by John Kelly
A few paragraphs later, Ralph conferred another even more extraordinary right on the laity—or rather, on some of its members. The bishop said that if no priest could be found, “The Sacrament of the Eucharist [Holy Communion] . . . may be administered by a deacon [a layman who assists in ecclesiastical functions].”
The bishop’s extraordinary decision to give the faithful the right to administer the holy sacraments was born of desperation. The diocese of Bath and Wells would lose almost half its normal complement of priests in the mortality, and as Ralph’s proclamation noted, the dangers of ministering to the sick had become so great, no surviving priest could be found who was “willing whether out of zeal or devotion or for a stipend to take on the [duties of] pastoral care.”
Alas, the bishop’s personal courage did not quite measure up to his muscular rhetoric. In late January, as the plague danced through the streets of Bath, he retreated to the relative safety of his manor in rural Wiveliscombe. In fairness, it was Ralph’s normal practice to winter at the manor. Moreover, in 1349 he was hardly the only august personage to pay a prolonged visit to rural England. Edward III himself spent the early months of 1349 in the rural southeast and around Windsor—very fretfully, apparently, since he sent up to London for holy relics. Still, Ralph’s decision to leave Bath probably contributed to an ugly incident later in the year.
In December, as the plague was waning, he decided to visit the little town of Yeovil to celebrate a Mass of thanksgiving. However, after a year of “death and death and death,” the townspeople apparently became upset at the sight of the pink, plump Ralph riding into town at the head of a rather large and resplendent entourage. After the bishop disappeared inside the local church, an angry mob gathered in a nearby square. Voices were raised, fists waved, weapons brandished, denunciations made—then suddenly the crowd was running toward the church. Bishop Ralph’s
Register, a kind of official diary, describes the rest of the story. “Certain sons of perdition, [armed with] a multitude of bows, arrows, bars, stones and other kinds of arms” burst into the church, “fiercely wound[ing] very many . . . servants of God,” then “incarcerated [us] . . . in the rectory of said church until on the day following [the attack] the neighbors, devout sons of the church . . . delivered us . . . from our prison.”
On returning to Wiveliscombe, a very angry Ralph ordered Yeovil citizens Walter Shoubuggare, Richard Weston, Roger Le Taillour, and John Clerk—as well as other “sons of perdition”—excommunicated. The men were commanded to “go around the parish church . . . on Sundays and feast days . . . bare head[ed] and foot[ed] . . .” in a penitential manner. In addition, at High Mass, they had to hold a candle “of one pound of wax” until the hot wax had melted onto their hands. Perhaps the memory of the cemetery at Yeovil—“polluted by violent effusions of blood”—began to haunt the bishop, or perhaps he started to feel guilty about wintering in Wiveliscombe. Whatever the reason, soon after issuing the excommunication order, Ralph revoked it. “Lest . . . the teaching [of] Christ be diminished and the devotion . . . of God be weakened,” he wrote the vicar at Yeovil, “we suspend the said interdict.”
In Oxfordshire, the county to the east of Ralph’s diocese, the plague caused such devastation, the documents that survived have an end-of-the-world feel to them. In 1359 we hear that taxes can no longer be collected in the little hamlet of Tilgarsley because it has been deserted since 1350; in nearby Woodeaton manor, that after “the mortality of men . . . scarce two tenants remained . . . and they would have departed had not Brother Nicholas of Upton . . . made an agreement with them.” In Oxford, which lost three mayors to the plague, the few surviving documents include a petition from a university official and a death estimate. The official complains “that the university is ruined and enfeebled by the pestilence . . . so that its estate can hardly be maintained or protected.” The death estimate comes from a former chancellor, the fierce Richard Fitzralph, Bishop of Armagh. In 1357 the bishop wrote that there used to be “in ye University of Oxenford . . . thrilty thousand scolers [scholars] . . . and now [in 1357] there beth unneth [under] six thousand.” Since the town of Oxford itself, let alone the university, could not have held thirty thousand souls, the bishop was surely exaggerating. Nonetheless, what was true was that a great many people had died. The most trustworthy account of what happened in Oxford may come from an eighteenth-century scholar who says that when the plague arrived in the autumn of 1348, “those that had places and houses in the country retired [though overtaken there also] and those that were left behind were almost totally swept away. The school doors were shut, colleges and halls relinquished and none scarce left to keep possession or . . . to bury the dead.”
What such postmortems leave out are the details of daily life that autumn: the never-ending tattoo of rain on thatched roofs, the muffed thud of shovels in church graveyards, the lamentations of parentless children and childless parents, and, in the soggy fields beyond the little villages of southern England, the rotting carcasses of thousands of sheep and cows. Mass animal die-offs were common in the mortality, but, judging from contemporary accounts, in England they achieved a special intensity. “In the same year [as the pestilence],” wrote a chronicler, “there was a great sheep murrain [epidemic] throughout the realm, so much so that in one place five thousand sheep died in a single pasture, and the bodies were so corrupt that no animal or bird would touch them.”
The English animal die-offs seem to have been caused by rinderpest and liverfluke, herd diseases that flourish in damp weather. In 1348 and 1349, their spread was probably further abetted by a lack of shepherds to tend threatened flocks. However, in other places the die-offs may have been part of the pestilence. In Florence dogs, cats, chickens, and oxen died in the plague, and, like people, many had buboes. The most haunting report of an animal die-off comes from a medieval Arab historian, who says that in Uzbekistan lions, camels, wild boar, and hare “all lay dead in the fields afflicted with the boil.”
In England, as in other countries, one of the few things that offered a measure of protection against the pestilence was privilege. The stone houses of the wealthy were less vulnerable to rat infestation,* and the aristocracy and the gentry tended to enjoy better health in general. Indeed, most modern fifty-year-olds would envy the superb physicality of Bartholomew Burghersh, a knight and diplomat of Edward III’s time. When Burghersh died in late middle age, he still had a lean, muscular build, broad shoulders, a complete set of teeth, and no signs of osteoarthritis, a common feature of medieval skeletons. According to one estimate, only 27 percent of aristocratic and wealthy England died in the mortality, as opposed to 42 to 45 percent of the country’s parish priests, and 40 to 70 percent of the peasantry.
However, as a poem of the time noted, no one, not even the highborn, was immune from the universal pestilence.
Scepter and Crown
Must tumble down
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
Southeast England, Early Fall 1348
Across the long quays of medieval Bordeaux flowed bales of wool, packets of produce, barrels of burgundy wine, and, on an early August day in 1348, a golden-haired princess of England, Joan Plantagenet, youngest child of Edward III. With her heart-shaped face and air of regal certitude, Joan must have seemed like a miracle to the weary French stevedores working the quays. For weeks they had known nothing but pestilential death; now, suddenly, here in their midst was a royal fairy tale, complete with four brightly pennoned English ships, a silky Spanish minstrel, a gift from Joan’s betrothed, Prince Pedro of Castile, a hundred regally dressed archers, and two of Edward’s most lofty servants, Andrew Ullford, leathery veteran of the French wars, and Robert Bourchier, lawyer and diplomat.
Little is known about the princess’s visit to Bordeaux except that she stopped there en route to Spain, where she was to marry Prince Pedro in the fall, and that the morning of her arrival the mayor, Raymond de Bisquale, was wait
ing on a quay to warn her and the rest of her wedding party about the presence of the plague. We also know that the English brushed aside the warning, though we do not know why. The princess’s foolishness can probably be attributed to her age. Fifteen-year-old royals must be even more inclined than ordinary fifteen-year-olds to think themselves immortal. However, the recklessness of the two senior figures in the royal party, Bourchier and Ullford, is harder to fathom. Perhaps after surviving Crécy, where the English had been outnumbered four or five to one, Ullford had developed his own delusions of immortality. Or maybe Mayor de Bisquale struck him and his fellow mandarin, Bourchier, as one of those inconsequential little Frenchmen with fussy hair and a funny walk.
The two royal officials should have known better.
On August 20 Ullford died a hard plague death, leavened only by a good view. The old soldier’s final hours were spent in the Château de l’Ombriere, a sumptuous Plantagenet castle overlooking Bordeaux harbor. Several others in the wedding party also died, including, on September 2, Princess Joan, who left behind the memory of a girlish laugh and an unworn wedding gown made from four hundred and fifty feet of rakematiz: a thick, rich silk embroidered with gold. What the princess did not leave behind was a body. In October Edward offered the Bishop of Carlisle a huge sum to go to pestilential Bordeaux and retrieve the princess’s corpse, but whether the prelate actually visited the town is unclear. In any case, Joan’s body was never recovered. Historian Norman Cantor thinks this is because her corpse was burned in October, when Mayor de Bisquale ordered the harbor set aflame. Intended to check the spread of the pestilence, the fire blazed out of control and destroyed several nearby buildings, including, notes Professor Cantor, Château de l’Ombriere, where Princess Joan died.
On September 15, when Edward III wrote to King Alfonso, Pedro’s father, to inform him of Joan’s death, the English demigod sounded like every parent who has ever tried to make sense of something as senseless as a child’s death. “No fellow human being could be surprised if we were inwardly desolated by the sting of grief, for we are human too. But we who have placed our trust in God . . . give thanks to Him that one of our own family, free of all stain, whom we have loved with pure love, has been sent ahead to heaven to reign among the choirs of virgins where she can gladly intercede for our offences before God.”
As Edward wrote, a new metastasis was developing in the south of England. During the fall, the plague appeared in Wiltshire, the county immediately to the east of Dorset, then, almost simultaneously, in Wiltshire’s eastern neighbors, Hampshire and Surrey. A circumstantial case can be made for Southampton, on the Wiltshire coast, as the source of the new outbreaks. Ships from France, including from Bordeaux, visited the port almost daily. However, since there were no telltale bursts of ecclesiastical death in Southampton until December, it also seems possible that this new assault by the plague originated in Dorset—perhaps from Melcombe,
Y. pestis spread east as well as north.
All that can be said with certainty seven hundred years later is that in the fall of 1348, people in the counties to the east of Dorset knew that death was about to burst upon them. On October 24 Bishop William Edendon, whose Hampshire diocese of Winchester stood directly in harm’s way, issued an ominous warning. Evoking the lamentations of Rachel in Matthew 2:18,* the bishop declared, “A voice has been heard in Rama. . . . We report with anguish the serious news . . . that this cruel plague has begun a . . . savage attack on the coastal area of England. . . . We are struck with terror lest . . . this brutal disease should rage in any part of our city or diocese.”
On November 17, with the plague now howling at Hampshire’s borders, Bishop Edendon took the occasion to remind the faithful of “the radiant eternal light which glows . . . in the dark core of human suffering.” In a second proclamation, the bishop declared that while “sickness and premature death often come from sin . . . by the healing of souls this kind of sickness [the plague] is known to cease.” There is no record of how many of the faithful drew hope from the bishop’s words.
Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, over the first winter of the pestilence, the little towns of southern England began to die, each in its own way. The following May, as a spring sun warmed the gray slabs of Stonehenge, the only sound to be heard on the nearby Wiltshire estate of Carleton Manor was birdsong. Carleton’s water mills stood quiet, its farmlands untilled, and twelve of its thatched cottages empty. The years 1348 and 1349 may have been the quietest years in the English countryside since the land was first inhabited by man. At Ivychurch priory, near the Wiltshire-Hampshire border, twelve of the priory’s thirteen canons lay dead. One can scarcely imagine the feelings of the survivor, James de Grundwell, but by March l349 he must have found it odd not to wake to the sound of rain pounding against the roof and the moans of dying monks echoing through the dank monastery halls. Edward thought de Grundwell’s good fortune worthy of both a promotion and a mention in a royal dispatch. “Know ye that since . . . all the other canons of the same house, in which hitherto there had been a community of thirteen canons regular, have died . . . , we appoint James de Grundwell custodian of the possessions, the Bishop testifying that he is a fit and proper.”
In Winchester, ancient capital of England, an all-too-familiar problem produced a bitter division in January 1349. Concerned about unburied corpses “infecting” the air—and hence spreading the pestilence—the laity wanted to dig a plague pit outside the city; but the clerical establishment, led by Bishop Edendon, resisted. The plague pit would be on unconsecrated ground, and people buried on such ground might be overlooked on Resurrection Day. On January 19 Bishop Edendon tried to mollify popular discontent about the Church’s stance on burials with another proclamation. There was good news, the bishop declared. “[T]he Supreme pontiff . . . had . . . on account of the imminent great mortality, granted to all people of the diocese . . . a plenary indulgence at the hour of death if they departed in good faith.” However, with piles of unburied bodies everywhere, secular Winchester had become impatient with religious bromides. A few days after the bishop’s announcement, anger about the plague pit boiled over into violence. A group of townsfolk attacked a monk while he was saying a funeral Mass.
After the attack, the Church bowed to popular will and ordered the town’s existing cemeteries expanded and new burial sites dug in the countryside. However, Bishop Edendon, who had one of those minds that have kept the Catholic Church in business for the last two thousand years, was not about to let the townspeople have the last word in the dispute. As part of the cemetery expansion, he announced that a plot of diocese land used by local merchants as a market and fairgrounds for over a century would be converted into a burial site. For good measure, the bishop also had the town of Winchester fined forty pounds for encroaching on diocese property.
Over the winter of 1348–49, as “every joy . . . ceased . . . and every note of gladness . . . hushed,” perhaps half of Winchester died. The diocese, which included the neighboring county of Surrey, had one of the highest clerical mortality rates in England; 48.8 percent of the beneficed—or salaried—clergy in the diocese perished. Figures for the town of Winchester are less precise, but by 1377 a preplague population of eight thousand to ten thousand had shrunk to a little more than two thousand. Not all the missing eight thousand townspeople were plague fatalities, but one historian thinks a death figure of four thousand for Winchester is “conservative.” Other parts of Hampshire county also became “abodes of horror and a very wilderness” over the first winter of the pestilence. In Crawley the plague carried off so many people, the village did not attain its preplague population of 400 again until 1851, five centuries later.
At Southampton, where the Italians came to buy English wool and the French to deliver wine, contemporary records indicate that as much as 66 percent of the beneficed clergy may have died in the first winter of the plague. Hayling Island, near Portsmouth, also suffered grievously. “Since the greater part of the . . . population die
d whilst the plague was raging,” Edward III declared in 1352, “. . . the inhabitants are oppressed and daily are falling most miserably into greater poverty.”
While some villages vanished entirely during the Black Death, one of the great English legends—that hundreds of villages were obliterated in the pestilence—has turned out to be partially myth. Recent research indicates that many of the “lost” villages actually succumbed to economic atherosclerosis; others, though given a final nudge into oblivion by the mortality, were already so weak economically, death was inevitable. However, the legend of the lost plague villages is not entirely untrue. Here and there in the green and pleasant English countryside, one comes across the odd ruin—the crumbling wall or overgrown path—that still echoes of the time when, everywhere upon the land, there was “death without sorrow, marriage without affection, want without poverty and flight without escape.”
Undoubtedly, the average Englishman found the mortality as frightening as the average Florentine or Parisian, but a phlegmatic, self-contained streak in the English character kept outbursts like those at Winchester and Yeovil and quarantines like those at Gloucester relatively infrequent. For every English “son of perdition” overcome by fear, there were a dozen John Ronewyks: solid, undemonstrative men who ignored the danger and quietly went about their work. As one English historian has observed, “With his friends and relations dying in droves, . . . with every kind of human intercourse rendered perilous by the possibility of infection, the medieval Englishman obstinately carried on in his wonted way.”