The Black Death

by Philip Ziegler

  • Henricus Dapifer de Diessenhoven, F.R.G., Stuttgart, 1868, IV, pp. 68–71.

  • Hugh von Reutlingen, Weltchronik, ed. Gillert, Munich, 1881.

  • Johannis de Winterthur (Vitodurani), Mon. Germ. Hist., N.S., Vol. III.

  • Annales Engelbergenses, Mon. Germ. Hist., XVII.

  • Kalendarium Zwetlense, Mon. Germ. Hist., IX.

  • Annales Matseenses, Mon. Germ. Hist., IX.

  • Henrici de Hervordia, ed. Potthast, Göttingen, 1859.

  • Continuatio Novimontensis, Mon. Germ. Hist., IX, p. 675.

  • Heinrici Rebdorfensis Annales Imperatorum, F.R.G., Vol. IV, pp. 532–8.

  British Isles

  • Robert of Avesbury, Continuatio Chronicarum de Gestis Mirabilibus Regis Ed. III., ed. E. M. Thompson, R.S. 93.

  • Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. Riley, R.S. 28.

  • Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, ed. J.R. Lumby, R.S. 41, VIII.

  • Eulogium (Historiarum sive Temporis), ed. F. Haydon, R.S. 9, III.

  • John Capgrave, The Chronicle of England, ed. F. Hingeston, R.S. 1.

  • Chronicon Henrici Knighton, ed. J. Lumby, R.S. 92, II.

  • Gesta Edwardi de Carnavan, Auctori Canonico Bridlingtoniensi cum Continuatione, ed. W. Stubbs, R.S. 76, II.

  • Chronicon Galfridi Le Baker de Swynebroke, ed. E. M. Thompson, Oxford, 1889.

  • Chronicon Johannis de Reading, ed. J. Tait, Manchester, 1914.

  • Willelmi de Dene, Historia Rossensis, Wharton, Anglia Sacra, Vol. I, p. 356; cf. B. Mus. Cotton M. S., Faust B. V, p. 96.

  • Stephen Birchington, Vitae Archiepiscoporum Cantuariensium, Wharton, Anglia Sacra, Vol. 1, p.1.

  • ‘A Fourteenth Century Chronicle from the Grey Friars at Lynn’, ed. A. Gransen, Eng. Hist Rev., Vol. LXXII 1957, p. 270.

  • Chronica Monasterii de Melsa, R.S. 43, III.

  • Historical Papers from Northern Registers, ed. J. Raine, R.S. 61.

  • Eynsham Cartulary, ed. H. E. Salter, Ox. Hist. Soc, Oxford, 1907–8.

  • Chronicle of Louth Park, line. Rec. Soc, 1891.

  • John Clyn, Annalium Hiberniae Chronicon, ed. R. Butler, Irish Arch. Soc., Dublin, 1849.

  • Chronicle of John of Fordun, ed. W. F. Skene, Edinburgh, 1872.

  • Cronykil of Andrew of Wyntoun, ed. D. Laing, Edinburgh, 1872.

  • Book of Pluscarden, ed. F. J. Skene, Edinburgh, 1880.

  Other Countries

  • Continuatio Chronici Guillelmi de Nangiaco, Soc. de L’Histoire de France, II, 1844, p. 211.

  • Chronicon Pragense, ed. Loserth, Fontes Rerum Austriacarum, Vol. I.

  • Breve Chronicon Clerici Anonymi, De Smet, Recueil des Chroniques de Flandres, Vol. III, p. 5.

  • Chronicon Majus Aegidii Li Muisis, De Smet, ibid, Vol. II, p. 110.

  • C. S. Bartsocas, ‘Two 14th Century Greek Descriptions of the Black Death (Nicephoros Gregoras and Emperor John Cantacuzenos)’, Journ. Hist. Med., Vol. XXI, 1966, No. 4, p. 394.

  Finally there are the plague tractates left by the doctors and savants of the period. Almost all those listed below were analysed by Anna Campbell in her invaluable study The Black Death and Men of Learning.

  • Master Jacme d’Agramont, Sudhoff, Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin, XVII, (1925), 120–21.

  • (Klebs, A. C., ‘A Catalan Plague Tract of April 24, 1348’, 6ème Congrès International d’Histoire de la Médecine, Anvers, 1929, pp. 229–32.)

  • Gentile da Foligno, Sudhoff, Archiv V (1913), 83–6, 332–7. A. Philippe, Histoire de la Peste Noire, (Paris, 1853) contains another text

  • John of Penna, Sudhoff, Archiv V (1913), 341–8, and Archiv XVI, (1924) pp. 162–7.

  • Paris Faculty of the Colleges of Medicine, (Compendium de Epydimia); Brit. Mus. Harl., 3,050, (XVII), p. 66 recto (b) to p. 68 verso (b); H. E. Rebouis, Étude historique et critique sur la peste, Paris, 1888. (D. W. Singer, ‘Some Plague Tractates’, Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., Vol. IX, Pt. 2, p. 159.)

  • Master Albert, Sudhoff, Archiv VI, 316–17.

  • Alfonso de Cordoba, Sudhoff, Archiv III, 224–6.

  • Abū Ja’far Ahmad Ibn ’Ali Ibn Muhammad Ibn ’Ali Ibn Khātimah (referred to generally as Ibn Khātimah). Translated into German in Sudhoff, Archiv XIX (1927), by Taha Dinānah, pp.27–81.

  • John Hake of Göttingen, Sudhoff, Archiv V, 37–8.

  • The Five Doctors of Strasbourg (Treasure of Wisdom and of Art), Sudhoff, Archiv XVI (1924).

  • (E. Wickersheimer, ‘La Peste Noire à Strasbourg et le regime des cinq médecins strasbourgeois’, 3ème Congrès International d’Histoire de la Médecine, Antwerp, 1923, pp.54–60.)

  • Author of ‘Utrum Mortalitas…’ (‘Is it from Divine Wrath that the Mortality of These Years Proceeds?’), Sudhoff, Archiv XI, 44–51. Ascribed by S. Guerchberg (‘La controverse sur les prétendus semeurs de la Peste Noire’, Revue des Études Juives, Vol. VIII, p. 3, 1948) to Konrad de Megenberg.

  • Abū ’Abdallah Muhammad Ibn ‘Abdallāh Ibn Sa’īd Ibn Al-Khatīb Lisânal-Din (referred to generally as Ibn al-Khatīb). Translated into German in Sitzungsberichte der Königl. bayer. Akademie der Wissenschafenzu München, II, (Munich, 1863), 1–28 by M. J. Müller.

  • Konrad de Megenberg, Buch der Natur, ed. Pfeiffer, 1870.

  • Dionysius Colle (De pestilentia 1348–1350 et peripneumonia pestilentiali). D. J. Colle, Benonensi, Pisa, 1617, pp. 570–76.

  • Author of ‘Primo de Epydimia…’ Sudhoff, Archiv V, (1913) 41–6.

  • Simon of Covino, Bibl. de l’École des Chartes (1840–41), ed. E. Littré, Sér 1, Vol. 2, pp. 201–43.

  • John of Burgundy (John à la Barbe). (Published 1371 but mainly relating to epidemic of 1348–9.) Ed. D. W. Singer, Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 159.

  • Guy de Chauliac, La Grande Chirurgie, ed. F. Nicaise, Paris, 1890.

  THE BLACK DEATH IN RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY

  It was towards the end of 1969, in the same year that Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death was first published, that the influential French journal Annales: Economies Sociétés Civilisations included a substantial section on ‘Maladies et Mort’, introduced by a survey article by Jean-Noël Biraben and Jacques Le Goff on ‘La Peste dans le Haut Moyen Age’ (pp. 1484–1510). And there then followed a similar concentration on death-related themes in the Revue du Nord for 1983, where Walter Prevenier and other Low Countries specialists – starting with Prevenier’s own paper on ‘La démographie des villes du comté de Flandre aux xiiie et xive siècles’ (pp. 255–75) – discussed the comparable experience of the North-West. In the interval, Dr Biraben had presented what is still the most extended historical analysis of the West European plague in his Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et mediterranéens (Paris, 1976), and Michael Dols’s valuable study of The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, 1977) had been published. More recently, Ole Jorgen Benedictow’s book on Plague in the Late Medieval Nordic Countries (Oslo, 1993) has covered the same ground for Iceland, Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Each of these books contains a comprehensive bibliography of the literature on plague in many languages. What follows is a bibliographical essay on the post-1969 English-language works which may be of interest to new readers of Ziegler’s classic.

  The argument about the nature and origins of bubonic plague continues. There have been revisionary books by J. F. D. Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1970) and Graham Twigg, The Black Death: a biological reappraisal (London, 1984). And almost everybody now agrees that plague was not the only – nor even (on many occasions) the major – killer in the late-medieval and early-modern West. Robert S. Gottfried reviewed other infections but still gave pride-of-place to plague in his Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England, The medical response and the demographic consequences (Leicester, 1978), then following that work with a general book on The Black Death. Natural and human disaster in medieval Europe (London,
1983). But smallpox, influenza and typhus earn a more prominent place in Ann G. Carmichael’s Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 1986), as they do again, with particular emphasis on malaria, in Mary J. Dobson’s Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997). For that later period, see also Paul Slack’s The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), and the collected essays in The Plague Reconsidered. A new look at its origins and effects in 16th and 17th century England, ed. Paul Slack (Local Population Studies supplement, 1977), and in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge, 1979). Other collections of essays include The Black Death. The impact of the fourteenth-century plague, ed. D. Williman (Binghamton, 1982), and Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, eds. Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt and Rona Goffen (Durham N. C., 1989). And contemporary descriptions of the plague, many in translation for the first time, have recently been collected by Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester, 1994), in a useful volume of sources.

  The sufferings of local populations and how they lived with pestilence are studied by Richard Gyug, ‘The effects and extent of the Black Death of 1348: new evidence for clerical mortality in Barcelona’, Medieval Studies, 45 (1983), pp. 385–98, Richard Lomas, ‘The Black Death in County Durham’, Journal of Medieval History, 15 (1989), pp. 127–40, R. A. Davies, ‘The effect of the Black Death on the parish priests of the medieval diocese of Coventry and Lichfield’, Historical Research, 62 (1989), pp. 85–90, Ray Lock, ‘The Black Death in Walsham-le-Willows’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, 37 (1992), pp. 316–37, Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Accommodating plague in medieval Marseille’, Continuity and Change, 11 (1996), pp. 11–41, and William J. Dohar, The Black Death and Pastoral Leadership. The diocese of Hereford in the fourteenth century (Philadelphia, 1995). As for the medical profession, its first response to the plague is the subject of John Henderson’s ‘Epidemics in Renaissance Florence: medical theory and government response’ in Maladies etsociété (xiie–xviie siècles), eds. N. Bulst and R. Delort (Paris, 1989), pp. 165–86, and of the same author’s ‘The Black Death in Florence: medical and communal responses’, in Death in Towns. Urban responses to the dying and the dead, 100–1600, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, 1992), pp. 136–50. John Henderson’s major book on Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford, 1994) includes a chapter on ‘Charity, the Poor, and the Aftermath of the Black Death, 1348–1400’ (pp. 297–353). For other Tuscan studies, see David Herlihy’s ‘Deaths, marriages, births, and the Tuscan economy (c.1300–1550)’, in Population Patterns in the Past, ed. Ronald Demos Lee (New York, 1977), pp. 135–64, and the two books by Samuel K. Cohn on Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800. Strategies for the afterlife (Baltimore, 1988) and on The Cultof Remembrance and the Black Death. Six Renaissance cities in Central Italy (Baltimore, 1992).

  Large claims are now being made for the Black Death’s primacy in world affairs, as in William H. McNeill’s Plagues and People (Oxford, 1977) and William M. Bowsky’s valuable compendium, The Black Death. A turning point in history? (New York, 1971). Richard C. Palmer makes a similar claim for English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348–1381 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993), whereas Mark Ormrod in ‘The English government and the Black Death of 1349–79’, in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 175–88, is keener to stress how little changed. That older view of institutional continuity still has much to recommend it. And a useful counter to Palmer’s book is Edward Powell’s more temperate Kingship, Law, and Society. Criminal justice in the reign of Henry V (Oxford, 1989). However, in social history generally, Samuel K. Cohn’s recent edition of the late David Herlihy’s unpublished essays on The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge Mass., 1997) is a good demonstration of how far Black Death studies have moved on. For even Herlihy, the doyen of late-medieval urban demography, had become convinced that there was insufficient evidence of a population down-turn before the Black Death to justify the belief of many historians of his own generation – influencing Philip Zieger among others – that plague was less the cause than an accelerator of social change.

  Those changes had been the subject of a long-running debate in the journal Past & Present, which generated such interest that it was re-issued in book form as The Brenner Debate. Agrarian Class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe, eds. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985). The debate has since been continued in S. R. Epstein’s ‘Cities, regions, and the late medieval crisis: Sicily and Tuscany compared’, Past & Present, 130 (1991). pp. 3–50. And one of its concerns has always been to establish the chronology of the crisis. Guy Bois, author of The Crisis of Feudalism. Economy and society in Eastern Normandy c. 1300–1550 (Paris, 1976; Cambridge, 1984) and a contributor to the original debate, had taken the view that it was the Great Famine of 1315–17 which was the turning-point. And following Ian Kershaw’s examination of that crisis in ‘The Great Famine and agrarian crisis in England 1315–22’, Past & Presently, 59 (1973), pp. 3–50, a levelling-off of Europe’s population in (or before) those years had seemed established. Yet the setback, it now appears, was only temporary. In Before the Black Death, Studies in the ‘crisis’ of the early fourteenth century, ed. Bruce M. S. Campbell (Manchester, 1991), Barbara Harvey’s answer to the question ‘Was there actually a crisis?’ was unequivocal. The reverses of the half-century before the Black Death were not a turning-point, she concluded firmly, but ‘a mid-term crisis’. In reality, it was ‘the advent of plague, an exogenous factor, that transformed the economic life of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, and the changes which actually occurred after that event could not have predicted in the first half of the century’ (p. 24).

  It had been Bruce Campbell’s fine study of the peasant land market in Coltishall (‘Population pressure, inheritance and the land market in a fourteenth-century peasant community’, in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, ed. R. M. Smith [Cambridge, 1984], pp. 87–134) that had caused David Herlihy to change his mind. Campbell was clear that the crisis in Norfolk’s Coltishall was the result ‘not of economic but of biological factors’. And much of the recent work on the socio-economic history of late-medieval England has served to reinforce that conclusion. For summaries of that work, see The Black Death in England, eds. Mark Ormrod and Phillip Lindley (Stamford, 1996), and my own King Death, The Black Death and its aftermath in late-medieval England (London, 1996). In the specialist literature, Campbell and Bailey, Bridbury and Britnell, Dyer and Goldberg, Harvey and Hatcher, Mate, Pollard, Poos and Razi are the names to watch. Of these, A. R. Bridbury has always taken the view that there was less crisis than opportunity in post-plague England, his position hardly changing from the publication of his iconoclastic Economic Growth, England in the later Middle Ages (London 1962) – cited in Ziegler’s bibliography – through ‘The Black Death’, Economic History Review, 26 (1973), pp.577–92, to the collected papers of Bridbury’s The English Economy from Bede to the Reformation (Woodbridge, 1992). Most historians, however, now see it differently. And there is growing agreement that it was the Black Death – more than famine, climatic deterioration, bullion shortages, or any other single cause – that first prepared the way for the ‘long’ fifteenth century of economic recession and social change.

  How the Recession ended is the subject of The Closing of the Middle Ages’ England, 1471–1529 (Oxford, 1997) by Richard Britnell, who has written usefully also on the earlier period in Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge, 1986), in The Commercialisation of English Society 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993), and in ‘The Black Death in English towns’, Urban History, 21 (1994), pp. 195–210. And there are summaries of the views of Campbell and Dyer, the two most prolific authors on this period, in Bruce Campbell’s ‘A fair field once full of folk: agrarian change in an ere of population decline, 1348–1500’, Agricultural History Review, 41 (1993)
, pp. 60–70, and Christopher Dyer’s Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages. Social change in England c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989). Valuable regional studies, each of much wider application, include Mark Bailey’s A Marginal Economy? East Anglian Breckland in the later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989); P. J. P. Goldberg’s ‘Mortality and economic change in the diocese of York, 1390–1514’, Northern History, 14 (1988), pp. 38–55, and his Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy. Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992); Mavis Mate’s ‘Agrarian economy after the Black Death: the manors of Canterbury Cathedral Priory, 1348–91’, Economic History Review, 37 (1984), pp. 341–54, and her ‘Labour and labour services on the estates of Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the fourteenth century’, Southern History, 7 (1985), pp. 55–67; A. J. Pollard’s ‘The north-eastern economy and the agrarian crisis of 1438–1440’, Northern History, 25 (1989), pp. 88–105; L. R. Poos’s ‘The rural population of Essex in the later Middle Ages’, Economic History Review, 38 (1985), pp. 515–30, and his A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991); and the many West Midlands studies of Zvi Razi, beginning with Life, Marriage and Death in a medieval parish. Economy, society and demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), and including his two important papers. ‘Family, land and the village community in later medieval England’. Past & Present, 93 (1981), pp. 3–36. and ‘The myth of the immutable English family’, ibid., 140 (1993), pp. 3–44.

  Razi, Poos and Goldberg are demographers as well as social historians. And the two specialisms are combined again in the work of John Hatcher and Barbara Harvey. John Hatcher’s survey of Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348–1530 (London, 1977) has been reprinted many times. He subsequently moved to an earlier period, but has since returned to the later Middle Ages with two important papers on ‘Mortality in the fifteenth century: some new evidence’, Economic History Review, 39 (1986), pp. 19–38, and ‘England in the aftermath of the Black Death’, Past & Present, 144 (1994), pp. 3–35. Hatcher’s research on the obituary lists of Christ Church (Canterbury) was what gave him the ‘new evidence’ for that article in 1986. And the heavy mortalities and characteristically short life-spans of Canterbury’s post-plague monks have been found to be matched exactly in the Westminster Abbey data, discussed by Barbara Harvey in her Ford Lectures of 1989, and published in Living and Dying in England 1100–1540. The monastic experience (Oxford, 1993).