Cosner charges that “men could not pass [by his house] for the stink [of] . . . horse dung and horse piss.”
On the meanest of medieval streets, the ambience of the barnyard gave way to the ambience of the battlefield. Often, animals were abandoned where they fell, left to boil in the summer sun, to be picked over by rats and ransacked by neighborhood children, who yanked bones from decaying oxen and cows and carved them into dice. The municipal dog catcher, who rarely picked up after a dog cull (kill), and the surgeon barber, who rarely poured his patients’ blood anywhere except on the street in front of his shop, also contributed to the squalid morning-after-battle atmosphere.
Along with the dog catcher and surgeon barber,
Rattus’s other great urban ally was the medieval butcher. In Paris, London, and other large towns, animals were slaughtered outdoors on the street, and since butchers rarely picked up after themselves either, in most cities the butchers’ district was a Goya-esque horror of animal remains. Rivers of blood seeped into nearby gardens and parks, and piles of hearts, livers, and intestines accumulated under the butchers’ bloody boots, attracting swarms of rats, flies, and street urchins.
The greatest urban polluter was probably the full chamber pot. No one wanted to walk down one or two flights of stairs, especially on a cold, rainy night. So, in most cities, medieval urbanites opened the window, shouted, “Look out below!” three times, and hoped for the best. In Paris, which had 210,000 residents, the song of the chamber pot echoed through the city from morning to night, intermingling with the lewd guffaws of the prostitutes on the Ile de la Cité and the mournful bleats of the animals going to slaughter at St. Jacques-la-Boucherie on the Right Bank.
No premodern city was clean, but the great urban centers of Antiquity employed a number of ingenious sanitation techniques. The Etruscans, for example, created extensive underground drainage systems to remove garbage and excrement, and the Roman aqueducts carried enough water from the countryside to supply each resident of the city with three hundred gallons per day. The Middle Ages also produced some sanitary wonders, including the privy system in the monastery at Durham, England, which an admiring visitor described thusly: “Every seat and partition in the dormer [dormitory] was of wainscot close, on either side very decent, so that one [monk] could not see the other. . . . [And] there were as many seats of privies as there were little windows in the walls to give light to every one on said seats.” The system also had an underground “water course” that drained waste dropped through the privies into a nearby stream.
Though many medieval cities had public sanitation systems, none came close to rivaling Durham’s efficiency. The typical urban system began with shallow open gutters in small residential streets; these led into a network of larger central gutters, which, in turn, fed into a central dumping point—usually a large river like the Thames or Seine. Where available, local streams were diverted to provide flushing power, but since urban streams were not widely available, most systems relied on gravity and rainwater. In theory, storms were supposed to flush waste through the downward-sloping gutters to a river dumping point. But dry weather was unkind to theory; large piles of fecal matter, urine, and food would accumulate in the gutters, providing a feast for rats. Storms, when they did come, were not much help. Even a good rain rarely pushed waste much farther than an adjoining neighborhood. However, enough waste matter eventually got to the end points in the system to make the urban river an insult to the senses and an affront to propriety. After a visit to the malodorous Thames, a horrified Edward III expressed outrage at the “dung, lay-stalls and other filth” on the banks.
London supplemented its sewer system with municipal sanitation workers. Every ward in the city had a cadre of inspectors, the Dickensian-named “beadles” and “under-beadles,” who probed, peered, sniffed, and questioned their way along the medieval street. Was waste being cleared from housefronts? Were alleys being kept clean? Better-off Londoners often built indoor privies, or garderobes, over alleyways, suspending them “on two beams laid from one house to the other.” For the garderobe’s owner, the privy meant liberation—no more chamber pots on cold nights—but for his neighbors, it meant piles of dung in the alley, a medley of frightful odors, and swarms of flies (rats do not usually feed on human waste). Beadles and under-beadles also investigated acts of sanitary piracy. The year before the plague arrived in England, two malefactors were arrested for piping their waste into the cellar of an unsuspecting neighbor.
Under the beadles were the rakers, the people who did the actual cleaning up. Rakers swept out gutters, disposed of dead animal carcasses, shoveled refuse from the streets and alleys, and hauled it to the Thames or other dumping points, like the Fleet River.
The beadles and rakers not only had the dirtiest job in medieval London, but the most thankless as well. In 1332 a beadle in Cripplegate Ward was attacked by an assailant who, to add insult to injury, stole the beadle’s cart; a few years later, two women in Billingsgate heaped such abuse on a team of rakers, municipal authorities ordered the women arrested. Indeed, judging from contemporary accounts, medieval London seems to have been engaged in a low-level civil war over sanitation. On one side were miscreants, like the foul-mouthed Billingsgate ladies and William E. Cosner, the garbage king of Farringdon Without. On the other side, the king, Edward III, who thundered, “Filth [is] being thrown from houses by day and night”; the nervous mayor, who tried to assuage these royal outbursts with a flurry of widely ignored sanitation ordinances; the much-abused beadles, under-beadles, and rakers; and irate private citizens like the murderous shop owner.
Granaries, fields of oats and barley, and large stocks of domestic animals also made the rat a ubiquitous figure in the medieval countryside, and the architecture of rural Europe may have made the peasant especially vulnerable to its sharp teeth. Most peasant huts were constructed of wattle and daub, a sort of medieval version of wallboard. First, wattle, or twigs, were woven into a lattice design; then the mudlike daub was smeared over the lattice. The combination was so permeable, one unfortunate English peasant was killed when a poorly aimed spear burst through his cottage wall one morning at breakfast.
An early-twentieth-century outbreak of plague in the Egyptian village of Sadar Bazaar highlights another rat-friendly aspect of peasant life. A rat count in the village revealed that families who slept with their domestic animals had more rats per household—the exact number was 9.6—than families who did not: 8.2.
The Greeks, who worshipped the body, considered cleanliness a cardinal virtue, and the Romans considered hygiene so important, their public baths looked like temples. At the baths of Diocletian, “the meanest Roman could purchase, with a small copper coin, the daily enjoyment of [a] scene which might excite the envy of the Kings of Asia,” wrote Edward Gibbon. However, early Christians, who thought self-abnegation a cardinal virtue, considered bathing, if not a vice, then a temptation. Who knows what impure thoughts might arise in a tub of warm water? Wit
h this danger in mind, St. Benedict declared, “To those who are well, and especially to the young, bathing shall seldom be permitted.” St. Agnes took the injunction to heart and died without ever bathing.
Religious suspicions about bathing softened during the late Middle Ages, though not enough to dramatically improve standards of personal hygiene. Catherine of Siena, who was born in 1347, also never bathed, though Catherine’s greatest achievement may have been her (reported) ability to go months at a time without a bowel movement. St. Francis of Assisi, who considered God’s water too precious to squander, was another infrequent bather. The laity continued to resist the bathtub for less high-minded reasons. Whatever one medieval Miss Manners might say about bathing as a way of being “civil and mannerly toward others,” it was easier to wash only your face and hands in the morning, just as it was easier to dump a full chamber pot out the window rather than walk down several flights of stairs. Undressing and changing clothing were also infrequent. Thus, another useful phrase in the fourteenth-century English-French dictionary was, “Hi, the fleas bite me so!”