The Black Death

by Philip Ziegler

  By means such as this, the bailiff was remarkably successful in assuring an adequate supply of cheap labour and the Bishop of Winchester lost little financially. In the year before the plague the Bishop had gained an income of some £70 from the manor of Blakwater: £20 for the profit from farming the demesne and £50 in rents, fines and various court perquisites. In the year of the plague the pattern altered greatly. The profit from the demesne almost vanished and rents dwindled dramatically, either because the tenants were too poor to pay them or because nobody was left alive. But this was more than offset by a sharp increase in the income from fines payable on the estates of the dead or from property which escheated to the lord because no heir could be found. The Bishop ended the year with a profit on his manor slightly greater than the year before. This economic ebullience proved illusory. In the next twelve months higher labour costs, and uncertain markets continued to depress the profit on the demesne. Rents recovered, but by no means to the level which had prevailed before the plague. In particular the water mill, usually one of the most profitable items in the bailiff’s accounts, stood empty until the middle of 1350. The windfall which had come from fines on the estates of the dead could not be repeated a second year. The Bishop still continued to break even, but only just. It was another three years before the income of the manor returned to its former level.

  The stoutest opposition to accepting the peasants from Preston Stautney came from the new parson. To him anything which differed even slightly from the past was to be distrusted if not deplored and mobility of labour was obviously contrary to all the established principles of good government. But Roger, now officially reeve, cared little for the parson’s objections. What had he done for them when things had been at their worst? If the peasants owed a debt to anyone it was to the travelling friar who had discreetly vanished when the new parson rode into the village from Winchester. The villagers listened sullenly when the parson denounced the friar’s presumption – why, after all, should they care for a church which had so conspicuously failed to protect its flock. They had by no means lost their faith in God but their enthusiasm for God’s ministers on earth had worn thin. When one of those wandering gangs of brigands which seemed so omnipresent in the years that followed the plague broke into the church and stole the silver cross, everyone was profoundly shocked. But when the same gang or another one stole the parson’s pig the villagers laughed heartily and wished them luck.

  By the end of 1350, to the casual visitor, Blakwater must have seemed almost back to normal. There were some new faces of course, an unusual number of widows and widowers, empty places in church. Sad little pilgrimages to the new graveyard outside the village had become a part of the daily routine. But only one house and, of course, Mad Meg’s shack remained untenanted and the latter had almost vanished under the assaults of wind, rain and mischievous children. The fields looked much the same as ever and the water mill was grinding away merrily. The dovecot of the manor had been repaired and the fish pond restocked. But any less cursory study would quickly have revealed that the village was like a man whose gangrenous arm had recently been cut off. In strictly physical terms the wound was more or less healed, but a few months could not eliminate the shock or sense of deprivation. There were still starts of pain in the vanished limb and the victim walked in dread that the gangrene would re-emerge and his sufferings start all over again.

  One day when the harvest was over Roger walked over the hill to Preston Stautney. The grass grew thick in what had used to be the main street, the wall around the manor had collapsed, the mill was derelict. As he pushed his way among the houses he saw that a few of the houses were inhabited, a corner of the fields was still being cultivated and someone had made a pathetic effort to clear the churchyard of the worst of its weeds and brambles. But in most of the houses the roofs had fallen in and the walls were beginning to tilt at crazy angles. He made his way to the church. The door had fallen from its hinges: birds were playing in the roof; a strong, pungent smell suggested that a fox had taken up residence beneath the wreckage of the pulpit. A pig was snuffling and rooting among the graves. With a shudder of disgust Roger drove it away; then turned and left the village without a backward glance.

  He was not a happy man. He had lost a son and his beloved wife. He had seen horrors that would linger with him all his life. But he still had three children left; he was luckier than some. Hard work and the knowledge that he had an important role to play had helped him over the last months. Blakwater was at least a living village, Preston Stautney was a village of the dying, if not already of the dead. He turned his face towards the living with sadness, with fear but also with a kind of gratitude. The nightmare was over. The pain remained but there was, after all, a great deal to be said for being alive.

  Notes

  In writing this chapter I have found of particular value:

  R. H. Hilton, A Mediaeval Society, London, 1966.

  H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor, Cambridge, 1956.

  A. Jessop, The Coming of the Friars and other Historic Essays, London, 1894.

  J. J. Jusserand, English Wayfaring life in the Middle Ages, London. 1891.

  G. G. Coulton, Mediaeval Panorama, Cambridge, 1938.

  G. C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge (Mass), 1942.

  and, analysing the effect of the Black Death on a village or group of villages:

  P. D. A. Harvey, A Mediaeval Oxfordshire Village: Cuxham, Oxford, 1965.

  A. E. Levett, The Black Death on the Estates of the See of Winchester, Oxford, 1916.

  E. Robo, The Black Death in the Hundred of Farnham.

  Some of these relate to a period somewhat before the Black Death. Others have had to be used with discretion because they deal with areas of England other than that where Blakwater is situated. But the overall picture has not been falsified.

  14. THE TOLL IN LIVES

  IN Blakwater, thirty-eight people died out of a total of about a hundred and fifty; dose to a quarter of the population. In Preston Stautney things must have been worse; probably nearly half the villagers succumbed. Which of these villages was nearer the national average? Can, indeed, any national average be established? Did a higher proportion of the population die in England than, for instance, in France or Italy? And how large was the actual death roll? Did a million English die? Two million? Three?

  To none of these questions is a categoric answer possible but, now that the geographical tour of Europe has been completed, it is at least possible to hazard a few guesses. The most ample material on which an estimate can be based is certainly to be found in England but even here the base is shaky and deductions hazardous. It is possible to arrive at a wide variety of conclusions by differing but reasonably valid lines of argument, and exceedingly hard to establish which, if any, is the best one.

  The first and, in some ways, most perplexing problem is the size of the total population in the middle of the fourteenth century. The main difficulty is that no attempt at anything approaching a general census was made between Domesday year and the poll-tax returns of 1377. Nor did even these attempt to cover all the counties of England or all kinds of men. Nevertheless it is possible to hazard a reasonably confident guess that the population of England in 1086 was something near 1.25 million,{402} and that, by 1377, this had risen to about 2.5 million. If it were permissible to assume a steady increase of population between these two points then it would, of course, be easy to arrive at the approximate size of the population at any given date. But this is very far from being the case. On the contrary it is now established with a fair degree of certainty that the population rose to a peak about 1300 and then stagnated or even declined in the first half of the fourteenth century.

  Exactly what caused the economic decline between 1300 and 1348 and how far, if at all, it was reflected in a reduction of the population has been the subject of much debate. Dr Titow has cited evidence from the Winchester Account Rolls to show that the great famines of 131
5 to 1317 were the turning point.{403} Though, in some areas, the recession seems to have begun ten years or more before, in general the statement seems valid. The famines themselves cost many lives but, in the palmier days of the thirteenth century, this loss would quickly have been made good. In the fourteenth century no such recovery took place. In a highly important article Professor Postan has demonstrated that, while wages rose gradually and taxation did not decline, there was a fall in agricultural output and in exports.{404} The explanation must be a smaller force of labourers to share the pay packet. There is evidence to the same effect to be found in the narrowing wage-differential between skilled and unskilled labour and the withdrawal from previously cultivated land. ‘The contemporaries obviously believed that they were living in an age of contracting settlement,’ commented Postan, ‘and there is no reason why we should not accept their belief at its face value.’

  The population in 1348 was, therefore, certainly little greater and probably less than it had been in 1310. But this does not tell one how large it was. Seebohm was the first historian to grapple with the problem in anything approaching modern terms.{405} He visualized 1348 as a peak, attributed the rapid rise in the preceding century largely to the immigration of fishermen and manufacturers of woollen cloth, and concluded that the population just before the Black Death was in the region of five million. Thorold Rogers promptly countered with the contention that England could not possibly have supported a population of five million.{406} He analysed the farm accounts of 8,000 bailiffs and deduced from the production figures that the population of England and Wales together must have been somewhere between two and two and a half million. After a delay for cogitation Seebohm replied challenging Rogers’s figures for corn production.{407} The wrangle was there allowed to rest. For the next seventy-five years population estimates varied between these two points, usually inclining towards the higher.

  In 1948, Professor Russell for the first time brought highly sophisticated statistical techniques to bear on the problem. His conclusion was that the English population in 1348 was some 40 per cent larger than at the time of the poll-tax, in round figures about 3.7 million.{408} His graphs and tables are awe-inspiring but behind his arcane statistical manoeuvres the validity of his conclusion rests to a great extent on the gratifyingly comprehensible assumption that the average medieval household contained only 3.5 members and not five as had previously been assumed. The significance of this figure lay in the ratio which it established between land-holders, whose deaths were recorded, and the rest who usually died unchronicled. If his index figure were to be raised by even half a person per household, the total population would certainly be increased to well over four million. An accurate index figure must therefore be fundamental to any calculation.

  Professor Russell justified his somewhat dramatic departure from accepted theory by evidence drawn from inquests of enclosures, poll tax lists and other sources.{409} This is far from being unchallenged. The counter-argument, in its simplest form, was that the Russell household unit contained only the nucleus of parents and children. But there is good reason to include other members, such as a retired father, unmarried brothers or sisters, servants and sometimes even sub-tenants.{410} Roger Tyler’s household included seven people in addition to the tenant himself – a large unit, certainly, but by no means improbably so. Professor Russell’s calculations, it is claimed, were based on an extremely limited number of cases and his evidence drawn largely from the period which followed the plague. If the 3.5 index were applied to the figures established for 1311 then, Dr Titow has pointed out, it would ‘postulate a society in which male persons over twelve years of age constituted 59 per cent of the total population’.{411} Undoubtedly there is considerable variation between one period and another but Dr Krause, who analysed Professor Russell’s calculations with thoughtful distaste, cannot accept that in the fourteenth century the index fluctuated more than between 4.3 in a period of low childbirth and 5.2 when the rate was high.{412}

  Faced with statistical juggling of this kind the layman is apt to feel a sense of baffled helplessness, leading often to blind acceptance of the latest theory which happens to have been propounded. He would do well to remember Professor Elton’s expression of lapidary wisdom:

  Those determined to put their faith in ‘sophisticated’ mathematical methods and to apply ‘general laws’ to the pitifully meagre and very uncertain detail that historical evidence often provides for the answering of just such interesting and important questions, are either to be pitied because they will be sinking in quicksand while believing themselves to be standing on solid earth, or to be combated because they darken counsel with their errors.{413}

  Professor Russell is far from having accepted these strictures on his theory.{414} But he is too serious a scholar to maintain categorically that his must be the correct solution. The question remains open. In so far as any consensus can be said to have evolved it would probably be that the total population could have been anywhere within a range of which Russell’s 3.7 million would be the lower point and 4.6 million or so the higher. A total of 4.2 million has no more precise justification than any other but is certainly no less plausible and is a convenient central point from which to work.

  * * *

  Of this 4.2 million, how many died. ‘Only one in ten survived’, says one chronicler; ‘three quarters perished’, says another; ‘four fifths’, a third. Few estimates fall as low or lower than a half. Such lurid speculations, of course, contain little of interest to the statistician; enough cases have been established where the estimates of the chroniclers were palpably impossible to dispel any lingering belief that the man on the spot knew best But to arrive at a more rational figure is not easy.

  One much favoured method is to seek to calculate from the ecclesiastical records the number of the beneficed clergy who died, to establish this as a proportion of the total and then to apply the same or some related percentage to the lay population. It was the application of this technique which led Cardinal Gasquet to claim that fully 50 per cent of the population perished in the two years beginning in July 1348.{415} The imperfections of the method have already been discussed.{416} Cardinal Gasquet himself was led badly astray by such deficiencies and even the more evolved workings of Professor Hamilton Thompson and Dr Lunn leave certain pockets of uncertainty.

  Nevertheless studies of this kind can produce interesting and highly relevant results. Hamilton Thompson{417} and Lunn{418} between them have established the mortality rate of beneficed clergy in ten of England’s dioceses. The figures are remarkably consistent, ranging between just under 39 per cent for York and 39.6 per cent for Lichfield to 47.6 per cent for Bath and Wells, 48.5 per cent for Ely and 48.8 per cent for Exeter, Winchester and Norwich. On this basis it is reasonable to assume that something close to 45 per cent of all parish priests died during the plague. Similar statistics based on twelve of the more important monasteries show a surprisingly similar rate among the monks, 44 per cent of whom perished.

  But though these figures are undoubtedly relevant to the problem of the total casualties caused by the Black Death, exactly how they should be used is harder to establish. It is as certain as any medieval statistics can be that, for England as a whole, the mortality rate among the people was lower than 45 per cent. Applying the ratio between dead clergy and dead people referred to above{419} one must conclude, on the other hand, that it cannot have been lower than 34 per cent or so – say a third to avoid any false impression of exactitude.

  Professor Russell, who found the figures for clerical mortality difficult to reconcile with his own very low estimate for deaths among the whole population, tried to overcome his difficulty not, as might have been expected, by assuming the existence of a larger differential between the two categories but by suggesting that the former figures were incorrect. ‘With some reluctance’,{420} he reached the conclusion that Professor Hamilton Thompson, that ‘careful scholar who knows ecclesiastical practice so well’, h
ad nevertheless been guilty of some fairly elementary blunders. But since the blunders whose presence he suspected were specifically those which Hamilton Thompson had set out to eliminate from the earlier calculations of Cardinal Gasquet, since Lunn has subsequently confirmed Hamilton Thompson’s conclusions and since neither Russell nor anyone else has yet done any work which yields substantially different results, it would seem premature to discard the fruits of their researches. It would be reasonable to say that, if no evidence existed except that of the Ecclesiastical Register, an overall mortality rate among the people of England of at least a third might be expected.

  But there is other evidence, and Professor Russell has summarized it faithfully. There is, for instance, the possibility of arriving at an answer through figures for the payment of frankpledge dues. The value of the calculation is limited since it rests on a narrow statistical base of eighty-four case-histories in Essex, but it is worth noting that it gives an overall mortality of 43 per cent. Court Rolls also provide some evidence, though the principal lesson to be learned from them is the wide variation between different areas. In the Farnham manors the loss between 29 September 1348 and September 1350 seems to have been more than 28 per cent but less than 38 per cent, depending on the index figure taken for the ratio between tenants and dependents.{421} A study of the manor of Cuxham in Oxfordshire indicates a death roll of something over two thirds.{422} Similar figures for three manors belonging to Crowland Abbey suggest a rate of 56 per cent.{423} On the other hand, in her analysis based on the Winchester Pipe Roll of eleven widely scattered manors belonging to the Bishop of Winchester, Dr Levett, while venturing no exact figure, could find no evidence to suggest a death rate high enough to disrupt the working of the manors and, in the case of one very large manor, felt that the figure of a third must be over-pessimistic. ‘The general impression gained from an attempt to make any such calculations,’ she concluded dryly, ‘is that they are singularly useless.’{424}