Whether the inhabitants of these erstwhile earthly paradises would have recognized them from Edendon’s description may be doubtful but the picture of the fate which had overtaken them must have caused dismay in the minds of all his readers. For, went on the Bishop:
…this cruel plague, as we have heard, has already begun singularly to afflict the various coasts of the realm of England. We are struck by the greatest fear lest, which God forbid, the fell disease ravage any part of our city and diocese. And although God, to prove our patience and justly to punish our sins, often afflicts us, it is not in man’s power to judge the divine counsels. Still, it is much to be feared that man’s sensuality which, propagated by the tendency of the old sin of Adam, from youth inclines to all evil, has now fallen into deeper malice and justly provoked the Divine wrath by a multitude of sins to this chastisement.
To avert this doom the Bishop instructed his clergy to exhort their flocks to attend the sacrament of penance; on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays to join in saying the seven penitential and the fifteen gradual psalms and to take part, barefoot and with heads bowed, in processions around the market place or through the churchyards, reciting the greater litany. Three weeks later, while staying at Esher, he followed up this mandate with a further letter reminding the people ‘that sickness and premature death often come from sin and that, by the healing of souls, this kind of sickness is known to cease’.{276}
But belated penitence availed nothing. The plague struck the diocese of Winchester with especial violence. 48.8 per cent of all beneficed clergy died, a figure not exceeded in any other diocese of England.{277} One explanation of this high mortality may be that the coastline of Hampshire was particularly exposed to ship-borne infection; the other two dioceses to suffer most were those of Exeter and Norwich, both of them similarly vulnerable. But it is difficult to make any sensible deductions valid for the whole of England about the factors which made any given area a ready target for the plague. In one region the hilly country seemed to suffer most, in another the plains. The fens of East Anglia escaped lightly, yet the valleys of the Severn and the Thames were devastated. The coast of Hampshire was much affected, yet Kent was relatively little damaged. Nowhere was immune but it seemed that only when the plague had come and gone could any town or county know whether or not it would prove especially susceptible.
In Crawley the population dropped from four hundred in 1307 to only a hundred and eighty in 1673. It did not reach four hundred again until 1851.{278} Certainly the Black Death was not alone responsible for what must have been a protracted process of depopulation. But the rapid changes in the methods used in the cultivation of the manorial demesne, in particular as regards the number of weekly workers, which immediately followed the epidemic show how much it must have affected the available labour force.{279} Prior to 1349 the reeve of Crawley, on behalf of his landlord, the Bishop of Winchester, was happy to receive ‘fees for annual recognition’, that is to say, fees paid by villeins for the privilege of staying away from the manor to which they belonged. After this date no more such fees were received. Given the dearth of labour that then existed no landlord would willingly allow his villeins to deprive him of their services. Certainly the villeins did wander abroad, with greater frequency and success even than before the plague; but it was in defiance of their landlord and the law of the land.
Hampshire’s off-shore islands suffered no less than the mainland.{280} The Isle of Wight was so reduced in population that, in 1350, the King remitted the tax due from the royal tenants. Almost every benfice in the island became vacant during the plague. Hayling Island, off Portsmouth, suffered quite as badly. ‘Moreover’, said a royal declaration of 1352, ‘since the greater part of the said population died whilst the plague was raging, now, through the dearth of servants and labourers, the inhabitants are oppressed and daily are falling most miserably into greater poverty.’{281} For these unfortunates, too, a reduced rate of taxation was conceded.
Winchester, the ancient capital of England, was as severely affected as any large town in the country. As usual it is difficult to establish either how large the population was before the plague or what percentage perished. Professor Russell has calculated that, in 1148, the population was about 7,200 and that, by 1377, the year of the poll tax, it had dropped to a mere 2,160.{282} Almost certainly numbers would have grown between 1148 and 1300 and dropped only slightly, if at all, between 1300 and 1348. The population at the latter date could not have been less than 8,000 and was perhaps as much as 9,000 or 10,000. If one guessed that the Black Death killed 4,000 people in the city the estimate would probably be conservative.
By January 1349 deaths were running at such a level that the existing burial grounds were overcrowded. The Church insisted that all burials must take place in consecrated ground; the populace, more concerned with hygiene than theology, insisted with equal vigour that the bodies of the plague victims must be taken outside the city walls and buried in a common pit. When a monk from St Swithun’s, the priory of the Cathedral, was conducting a burial service in the central churchyard, an angry crowd broke in and attacked and wounded him. The Bishop, outraged at this aggression by ‘low class strangers and degenerate sons of the church’ against a man ‘whom, by his habit and tonsure, they knew to be a monk’, ordered the excommunication of the guilty. At the same time he gave the indignant citizens most of what they wanted – ordering the rapid enlargement of the existing graveyards and the opening of new ones away from the centre of the town. He explained, for the benefit of the less well-informed members of his flock, that, since the Catholic Church believed in the resurrection of the dead, it was important that their corpses should be buried ‘not in profane places, but in specially enclosed and consecrated cemeteries, or churches where with due reverence they are kept, like the relics of the Saints, till the day of Resurrection’.{283}
In the Middle Ages it rarely paid to get into a wrangle with a monk. The Bishop of Winchester had the last laugh when the time came to enlarge the churchyard of the Cathedral. With polite expressions of regret it was explained that this could only be done by reclaiming a stretch of land between the Cathedral and the High Street which had been granted to the priory by Henry I but subsequently ‘usurped’ by the Mayor, bailiffs and citizens as a site for a market and for bi-annual fairs. In Winchester, it was clear, either the quick or the dead were going to suffer and, if the Church had anything to do with it, it was not going to be the dead.
As in Siena, the plague left Winchester a tangible record of its visit. Edendon had formed grandiose plans for remodelling the west end of the Cathedral and reconstructing the nave in the Decorated style. He completed the demolition work in 1348, pulling down the two massive towers that flanked the Norman front. But when it came to rebuilding, the Black Death removed his labour force and funds ran short. A new west front was hurriedly flung up as a temporary measure until there was time and money to build something which would redound with greater éclat to the glory of Bishop Edendon. So far this makeshift has lasted something over six hundred years and still appears to have plenty of life left in it.
* * *
The plague reached Surrey, the other half of Bishop Edendon’s diocese, a few weeks after Hampshire. March and April seem to have been the worst months. Banstead, four miles east of Epsom, was typical of many of the victims.{284}
The manor had been granted by Edward III to Queen Philippa as part of her dowry. A certain John Wortyng was installed as bailiff but evidently failed to win the confidence of the Queen’s man-of-business. Some years after the Black Death had passed through the manor he claimed an allowance of £6 9s. 10d. for rent not paid on vacant tenements. The entry was struck out in his accounts and the sceptical note appended: ‘Cancelled until inquiry is made into how many and what tenements are in the Queen’s hands and for how much he could have answered on the issues of each tenement.’ In the event he seems to have been proved justified. A jury sitting in 1354 found that twenty-seven out of 105
villein holdings had been vacant since the epidemic. It is not unreasonable to deduce that a few others at least had found new tenants during this period and that the original death roll must therefore have included at least a third of Banstead’s villeins.
The Black Death at Farnham has been the subject of a special study.{285} The hundred of Farnham was one of the richest and most populous in the great estates of the Bishop of Winchester. Judging by the Reeve’s records in the Pipe Rolls there was a freakish first visitation of the plague at the end of 1348 which disappeared as mysteriously as it had come early in 1349 and was followed by the main outbreak at the same time as the rest of Surrey a few months later. In the twelve months between September 1348 and September 1349, 185 heads of households died. The ratio between householders and dependants is a subject of some controversy but, for the moment, it will be sufficient to assume that it could be no less than one to three. The total population of the hundred was between three thousand and four thousand; taking a figure half-way between the two, it would seem that some 20 per cent of the inhabitants died.
The paradoxical result of this mortality was that the Bishop of Winchester did very well financially. In a normal year fines paid on the estates of the deceased yielded between £8 and £20; in the twelve months of the Black Death this soared to £101 14s. 4d. As heriots, the head of cattle which the heirs of every dead tenant had to hand over to the landlord, the reeve received twenty-six horses and a foal, fifty-seven oxen, one bull, fifty-four cows, twenty-six bullocks, nine wethers and twenty-six sheep. This windfall had its embarrassing side. Prices had slumped as a result of the plague and the reeve, even after killing and salting some of the oxen and cows, was forced to convert part of the demesne to pasture for the new herds.
On the debit side there was a substantial drop in rents; either because the tenants were dead or because conditions were so difficult that all or part of the rent was remitted by the landlord. But, as on most of the manors of the Bishop, labour services were more important than a money rent. So great was the surplus of labour in Farnham immediately before the Black Death that it proved relatively easy to fill the vacancies and get in the harvest without much recourse to specially hired workmen. The three traditional harvest dinners were given for the twenty-four customary workers at a total cost of nine shillings, a figure very similar to that for earlier seasons. In the year in which the Black Death was at its worst, total receipts at Farnham were £305; total expenses only £43 5s.1¼d.
If this had been the whole story, then Farnham would have had cause to congratulate itself. But though the plague diminished in virulence it was still active. Between September 1349 and September 1350 another 101 head tenants died. By now the dwindling of the population must have meant that the ratio between householder and dependant also diminished but at least another three hundred villagers died. By the end of 1350, especially as a few further cases of plague occurred even in the last months of that year, more than a third of the people of Farnham must have been dead. Forty times in that year it was said that no fine was paid because there was nobody left to inherit. This meant that the cottage and land escheated to the lord; a situation which was profitable enough for the landlord in normal times when there were plenty of spare villeins to take up the tenement but disastrous when all the putative tenants were in their graves. The income from fines fell to £36 15s. 10d. and only four heriots were delivered, presumably remitted through charity or because the landlord had too many cattle already. By the end of 1349, fifty-two holdings were lying derelict. Thirty-six of these were filled up rapidly but the remainder proved more difficult. An increased amount of work on the demesne, particularly at harvest time, had to be done by hired labour and wages rose sharply in 1349 and 1350. With the virtual closure of the potters ‘and brick makers’ industry in the neighbourhood, sales of clay and fern fell away to nothing. But even in this year the reeve could still show a reasonable profit on his operations.
It took some years to get things back to normal. Considerable pressure had to be brought on tenants to take up the vacant holdings but in the end all of them were filled. Wages never returned to the 1348 figure, but they soon fell below the inflated level of 1350. A market for clay and fern gradually reopened. Good administration; the support of a rich and powerful landlord and the natural wealth of the land, ensured that the hundred of Farnham, like the greater part of the Bishop’s estates, was never a liability. In spite of the death of every third inhabitant, life and business went on much as before. In this Farnham was no more typical of England as a whole than the many manors already mentioned where the economy collapsed and income fell away to almost nothing. But its resilience was far from being unique or even exceptional. It is important to remember that both kinds of manors existed when seeking to establish a picture of England under the Black Death.
9. LONDON: HYGIENE AND THE MEDIEVAL CITY
AND so the Black Death lapped at the gates of London. Compared with Paris, Vienna, Bruges or Constantinople, London may not have seemed so enormous a metropolis; certainly in architecture, painting and general grace of living Venice and Florence were far ahead. But it was still by a long way the most important commercial and industrial centre of England; three times, at least, as large as its nearest rival. Westminster, just outside the city walls, was the seat of government and of the King.
London seems to have grown more rapidly and more consistently than any of its rivals. Though the city was not included in the Domesday Book, at that time it probably had some fifteen or sixteen thousand inhabitants. By early in the thirteenth century, Professor Russell calculated, this figure must have doubled and, by 1348, doubled again to a population of some sixty thousand within the city wall.{286} The immediately outlying villages, integrated with the city in many ways and certainly part of the same unit from the point of view of the spread of the plague, must have added another ten or fifteen thousand to the total.
It would be inappropriate, in a book of this scope, to attempt any profound or detailed analysis of day-to-day life in a medieval city. Nevertheless there is much about the state of London, as for that matter about Paris or Florence, which is directly relevant to any study of the plague, since there were certain built-in features in the Londoner’s pattern of life which contributed directly to its successful spread. Perhaps the most relevant of these was the overcrowding. Privacy was not a concept close to the heart of medieval man and even in the grandest castle life was conducted in a perpetual crowd. Hoccleve writes of an earl and countess, their daughter and their daughter’s governess who all slept in the same room. It would not be in the least surprising to know that they slept in the same bed as well if, indeed, there was a bed. In the houses of the poor, where beds were an unheard of luxury, it would not have been exceptional to find a dozen people sleeping on the floor of the same room. In the country villages, indeed in many urban houses as well, pigs and chickens and perhaps even ponies, cows and sheep, would share the common residence. Even if people had realized that such a step was desirable it would have been physically impossible to isolate the sick. The surprise is not how many households were totally wiped out but, rather, in how many cases some at least of the inhabitants survived.
The dirt and inadequate sanitation of these hovels was, strictly speaking, less relevant to the spread of the Black Death. No one was going to become infected with bubonic plague by drinking tainted water or breathing foetid air. But, equally, it is true that the plague found its work easier in bodies weakened by dysentery, diarrhoea or the thousand natural shocks that the unclean body is particularly heir to. Still more important; warmth and dirt provide the ideal environment for the rat. The eventual victory of the brown rat over the plague-bearing black rat was in part due to the physical superiority of the former, but, at least as important, was a tribute to the rise in the standard of living and the substitution of brick for clay and wood which deprived the black rat of his sustenance and favourite way of life. The medieval house might have been built to specific
ations approved by a rodent council as eminently suitable for the rat’s enjoyment of a healthy and care-free life.
What one might call the cinematic image of a medieval town is well known. Lanes barely wide enough to allow two ponies to pass meander between the steep walls of houses which grow together at the top, so as almost to blot out the light of day. The lanes themselves – they seem indeed more drains than lanes – are deep in mud and filth; no doubt to be attributed to the myriad buxom servant-wenches who appear at the upper windows and empty chamber pots filled with excrement on the passers-by. No street corner is without the body of a dead donkey and a beggar exhibiting his gruesome sores and deformities to the charitable citizens. Clearly one is in a society where hygiene counts for nothing and no town council would waste its time supervising the cleaning of streets or the emptying of cesspools.
The picture, though of course over-drawn, is not entirely false. A medieval city, by modern standards, would seem a pretty filthy and smelly spot. But it would be unfair to suggest that citizens and rulers were indifferent to the nuisance or did nothing to remedy it. Thanks to the researches of Mr E. L. Sabine{287} and others, we now know much about conditions in London and the activities of the mayor, aldermen and common council. Though London, as the largest city of England, had the most serious problems, so also it had the greatest resources with which to deal with them. The overall picture of London’s filth or cleanliness will be more or less valid for most of England’s towns and cities.
Sanitary equipment, it need hardly be said, was scarce and primitive. In monasteries or castles, ‘garderobes’ were relatively common. Since 1307, the Palace of Westminster boasted a pipe between the king’s lavatory and the main sewer which had been installed to carry away the filth from the royal kitchen. But this was probably unique in London; usually the privies of the aristocrats jutted out over the Thames so that their excrement would fall directly in the river or splash down the face of the castle wall. The situation was worse when the privies projected, not over a free flowing river but above a shallow stream or ditch. An inquest into the state of the Fleet Prison Ditch in 1355 revealed that, though it should have been ten feet wide and deep enough to float a boat laden with a tun of wine, it was choked by the filth from eleven latrines and three sewers. So deep was the resultant sludge that no water from Fleet Stream was flowing around the prison moat.
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