The Black Death

by Philip Ziegler

  Even if no other evidence survived from Ireland, John Clyn’s cry would show how painfully the country must have suffered. He was a lonely, frightened man, who had already witnessed the death-agonies of almost all the other members of his house and now sought to record their end for posterity before the oblivion of death swept over all Kilkenny and all the country – even all the world. Whether anyone would live to read his words he did not know, hardly dared even wonder, but that instinct which leads men to seek to communicate with their unknown successors, whoever they might be and whatever they might be doing, now drove him on to write his chronicle, a memorial to the terror and grief of those who were still alive.

  There is still much that is obscure about the course of the Black Death in Ireland.{392} We cannot even be sure from whence it came. The most likely source is Bristol which was then the main centre of Anglo-Irish trade, but it could well have come direct from Gascony or one of the ports of Brittany. More important and considerably more mysterious is the period of the epidemic. John Clyn was categoric. Referring to 1348 he said:

  …in the months of September and October, bishops, prelates, priests, friars, noblemen and others, women as well as men, came in great numbers from every part of Ireland to the pilgrimage centre of That Molyngis. [Teach Molinge on the River Burrow.{393}] So great were their numbers that on many days it was possible to see thousands of people flocking there; some through devotion but others (the majority indeed) through fear of the plague, which then was very prevalent. It began near Dublin at Howth and at Drogheda. These cities were almost entirely destroyed and emptied of inhabitants so that in Dublin alone, between the beginning of August and Christmas, 14,000 people died.

  There is no more reason to take Clyn’s statistics seriously than those of any other chronicler but, equally, there is no reason to expect him to be seriously wrong over dates. On this basis, therefore, Ireland must have been infected within a month or two of England. On the whole a rather longer delay was to be expected but there is nothing wildly improbable in such a conclusion.

  Yet in August 1349 Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, told the Pope during a visit to Avignon that the plague had destroyed two thirds of the English nation but had not yet done any conspicuous harm to the Irish or the Scots.

  Such minor outbreaks as there had been were confined to the coastal areas. Fitzralph may have been a few weeks behind the times with his information but he went directly from Ireland to Avignon and would anyhow have kept closely in touch with affairs in his diocese. It took a minimum of fifteen or sixteen days to get from London to Avignon and an allowance of four weeks was not considered over-generous. From Dublin it would probably have taken a few days longer. But on any calculation the Archbishop must have been aware of any major calamity in Ireland which happened before the end of June. Even allowing for hyperbole on the part of John Clyn, it is incredible that the Archbishop should have dismissed as of minor importance an epidemic which could be described as having ‘almost entirely destroyed and emptied of inhabitants’ Howth, Drogheda and Dublin.

  Other information supports Richard Fitzralph. The Archbishop of Dublin died on 14 July 1349, and the Bishop of Meath in the same month. If Fitzralph had left Ireland about the middle of July it is not at all surprising that he should not have had this news by the time of his audience with the Pope. But it is more surprising that both deaths should have occurred almost a year after John Clyn’s plague had ravaged Ireland. Further evidence from the Annals of Connacht for 1349 lead to the same conclusion. ‘A great plague in Moylurg’ these record ‘and all Ireland this year. Matha, son of Cathal O’Ruairc died of the plague. The Earl’s grandson died. Risdered O’Raigillig, King of East Brefne died.’{394} Clyn may have expressed himself badly and meant that, though the first cases of the plague were recorded in 1348, the epidemic did not become serious until 1349, in particular the summer and autumn. For the want of a better explanation this will have to suffice. Certainly John Clyn can be excused a certain stylistic looseness given the circumstances in which he wrote.

  Whatever the dates of the epidemic there is ample evidence of its disastrous impact. Even while Fitzralph was making his way to Avignon it was spreading out from the Pale on the east coast to the midlands and the west. John Clyn records that, of his own Friars Minor, twenty-five died in their house at Drogheda and twenty-three at Dublin. In July 1350 the Mayor and Bailiffs of Cork filed a petition pleading for the revision of certain taxes. Clonmel and New Ross also petitioned successfully for relief. The citizens of Dublin begged for a special allowance of a thousand quarters of corn. As late as 1354 the tenants of certain royal farms around the capital were claiming that they had been reduced to pauperdom by the ‘plague lately existing in the said country’, and because of ‘the excessive price of provisions’ which was exacted by certain royal officials. Geoffrey the Baker states that the Anglo-Irish were almost wiped out but the pure blooded Irish in the mountains remained inviolate till 1357.{395} This cannot be accepted but it is possible that comparatively little damage was done among the indigenous Irish and that these suffered more severely in another epidemic eight years later – perhaps of some quite different disease.

  But to see the sufferings of Ireland in their proper perspective it is necessary to remember that, in appealing for relief, reference was usually made not only to the plague but also to the ‘other many misfortunes which had happened there’ – ‘the destruction and wasting of lands, houses and possessions by our Irish enemies’. An inquisition of the lands of Roger de Mortimer found ‘a great and flourishing manor, full of free tenants, farmers and burgesses, waste’. The manor of Geashil, belonging to the Earl of Kildare, was ‘worth nothing’. The demesne lands in County Longford ‘lay waste for lack of tenants’. All these statements of sad fact sound familiar enough and could have been culled from the records of any county of England which was recovering from the plague. But in Ireland they stem from the 1320s and 1330s; fruit not of the plague but of the perpetual, ruinous civil war which ravaged the country in the fourteenth as in almost every other century. The Black Death was no less painful to the Irish because they were accustomed to live in a state of even bloodier disorder than their neighbours across the Irish Sea but it should not be forgotten that a high proportion of their misfortunes would have arisen even though there had been no plague to help them forward.

  * * *

  It would be proper to conclude this tour of the Black Death in Britain with some account of its spread to Scotland. Unfortunately, little detail is recorded. According to Knighton{396} the Scots were delighted when they heard of the fate which had overtaken their hated neighbours in England. They regarded it as a proper retribution for past offences and, as the plague swirled over Cumberland and Durham, massed their forces in the forest of Selkirk, ‘laughing at their enemies’ and awaiting the best moment to invade. It was their last laugh for, as they were on the point of moving into action, ‘the fearful mortality fell upon them and the Scots were scattered by sudden and savage death so that, within a short period, some five thousand died’. The panicstricken soldiers dispersed throughout Scotland, dying by the side of the road or carrying the infection with them to their homes.

  ‘God and Sen Mungo, Sen Ninian and Seynt Andrew scheld us this day and ilka day fro Goddis grace and the foule deth that Ynglessh men dyene upon.’{397} Such was the prayer that the Scottish soldier was trained to say as he watched the sufferings of the English on the other side of the frontier. It is certain that his prayers went for little but so little attention is paid to the Black Death by historians of Scotland that one is tempted to believe that St Mungo, St Ninian and St Andrew must have spared their admirers some part at least of the tribulations of other less well protected Europeans. One of the few people living at the time of the plague whose account survives is John of Fordun.{398}

  ‘In the year 1350,’ he wrote,

  there was, in the kingdom of Scotland, so great a pestilence and plague among men… as, from the
beginning of the world even unto modern times, had never been heard of by man, nor is found in books, for the enlightenment of those who come after. For, to such a pitch did that plague wreak its cruel spite, that nearly a third of mankind were thereby made to pay the debt of nature. Moreover, by God’s will, this evil led to a strange and unwonted kind of death, insomuch that the flesh of the sick was somehow puffed out and swollen, and they dragged out their earthly life for barely two days. Now this everywhere attacked especially the meaner sort and common people; – seldom the magnates. Men shrank from it so much that, through fear of contagion, sons, fleeing as from the face of leprosy or from an adder, durst not go and see their parents in the throes of death.

  This all-too familiar description could have applied as well to any other country. Androw of Wyntoun,{399} who was contemporaneous with John of Fordun but certainly never read the latter’s chronicles, confirms that Scotland suffered severely.{400}

  In Scotland, the fyrst Pestilens

  Begouth, off sa gret wyolens,

  That it was sayd, off lywänd men

  The thyrd part it dystroyid then

  Efftyr that in till Scotland

  A yhere or more it was wedand

  Before that tyme was nevyr sene

  A pestilens in oure land sa kene:

  Bathe men and barnys and women

  It sparryed noucht for to kille them.

  Finally, the Book of Pluscarden,{401} a slightly later chronicle but still written dose enough to the date of the plague to have some ring of authenticity, also refers to a third of the population being slain and to the poor suffering far worse than the rich.

  ‘They were attacked with inflammation and lingered barely four and twenty hours,’ noted the anonymous author, concluding more hopefully: ‘The sovereign remedy is to pay vows to St Sebastian, as appears more clearly in the legend of his life.’

  The most striking feature of these accounts is the reiterated statement that a third of the population perished. This is a conservative figure compared with the speculation of the chroniclers of other countries whose estimates of the mortality might be anything between fifty and ninety per cent, or even on occasion the entire population. It is perhaps to be expected that the medieval statisticians of Scotland would approach their task with a sobriety not to be found in the English or the still more volatile Latins but, even so, it seems unlikely that they can be acquitted entirely of exaggeration. Unless their estimates were very far out of line with those of other countries the figure of a third must have been substantially too high. If this is so, then Scotland must have escaped more lightly than England or Wales.

  The emphasis given to the virtual immunity of the rich and powerful is also interesting. Everywhere it was the poor who suffered worst and, generally speaking, the more eminent the individual’s position, the greater his chances of survival. To take only one example: 18 per cent of the English bishops died as against some 40 per cent of all beneficed clergy. But it was by no means unusual for the great to perish; there are innumerable cases of noblemen or merchants, living in large and spacious houses, who met the same fate as their less prosperous neighbours. Clearly such cases cannot have been unknown in Scotland but John of Fordun’s emphatic statement that ‘the meaner sort and common people’ were above all the victims suggests that the discrepancy was even more marked north of the Tweed.

  With lower overall mortality and relatively trivial losses among the nobility and upper levels of society it is less surprising that the plague should have left so light a scar in Scotland. It does not seem, however, to have disturbed the balance of power between England and Scotland, though the failure of the English to win the lasting success which had seemed to be made possible by the rout of the Scots at Neville’s Cross and the capture of King David, can perhaps in part be blamed on the shortage of man-power which resulted from the plague. At all events, the appetite of the Scots for plunder and revenge was temporarily checked and it was several years before they recovered their full zest for forays across the border.

  Though cases of the plague occurred north of the border in the autumn of 1349, it seems to have been largely held in check by the Scottish winter. This can, to some extent, be ascribed to the reluctance of rats to change their residence in intense cold but winter does not seem to have been much of an impediment to the advance of the Black Death in other countries. Whatever the reason, the lull was short-lived. In the spring of 1350 the plague was on the move again and quickly blanketed the whole country. By the end of that year all Britain had been infected; all Europe, indeed, since the countries to the north were ravaged at much the same time. In the whole continent, with the exception of a few lucky pockets, hardly a village was left unscathed, hardly an individual can have escaped without the loss of at least one friend or relative. It was a continent in mourning. Millions of fresh graves provided a visible memorial but it was not only the dead who paid the price. To survive the Black Death was not to survive unscathed. Indeed, in some ways, the shock which it inflicted on the minds of men seemed even more significant than the fearful harvest which it had reaped among their bodies.

  13. THE PLAGUE IN A MEDIEVAL VILLAGE

  STATISTICS alone cannot provide an adequate picture of the Black Death. That 48.6 per cent of the beneficed clergy in a given diocese died between April and September 1349 is an imposing but somewhat flavourless concept which, in itself, gives no very vivid impression of the sufferings of the people. That a quarter, a third or even half the population died as well is more striking, but the figures still convey no proper idea of what so brutal a depopulation meant to those who survived. In every country the great majority of those who lived and those who died were village dwellers, dependent on agriculture for their existence.

  The academic historian rightly distrusts, even if he does not despise, the work of imaginative reconstruction produced by the historical novelist. A fortiori, there must be excellent reason to justify the introduction into a book of this kind of any detail which lacks some sort of documentary evidence. But if the effect of the Black Death is really to be understood then it must be studied at work in a small village community and some attempt be made to evoke the atmosphere which it created and which it left behind it. Not enough is known about any one village to make this possible, but, by piecing together scraps of authenticated material, it is possible to construct a coherent picture which, in essence, is plausible and valid. Only by such an exercise can one hope to put flesh on the dry statistical bones provided by the records of the period.

  The village of Blakwater, then, is imaginary; that is to say it is not to be found on any map and was unknown to the compilers of the Domesday Survey. But in its organization and its composition it is not in the least a work of imagination; on the contrary it is very ordinary, and every feature could be duplicated in many hundreds of similar villages scattered over the face of England. It is perhaps a little richer and better run than most and it has for this reason been endowed with a poorer neighbour, Preston Stautney, which is decidedly worse off than the average village of the county. Together these two villages present a reasonably accurate picture of a rural community of the open or ‘champion’ country in the south of England around the middle of the fourteenth century.

  Blakwater, then, was a medium sized village of some thirty families and a total population of about a hundred and fifty. Four of these families belonged to freemen paying rent to the lord of the manor but owing him no feudal service, other villagers were still all bound to the lord and had to do various works on his land in exchange for their cottages and strips of field. It did not seem likely that this would change rapidly since the landlord was William Edendon, Bishop of Winchester, and the Bishop, like most of his colleagues, was decidedly conservative in his attitude towards his tenants. He accepted that the commutation of labour services for money had already gone a long way in the English countryside and that – a point which caused him some distress – it was even to be found on his own estates. But he
deplored the process, for social more than economic reasons, and it was well-known that his villeins would be unusually privileged if they were ever allowed to change their status.

  The village lay about eight miles south-west of the King’s road between London and Winchester; a broad river of mud in winter and of choking dust in summer. The traffic along this road was as heavy as on any in England, not of horsemen and pedestrians only but also of horse-drawn carriages, some of them, belonging to the families of the great magnates, vast and sumptuously decorated. Needless to say, no such carriage, nor indeed any sort of wheeled vehicle, ever found its way down the meandering footpath which led from the highway to Blakwater. Perhaps more surprisingly, very few of the villagers ventured any distance in the other direction. Not a single inhabitant of Blakwater had been as far as London, let alone to any foreign country. Only half a dozen had reached Winchester; the parson, the steward, the reeve and one or two of the more adventurous villagers. For the rest of the people, it was an expedition to walk even as far as the rickety wooden bridge which spanned the stream of Blakwater barely half a mile from the edge of the village.

  They felt no sense of deprivation. The village was closely knit, introverted and, by and large, content with its condition. Certainly it conducted some minor trade with the outside world, exported a little wheat and cattle to the market, imported some cloth and the odd manufactured article. But such trade was conducted by foreigners from Winchester through the intermediacy of the reeve or steward; so far as the other villagers were concerned it seemed to have little or no relevance to their daily life. What happened in the next village, let alone the next county, was a matter, if not of complete indifference, at least of minor and academic importance. It was entertaining to listen to the tales of travellers in the same spirit as, today, one might crowd to hear the words of an astronaut; but only the romantic or the reckless actually want to go to the moon and the inhabitant of Blakwater was no more likely to want to go to London or to Calais.