Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

In this year 1348, in Melcombe, in the county of Dorset, a little before the Feast of St John the Baptist, two ships, one of them from Bristol, came alongside. One of the sailors had brought with him from Gascony the seeds of the terrible pestilence and, through him, the men of that town of Melcombe were the first in England to be infected. {224}

Other ports have been put forward for the doubtful honour of being the first in England to receive the plague. One chronicler, from the Abbey of Meaux in Yorkshire, believed that Bristol was infected earlier, {225} Henry Knighton opted for Southampton, {226} while John Capgrave, writing some eighty years later, recorded: ‘First it began in the north cuntre; than in the south; and so forth throw oute the reme.’ {227} The latter thesis, at least, can be dismissed. The Black Death may well have made a separate entry into the north of England but certainly not until several months later than in the south. Indeed, there is no evidence that the plague took a firm grip in the northern counties until the beginning of 1349.

Many ports of southern England were in constant, almost daily contact with the continent or with the Channel Islands. It would be surprising if trading ships had not carried the plague to several of them. But the consensus of opinion seems to be that Melcombe Regis, now part of Weymouth, earned its unsavoury claim to fame. As well as the Grey Friars ’ Chronicle quoted above, a monk of Malmesbury also refers to ‘a port called Melcombe, in Dorsetshire’, {228} and further chroniclers, no doubt in some cases copying the opinions of their contemporaries, either refer to it by name or state that the plague arrived at a ‘Dorsetshire port’ with other details which fit its description. {229}

The confusion is a great deal worse when it comes to deciding on exactly what date the plague was first observed in England. The Franciscan of Lynn states that it arrived ‘a little before the Feast of St John the Baptist’ – that is to say before 24 June 1348. Higden’s Polychronicon also agrees that this was the crucial date. But nobody else is prepared to put it so early. Robert of Avesbury says that the plague began ‘about St Peter’s Day’, {230} presumably meaning 29 June, rather than the other dates on which the Apostle is commemorated. The monk of Malmesbury opted for 7 July. The Canon of Bridlington favoured ‘the feast of St James’, or 25 July. Henry Knighton of Leicester referred to ‘the autumn’ of the year 1348; an imprecise period but one which could hardly have begun before the end of August. The Bishop of Bath and Wells, on 17 August, ordered ‘processional stations every Friday… to beg God to protect the people from the pestilence which had come from the East into the neighbouring kingdom’. The reference to the plague in ‘the neighbouring kingdom’, which can only mean France, seems to imply that the Bishop was not yet aware that the disease was already to be found in England. Yet it seems incredible that he should not have known about an epidemic which, according to others, had already been raging for nearly two months in his own diocese. Finally, Stephen Birchington deferred the outbreak to immediately after Christmas 1348. {231} Since, however, he reported that it ended in May 1349, it is reasonable to detect some confusion in his mind between the duration of the plague in Canterbury and in England as a whole.

This evidence is cited at somewhat tedious length not because it matters much whether the Black Death arrived in Melcombe Regis or in Southampton, a few weeks earlier or a few weeks later, but to illustrate the extraordinary difficulty of establishing with any precision the details of what took place. If the chronicles are unable to agree within three or four months on the date on which the first case of the plague was recorded, then how much more likely it is that there will be complete confusion when such complex problems as the number of thousands slain by the disease come to be discussed. Piecing together the various accounts, the most likely picture of what actually happened is that a ship bearing a victim of bubonic plague did arrive at Melcombe Regis at the end of June 1348; that the first case of a local inhabitant catching the disease occurred in early July and that the disease did not begin to spread or to develop its terrifying pulmonary and septicaemic variations until the beginning or middle of August. But that, as is the case with so much that will follow, is a guess and the truth will probably never be established with certainty.

If Melcombe Regis was indeed the first port to receive the Black Death it may have been brought from Calais. Melcombe was at this time a town of some importance contributing almost as many ships to the siege of Calais as Bristol or even London. It could well have been one of these ships returning from France which brought in the plague. Prima facie the suggestion of the Grey Friars ’ Chronicle that the plague was imported from Gascony is less likely since Melcombe is not known to have received many boats coming from that region. But it is by no means impossible; one of the ships was said by the Chronicle to have had its home in Bristol and this could well have been on the return journey from some Gascon port. Another, and perhaps still more probable source of infection, is the Channel Islands: Jersey and Guernsey were suffering badly from the Black Death at this time, so much so that Edward III wrote to the Governor of Jersey: {232}

By reason of the mortality among the people and fishing folk of these islands, which here as elsewhere has been so great, our rent for the fishing which has been yearly paid us, cannot be now obtained without the impoverishing and excessive oppression of those fishermen still left.

The letter is undated and it is not known by how far or, indeed, if the Black Death in the Channel Islands preceded the outbreak on the English mainland. But if, as seems probable, the islands were affected first, it is to Melcombe Regis more than to any other English port that they are likely to have spread the disease.

But whether by way of Southampton or by Melcombe Regis; whether in June, July or August; it was inevitable that the Black Death would sooner or later spread to the British Isles. It is tempting to think of Britain isolated behind her sea defences, remote from Europe and, with a bit of luck, immune from the misfortunes of her continental neighbours. But the truth, then as now, is that England was part of the continent of Europe and that the Channel as much linked England and France as divided them. Indeed, it was a great deal easier for men and merchandise to arrive by sea in England than to make the perilous crossings of the Alps or venture along the other land routes of continental Europe. ‘The south-east of England’, wrote Professor Kosminsky, {233} ‘lay at a great cross-roads where the trade routes from Scandinavia, the Baltic, the North Sea, the Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean all met, as well as the great river-ways of the Rhine, the Meuse, the Scheldt and the Seine.’ Along the trade routes, without possibility of check, moved the Black Death.

From Melcombe Regis the plague struck inland across the West Country. It is not difficult to get an approximate idea of its course. England is badly endowed with the impressionistic reporting of such chroniclers as Michael of Piazza or Agnolo di Tura. There is even less in the way of dispassionate medical records; English physicians contributed virtually nothing to the ample if somewhat profitless literature of the plague tractators. But the richness of our national archives – the archives of a nation wedded to legalism and the virtues of precedent and, still more important, of a nation which has had the good fortune never to suffer subsequent foreign invasion – offers a fuller picture of the progress of the Black Death than those which any other country can provide.