Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

There is no reason to exclude national temperament from the complex of factors which must explain this omission provided that one does not try to erect too pretentious or elaborate a structure on the small basis of established fact. Even in the fourteenth century, when inadequate communications and the weakness of the central government ensured that loyalties were still primarily to the lord, the community or the region, there was already apparent a consistency in English life and character which it would be absurd altogether to ignore.

‘They could not, they would not be driven or frightened out of what they dimly comprehended they had to do.’ The words were applied by Drew Middleton to the Londoner in the blitz {247} but they fit as well in the fourteenth century. One of the most striking features of the Black Death in England, attested to in the Court Rolls of innumerable manors and those borough records that are still available, is the way in which communal life survived. With his friends and relations dying in droves around him, with labour lacking to till the fields and care for the cattle, with every kind of human intercourse rendered perilous by the possibility of infection, the medieval Englishman obstinately carried on in his wonted way. Business was very far from being as usual but landlord and peasant alike did their best to make it so.

The simple structure of the more or less self-contained medieval village was, of course, far easier to maintain under stress than the elaborate social infrastructure of contemporary civilization. So far as the typical peasant was concerned, England’s was a subsistence economy and to have let it founder would have been to cease to exist as a society, almost, indeed, to cease to exist at all. But the Englishman did more than just keep alive. Though the Black Death violently distorted the pattern of village life, wherever it was possible to do so taxes were paid and manorial services rendered; the quick not only buried their dead but dutifully paid the fines on inheritance which were owing to the landlord. Within a few months one cell alone of Bruton Priory received fifty head of oxen and cattle as heriots; one for each tenant who died. Here and there the burden was too great; organized society ceased to exist for a few weeks or months, perhaps even for ever. But such cases were the exception. By and large, and to a greater extent than seems to have been true in continental Europe, the fabric of society survived.

Was this a condemnation of the Englishman’s timid conservatism? Or a triumph for his durability and determination? Or merely a reflection of the fact that the English had had longer to get used to the idea and that fatalism had set in? The interpretation is a matter of taste and no formula could fail to be a misleading over-simplification. But it can at least be said that the Englishman’s reaction, or lack of reaction, was a victory for the system under which he lived. It can be argued that, in the long term, the Black Death struck a fatal blow at the manorial system and heralded the end of the Middle Ages. Be that – for the moment – as it may; in the short term the Black Death provided an impressive tribute to the system’s strength and to the readiness of the Englishman to accept the security which it offered and the limitations which it imposed.

Judging by the rapid progress of the plague along the coast of North Devon and Somerset, the infection travelled by boat by way of the Bristol Channel as well as by the slower inland routes. Whether it arrived first by land or water at Bristol is uncertain; the latter, probably, though any port which was the centre of such a busy traffic would have been an early victim in either case. Bristol, the principal port of entry for the West Country, with something close to ten thousand inhabitants, was the first important English city to be affected. ‘There died’, recorded Knighton, ‘suddenly overwhelmed by death, almost the whole strength of the town, for few were sick more than three days, or two days, or even half a day.’ {248}

‘Almost the whole strength of the town’, need not be taken too seriously, but it does seem that the plague was particularly ferocious in the city and its environs. Statistics must, as usual, be extrapolated from scanty evidence. There were ten new institutions for eighteen benefices – a figure which suggests that mortality among clerics was above the average for that part of England. The Little Red Book of Bristol lists the names of the town council, the ‘Forty-Eight’, for 1349. Of the fifty-two members which the ‘Forty-Eight’ whimsically contained, the names of fifteen had been struck through to show that they were dead. If all these died of the plague the mortality rate would have been a little under thirty per cent; an unusually high figure for what must have been the cream of the city dignitaries. Things were undoubtedly a great deal worse in the crowded and stinking warrens in which the poor were forced to live. Boucher, the city historian, estimates an overall death rate in Bristol of between thirty-five and forty per cent and there is no reason to believe this figure exaggerated. {249} ‘The plague’, according to an old calendar, ‘raged to such a degree that the living were scarce able to bury the dead…. At this period the grass grew several inches high in the High St and in Broad St; it raged at first chiefly in the centre of the city.’ {250} Cardinal Gasquet mentions the difficulties of the parson of Holy Cross de la Temple who had such urgent need to enlarge his graveyard that he took over an extra half acre without waiting for a royal licence. It is comforting to know that the King’s pardon was subsequently forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Exeter had also been afflicted. According to one local historian of the nineteenth century, ‘this dreadful calamity continued until the year 1357, when it happily ceased’. {251} Happily, indeed; but in fact there is no evidence to suggest that the plague in Exeter lasted longer than the usual span or that there was a renewed outbreak within the next few years. Another Exeter historian more prosaically states that the Black Death ‘arrested the building of the cathedral nave… paralysed our woollen trade and all commercial enterprise and suspended agricultural pursuits.’ {252} Certainly, for two or three months, transportation in the area must have been reduced if not largely suspended, but Exeter, like every other English town in the fourteenth century with the possible exception of London, could live comfortably off the farms in its immediate neighbourhood. Though food may sometimes have been hard to buy for want of middlemen to carry, prepare and sell it, there is no reason to think that the threat of famine was added to the city’s miseries.

Inexorably the plague moved on through the West. It seems to have taken three or four months to complete its march but, by the middle of 1349, there can hardly have been a village in Devon and Cornwall which had not received its visit. At the isolated village of Templeton on the moors to the west of Tiverton there was no churchyard to accommodate the dead so that they had to be taken by cart-loads during the night to the other church at Witheridge. {253} The deanery of Kenn to the south and south-west of Exeter is believed to have been the worst affected in the whole of England; eighty-six incumbents perished from a deanery with only seventeen parish churches. {254}

One casualty, luckier than most in that it survived, though seeming near to death at the time, was the tin industry of the west country. By the time of the plague the ‘free miners’ of Devon and Cornwall were a prosperous and powerful group enjoying a striking degree of local autonomy. The annual output of tin was some seven hundred tons. The death of many miners and the virtual disappearance of the market proved disastrous. In the years immediately following the plague production dropped away to almost nothing. As late as 1355 no tin at all was being produced in Devon. But in the more important mines of Cornwall recovery was more rapid and by the end of the century output had reached a peak which had only once been exceeded before the Black Death. {255}