Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

When the plague reached the city of Oxford, records Wood: {265}

Those that had places and houses in the country retired (though overtaken there also), and those that were left behind were almost totally swept away. The school doors were shut, colleges and halls relinquished and none scarce left to keep possession, or make up a competent number to bury the dead.

The problem of what happened to the University during the Black Death is particularly bedevilled by suspect statistics. Richard Fitzralph, who had been chancellor a little earlier, recorded that ‘in his time’ there had been 30,000 students but that, by 1357, the total had shrunk to a mere 6,000. He blamed the fall, however, not so much on the plague as on the machinations of the friars who lured students away by ignoble means. {266} Thomas Gascoigne, writing in the middle of the fifteenth century, {267} confirmed Fitzralph’s figure, saying that he had seen the figure of 30,000 cited in the rolls of the early chancellors as the student strength of the University. Wyclif raised the earlier total to 60,000 and reduced the latter to 3,000; not surprisingly attributing the mischief to the inflated worldly prosperity of the Church. {268}

Even in the bloated Oxford of the 1960s the total student body only numbers a little over ten thousand. No one today would accept as a reasonable estimate for 1348 a half or even a tenth of Fitzralph’s figure, let alone of Wyclif’s army of 60,000. Even at its peak of 1300 it is unlikely that the university held more than fifteen hundred students; 3,000 would be the outside limit. {269} Given the number of potential chroniclers whom the University must have contained, it is curious how little evidence survives to show what happened to this population during the plague. If the experience of the larger monastic houses is any guide, then those students who elected to see out the epidemic from within their colleges paid heavily for their rashness. It is highly unlikely that they fared better than the townsman and probable that they did a great deal worse.

Berkshire was in a poor state even before the arrival of the plague. An exceptionally hard winter followed by sheep disease had set back the county’s economy a few years before and, though things had improved by 1349, recovery was not complete. The impact of the plague was devastating but, except in certain areas, transitory. At Woolstone, almost on the borders of Wiltshire, the landlord in 1352 was forced to engage dairy women to do the milking and extra labour for weeding and most of the mowing. Yet by 1361 customary tenants were again established and paid labour largely dispensed with. {270} Of the Berkshire villages for which records exist, only in Windsor, a royal manor and as such likely to be given special treatment, were the changes introduced by the plague made permanent and all remaining villein services commuted for a money payment by 1369. Otherwise the pattern is one of losses made good, of a system strained but unbroken. Resilient and traditional, the manorial communities of England quickly put themselves back on an even keel and carried on, to the casual observer at least, as if the storm had never broken.

Buckinghamshire, where the Black Death was at its worst from May to September, does not produce a very different picture. In Wycombe a startling 60 per cent of the clergy died and it seems improbable that more than half the inhabitants stayed alive. {271} And yet by 1353 the town had recovered to the point that vacant plots for building were being sought by would-be householders. This however was true only of the town and not of the surrounding countryside, Wycombe’s renewed prosperity did not filter through to the Manor of Bassetbury on its outskirts where, even fifty years later, the water-mill was in ruins, the fulling mill and dye house untenanted, the barns of the manor in need of repair and the tenants generally enjoyed larger holdings and paid lower rents. {272} Meanwhile, at the manor of Sladen, near Berkhamstead, in a deanery which suffered comparatively lightly, a jury in August 1349 declared that the miller was dead and his mill anyway valueless since there were no tenants left to need his services. Rents to the value of £ 12 were no longer paid since all the cottagers were dead. One cottage, where a certain John Robyns survived and dutifully paid his 7s. 0d. a year, was the only part of the manor deemed still to be of value.

One is left therefore with the curious situation that a town in the centre of a deanery which lost almost as high a proportion of its beneficed clergy as any in the country, had largely recovered within three or four years, while a neighbouring manor was still in difficulties fifty years later and another manor, in a part of the county which seems to have been far less seriously afflicted, was virtually wiped out. One moral to be drawn is that it is dangerous to generalize even about relatively small areas – one village may suffer disastrously; another, only a mile or two away, escape virtually unscathed. Another moral, still more defeatist, is that all statistics relating to the Middle Ages, particularly those deduced by analogy or extrapolation, should be taken with a massive pinch of salt.

But a partial and somewhat more rational explanation lies in the nature of the different communities. A town like Wycombe, if well run and energetic, could draw away labour from the surrounding countryside. Many of the surviving villeins in the manors of the neighbourhood were disinclined to pick up the shattered pieces of the rural economy. Others resented the efforts of the landlords to exact feudal services which, in previous years when labour was cheap and plentiful, had been allowed to lapse or had willingly been excused against a modest money payment. In a market town, anxious to encourage immigration so as to foster its thriving trades and commerce, such malcontents could find a welcome and, with luck, protection against any effort on the part of the former masters to restore the strayed sheep to its manorial fold. Stadtluft macht Frei, went the adage; and certainly many fourteenth-century villeins savoured their first breath of freedom in some country town seeking to restore the ravages of the Black Death. Wycombe regained its strength at the expense of neighbouring manors like Bassetbury; some at least of the lost tenants of Sladen were probably to be found at work in St Albans or Wendover. That the second half of the fourteenth century showed a progressive depopulation of the countryside is now almost a truism: that many towns showed a corresponding growth would be extremely hard to prove. But at least there can be little doubt that many of them, against the trend of population in the country as a whole, managed successfully to hold their own.

Meanwhile the southern prong of the plague’s advance moved across Wiltshire and Hampshire. As in other areas, little points of certainty crop up above the mist of impressionistic vagueness. At Durrington, near Amesbury, eighteen out of forty-one tenants had disappeared by the end of 1349. {273} No rents of assize were paid at Tidworth. All the seven free tenants were dead on a moiety of the manor of East Dean and Grimstead and their lands were still standing vacant in 1350.

It would be possible to reel off a myriad such domestic details, each adding something to the overall picture but individually meaning little to the reader of today. To punctuate such a recital with constant ejaculations of dismay would be tedious to author and reader alike. But no study of the Black Death can make sense unless one constantly reminds oneself that this was not primarily a matter of statistics and social trends but of a shock of pain and appalling fear felt by many millions of people all over Europe. It is easy to say that medieval man lived closer to the threshold of death than his modern counterpart and that the impact of such wholesale destruction was therefore not so severe as it would have been today. But nothing could have prepared him for the horrors of 1348 and 1349. Behind the catalogue of bare ciphers, behind the laconic phrase ‘…because all the tenants were dead’, lurk innumerable personal tragedies, little if at all less painful because they seemed at that time to be the lot of all mankind.