BUT while the Black Death had thus moved northwards to the Scottish border, Wales and the adjoining British counties had not been spared. From Bristol the plague had spread into Worcestershire, rising to its crescendo in June 1349; then dying away in August only to return in the late autumn.{379} As early as April it had proved necessary to forbid further burials in the cathedral churchyard at Worcester because the congestion of the dead was beginning to threaten the survival of the living.{380}
‘Alas,’ recorded the Bishop,
the burials have in these days, to our sorrow, increased… (for the great number of the dead in our days has never been equalled); and, on this account, both for our brethren in the said church ministering devoutly to God and His most glorious Mother, for the citizens of the said city and others dwelling therein, and for all others coming to the place, because of the various dangers which may probably await them from the corruption of the bodies, we desire, as far as God shall grant us, to provide the best remedy.{381}
The Bishop’s remedy was to open a new graveyard beside the hospital of St Oswald and transfer there not only all burials which would otherwise have been in the Cathedral cemetery, but also from several of the parish churches of Worcester as well. ‘Hence’, in the lapidary phrase of a local historian, ‘that prodigious assemblage of tumulation which, at this time, cannot be viewed with indifference by the most cursory beholder.’{382}
Bishop Wulstan Bransford himself remained secluded in his manor at Hartlebury, four miles south of Kidderminster. In spite of this precaution he died on 6 August 1349. The King’s Escheator reported on the state of his estates between early August when he died and late November when a successor was appointed. His record shows that Hartlebury was not an isolated case. Tenants, he said, could not be got at any price; mills were vacant, forges standing idle, pigeon houses in ruins with all the birds fled. Of £140 owing to the Bishop in cash or in the form of various feudal services, £84 were never received, ‘…on account of the dearth of tenants, who were wont to pay rent, and of customary tenants, who used to perform the said works, but who all died in the deadly pestilence’. As late as 1354 relief was still being sought on the grounds that it was impossible for the Bishop to obtain any of the customary services which had once been his due; ‘…the remnant of the said tenants had changed them into other services and, after the plague, they were no longer bound to perform services of this kind’.
Some time in 1349 a serious riot took place between the townsmen and the monks of the Priory of St Mary, the Cathedral monastery. The townsmen broke down the gates of the priory, chased the prior ‘with bows and arrows and other offensive weapons’ and tried to set fire to the buildings. Here, as in the somewhat similar incident at Yeovil,{383} it is tempting to see some link with the Black Death. Certainly such a possibility cannot be excluded. But chasing the prior with bows and arrows and other offensive weapons was by no means unheard of in Worcester. Relations between town and cathedral monastery were often strained in medieval England and, though the Black Death may have heightened the tension, there is no reason to believe that in Worcester or elsewhere it actually created it.
Bishop Trilleck’s neighbouring diocese fared no better. In Hereford the Bishop forbade the acting of ‘theatrical plays and interludes’ in the city churches, a belated attempt to avert the wrath of the Almighty which seems to have met with little success. In the end, it is claimed, the epidemic was checked ‘by carrying the shrine of St Thomas of Cantilupe in procession’. In 1352 a joint petition was lodged by the patrons of the two churches of Great Colington and Little Colington:{384}
the sore calamity of pestilence of men lately passed, which ravaged the whole world in every part, has so reduced the number of the people of the said churches and for that said reason there followed, and still exists, such a paucity of labourers and other inhabitants, such manifest sterility of the lands, and such notorious poverty in the said parishes, that the parishioners and receipts of both churches scarcely suffice to support one priest.
The Bishop saw the justice of the complaint and the two parishes were duly amalgamated.
The county historians illustrate the impact of the plague by quoting the inquisition post-mortem on the family of John le Strange of Whitchurch.{385} John died on 20 August, when the plague had already done its worst over most of the county. He left three sons: Fulk, Humphrey and John the younger, of whom Fulk, as eldest, was naturally the heir. By the time the inquiry was held on 30 August, Fulk had already been dead two days. Before an inquisition could be held on Fulk’s estate, Humphrey too was dead. John, the third brother, survived but inherited a shattered estate. Even before his father died the three water mills ‘which used to be worth twenty marks’ had been reassessed at only half the value, ‘by reason of the want of those grinding, on account of the pestilence’. In another of his manors, ‘two carucates of land which used to be worth yearly sixty shillings’ were held to be worth nothing ‘because the domestic servants and labourers are dead and no one is willing to hire the land’.
Cheshire, to the north, was thinly populated in the fourteenth century but there is plenty of evidence to show that the losses were still severe. The heads of three of the largest religious houses – the abbot of St Werburgh’s, the prioress of St Mary’s, Chester and the prior of Norton – all died within a few weeks of each other. It was impossible to find anyone able and willing to hold the eyre of the forest, the bridge over the Dee remained out of repair for several months, the income gained from tolls at the passage of Lawton dropped away to little more than half its former value. The increased bargaining power which the Black Death put into the hands of the surviving tenants is well illustrated by the case of the manor of Rudheath, between Northwich and Macclesfield. A note on the Court Roll reads:{386}
In money remitted to the tenants… by the Justices of Chester and others, by the advice of the Lord, for the third part of their rent, by reason of the plague which had been raging, because the tenants there wished to depart and leave the holdings on the Lord’s hands unless they obtained this remission until the world do come better again, and the holdings possess a greater value… £10 13s. 11¾d.
It would be interesting to know more about the status of the tenants. The Government was shortly to pass legislation seeking to prevent the migration even of free tenants but it would not be surprising if the tenants of Rudheath in fact enjoyed no legal right to quit their tenements and were blackmailing their landlord with a threat to commit an unlawful act. Certainly such a case would not have been unique. The knowledge that the law was on his side was small comfort to a lord whose tenants had escaped and were now working on some neighbouring estate, enjoying more favourable terms and sheltered by their new master who, however he might deplore their breach of the feudal laws, was still primarily interested in ensuring that his own houses were lived in and his own lands were tilled.
* * *
Mr Rees, the leading authority on the Black Death in Wales, has recorded the lament of the contemporary Welsh poet, Jeuan Gethin, who must have seen and described the plague in March or April of 1349:{387}
We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the arm-pit; it is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion, a small boil that spares no one. Great is its seething, like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of an ashy colour. It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste. They are similar to the seeds of the black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea-coal and crowds precede the end. It is a grievous ornament that breaks out in a rash. They are like a shower of peas, the early ornaments of black death, cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries. It is a grievous thing that they should be on a fa
ir skin.
‘Black smoke’, ‘Rootless phantom’: such phrases convey something the mystery and horror of the plague to those who suffered it. But what is so moving about Gethin’s comment is that he did not allow the horror to overwhelm him but, with the vocabulary of a poet and the eye of a scientific observer, struggled to pin down the physical appearance of the phenomenon, to find the simile which would convey to the reader precisely what he saw. It was the defiant dedication of the doctor who, on his death-bed, records his symptoms from moment to moment for the future education of his colleagues. In the response of men like Jeuan Gethin lay the victory of mankind over his adversities.
Geoffrey the Baker traced the course of the plague around England. ‘The following year’, he went on, ‘it devastated Wales as well as England…’{388} The chronicler’s phrasing is obscure but it seems from the context that ‘The following year’ must refer to 1350. This must be incorrect. The Welsh were affected at much the same time as their English neighbours; in the south, indeed, somewhat earlier since the infection apparently moved across the Severn valley into Monmouthshire before it had run its course through Gloucestershire and Worcestershire.{389}
By March 1349 the infection had taken a firm grip on the whole lordship of Abergavenny. The lord of the eastern portion died at the beginning of the month, and by the middle of April, devastation was almost complete. In the manor of Penros only £4 out of rents worth £12 could be collected ‘because many of the tenements lie empty and derelict for lack of tenants’. The guardian of the heir petitioned for a reduction of £140 in a rent of £340. An inquiry allowed arrears only to the extent of £60 but, more significantly, accepted a permanent reduction of £40. The damage must have been grave indeed if the sceptical royal officials were prepared to accept that there was no hope of it being made good in the foreseeable future.
So far as any course can be plotted the disease seems to have travelled northwards through the border counties of Hereford, Shropshire and Cheshire and re-entered Wales in the North-East. The lead miners at Holywell, a few miles west of Flint, suffered so severely that the survivors refused to go on working. The Court Rolls of Ruthin provide an unusually complete picture of the depredations of the plague in that part of Wales. Nothing at all unusual seems to have happened before the end of May. Then, in the second week of June, the abnormal number of seven deaths took place within the jurisdiction of the Court of Abergwiller. The plague quickly spread. Seventy-seven of the inhabitants of Ruthin died within the next two weeks; ten in Llangollen, thirteen in Llanerch, twenty-five in Dogfeiling. Mortality continued at this level or even higher until the middle of July, abated for a few weeks, then returned to its most ferocious excesses in the last three weeks of August. The worst was then over and the winter passed with relatively little further loss.
Rees considers that the Black Death probably reached Carmarthen by way of the sea. Certainly two of the officials of the Staple were among the first victims and, if infected boats were putting into the harbour, their post would have been one of peculiar danger. The Lord of Carmarthen, in fact the Prince of Wales, suffered no less than other great landlords: receipts from mills and fisheries fell drastically and fairs, one of the most profitable sources of revenue, had to be abandoned altogether.
In Cardigan, so great was the mortality and the fear of infection that it proved almost impossible to find anyone to fill such offices as beadle, reeve, or serjeant. Out of one hundred and four gabularii or rent-paying tenants, ninety-seven died or fled before midsummer.
Wales in the mid-fourteenth century was divided into the lowland ‘Englishry’, largely controlled by colonizers from across the border and run on a manorial basis similar to that of England, and the upland ‘Welshry’ where the unfortunate natives skulked in what was left to them of their country. In the latter areas the writ of the English hardly ran and such records as survive give little indication of what befell the inhabitants. That they suffered seems certain and, if the analogy of the English hills is anything to go by, they suffered worse than their invaders in the valleys. But the damp mist which hangs so constantly over the Welsh mountains seems as apt to confound the historian as the tourist and even the small nugget of fact on which large guesses can be based is here entirely lacking.
Painful readjustment, demoralization, lawlessness: such are the familiar symptoms of a society recovering from the shock of the plague. Madoc Ap Ririd and his brother Kenwric
came by night in the Pestilence to the house of Aylmar after the death of the wife of Aylmar and took from the same house one water pitcher and basin, value one shilling, old iron, value fourpence. And they also present that Madoc and Kenwric came by night to the house of Almar in the vill of Rewe in the Pestilence, and from that house stole three oxen of John le Parker and three cows, value six shillings.{390}
How many others must have ‘come by night in the Pestilence’, to profit by the concomitant chaos, to rob the survivors or loot the houses of the dead.
But in Wales as in England, though law and order was badly shaken, substantially it survived. Burglary and banditry were anyhow far from uncommon in medieval England and self-defence the only satisfactory answer to the would-be aggressor. Things certainly got worse at the time of the Black Death but not sensationally so. The main highways were little less safe than in the past; the streets in the cities and big towns, anyhow never to be recommended during the hours of darkness, do not seem to have become conspicuously more perilous. In some cases, where the authorities lost their grip, the more prosperous citizens formed vigilance committees and took their protection into their own hands. A great many Aylmars were fated to lose, not only their wife but their pitcher and their old iron, value fourpence, as well. But the situation never became intolerable. Certainly the greater lawlessness was an inconsiderable extra burden compared with the overwhelming weight of the plague itself.
Mr Rees records that the effects of the Black Death in Wales seem to have been very similar, at least so far as the Englishry was concerned, to the effects in England itself. The decay of the manor and the manorial system was the immediate and the permanent consequence of the plague. The garden of the manor, with no one to tend it, was more and more often let out as pasture. The dovecot and fish stew were allowed to fall into disuse and often never reactivated. The lords of the manor renounced the fanning of the manorial demesne and began to let it out at the best rent they could get. The principle of bondage thenceforward played a far less significant part in the social structure of the manor. The system, in short, broke down because of the shortage of labour and the improved bargaining position of the villein.
All these phenomena were recorded in England too. But in the latter country so many qualifications have to be made to allow for the history of the previous decades, for regional variations and for eccentric and inexplicable movements against the trend that any generalization is open to destructive criticism. In Wales the scope for generalization is greater. Partly the reason for this is geographical: the area was smaller and more homogeneous; variations therefore were less. But the nature of the manorial system in Wales ensured that it would bear the imprint of the plague in a way much more clear-cut and decisive than its English counterpart. On the one hand the seeds of decay, which were already beginning to corrupt the English system long before Pasteurella pestis added its contribution, had by 1349 hardly affected Wales. Any change which did take place at this period can therefore be attributed with greater confidence to the plague. On the other hand, since the manorial system in Wales was younger and more fragile, it succumbed more rapidly to the blows which it received in 1349. In Wales the Black Death accomplished in a year or two a revolution which in England was worked out over the whole of the fourteenth century.
In part this statement depends for its validity upon a comfortable foundation of ignorance. Very little is known about the Black Death in Wales and far less work has been done upon the evolution of the manorial system there than is the case with its English pa
rent. No doubt a greater knowledge of the facts would suggest the need for important qualifications. But it is unlikely that the central proposition would be overthrown. The generalization so often made and so often disputed in the case of England – that the Black Death was directly responsible for the ending of the manorial system – can with greater confidence be applied to Wales.
But even here one is on shaky ground. For before the effects of the Black Death had fully worked themselves out, a cataclysm in some ways still more violent had fallen on Wales. The wars of independence of Owen Glendower, however noble or well-justified, set back the economic and social development of Wales by two hundred years. Through the thick clouds of hatred and bloodshed, through the appalling destruction and loss of life, it is difficult to see clearly what lay before and impossible to deduce how things would have developed but for the obliterating catastrophe. That the Black Death altered Wales is certain but the dimensions of the change can be no more than speculation.
And I, Brother John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minor and of the convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book those notable things which happened in my time, which I saw with my own eyes, or which I learned from people worthy of belief. And in case things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing so many evils and the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the evil one, being myself as if among the dead, waiting for death to visit me, have put into writing truthfully all the things that I have heard. And, lest the writing should perish with the writer and the work fail with the labourer, I leave parchments to continue this work, if perchance any man survive and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun.{391}
John Clyn added two words to his peroration: magna karistia – ‘great dearth’, then he joined his fellows; another hand briefly added at some later date, ‘Here it seems that the author died.’
The Black Death Page 22