Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

To quote statistics which show that Hertfordshire suffered less severely than other counties is not to detract from the agonies which the inhabitants endured: to the victims it mattered remarkably little whether the mortality was 37 per cent or a mere 34 per cent, the risk and the pain of death seemed much the same. A scrawl on the wall of the church of St Mary, Ash well, somehow catches the black horror of the plague. ‘Wretched, terrible, destructive year…’ the unknown scratched in the stone sometime in 1350, ‘…the remnants of the people alone remain…’ {317} There are plenty of examples in the county of almost complete disaster. At Standon, six miles north of Ware, thirty-two customary tenants were supposed to mow the lord’s hay. In 1349 no men went to mow, went to mow a meadow and the hay was left to rot in the fields.

But where an analysis has been made of a group of manors big enough to provide a reasonable sample, one is once again struck with the amazing speed of the countryside’s recovery. Dr Levett, whose individual contribution to the history of the Black Death, though in some respects now seen to be too extreme in its conclusions, has done so much to bring sanity and cool scientific reasoning into a sphere peculiarly rich in ill-supported fantasy, has studied, inter alia, the manors of the great abbey of St Albans. {318} The plague, it is true, was at its worst on these manors in April and May, which was the least dangerous period from the point of view of the rural economy. The corn crops could safely be left to take care of themselves until what was left of the population had time to attend to them, and weeding and ploughing dispensed with for one year without serious consequences. But, granted this minor stroke of luck, a serious setback to the manors’ economy might have been expected. So indeed there was, but as Dr Levett puts it:

The average historian of the plague period seems to have worked from two assumptions:

(1) that every peasant farmer was occupied to the utmost of his capacity before the pestilence; and (2) that after it the whole remaining population, supine and unalert on their own holdings, tended to rise up and wander about the country in search of high wages. Neither assumption will hold water.

Once the worst of the shock was over, energy, discipline and intelligent administration quickly got the wheels of agriculture turning once again. The St Albans’ manors were well run and prosperous, on good farming land and with the power and wealth of the Abbey to sustain them. They had little difficulty in luring away labour from other, less fortunate estates. It would be a great mistake to assume that what was true of them was true of the majority of English manors but, equally, they were by no means unique.

The Abbey itself suffered rather worse than its manors. {319} Michael of Mentmore, one of the greatest of its Abbots, was struck down after thirteen years in office on 2 April 1349:

…being the first to suffer from the dread disease which was later to carry off his monks. He began to feel the first symptoms on Maundy Thursday, but out of reverence for the festival and remembering our Lord’s humility, he celebrated High Mass and then, before taking his dinner, humbly and devoutly washed the feet of the poor. After he had taken his dinner he proceeded to wash and kiss the feet of all the brethren and to carry out all the offices of the day alone and without assistance. The next day when his sickness became worse, he took to his bed and, as a true Catholic, made his confession with a contrite heart and received the sacrament of extreme unction. Amidst the sorrow of all who surrounded him he endured until noon on Easter Day…. And there died at that time forty-seven monks… {320}

The neighbouring archdeaconry of Bedford lost 38.6 per cent of its beneficed clergy. {321} At Millbrook, to the south of the town of Bedford, the lord of the manor Peter de St Croix was among those who died. At the inquisition it was said that all the bondmen and cottars were dead and, a few months later, his son and heir Robert followed his father. {322} With incidents such as this a commonplace it is not surprising that Bedford, whose main function was to serve as a centre for the agricultural lands around it, lost drastically in prosperity. Certainly the general decline of the English rural economy began long before 1350 and would probably have continued even if there had been no epidemic but, in the case of Bedford at least, the County History believes the plague to have been the decisive factor. It took the town a hundred and fifty years to recover its former strength.

In East Anglia, arbitrarily defining this somewhat fluid concept to include Cambridgeshire as well as Norfolk, Suffolk and the north of Essex, the Black Death seems to have arrived in March 1349, reached its peak in May, June and July and died out during the autumn. {323} A typical case was that of the manor of Cornard Parva where nine deaths were recorded at the Court held on 31 March. By 1 May another fifteen were dead of whom seven left no heir; leaving the presumption, though by no means the certainty, that in such cases an entire family had been exterminated. By 3 November, after a long gap during which, presumably because of the plague, no Court was held, the parson and a further thirty-six tenants were dead, this time twenty leaving no heir. The lasting economic damage done by the Black Death was demonstrated in the market town of Sudbury in Suffolk. In 1340 there were 107 ancient stalls licensed for the weekly market. By 1361 the number had dropped to sixty-two. {324}

Yarmouth at this period was one of the most flourishing towns and certainly the leading sea-port of East Anglia. Seebohm believed that the population in 1348 must have been more than ten thousand {325} and Cardinal Gasquet, pointing out that Yarmouth had two hundred and twenty ships and furnished three times more sailors than London for the attack on Calais, argued that this estimate must be much too low. {326} Modern research, which almost always seems to lead to the reduction of earlier estimates, would on the contrary consider it decidedly too high. But the plague certainly wreaked terrible havoc and recovery was slow. At the beginning of the sixteenth century a petition of the burgesses to Henry VIII referred to the great pestilence: ‘by reason whereof the most part of the dwelling places and inhabitants of the said town stood desolate and fell into utter ruin and decay, which at this day are gardens and void grounds…’ The unfinished tower of St Nicholas, begun in the age of prosperity and abandoned when money and labour were alike lacking, pays tribute to the thoroughness with which the Black Death did its work.

The bailiwick of Clare, about fifteen manors belonging to the Earls of March and scattered widely over East Anglia, provide an interesting illustration of the extent to which a great landlord could hold his own in time of trouble. {327} The bailiwick on the whole was not very seriously affected: certainly much less so than another group of Mortimer manors around Bridgewater Castle in Somerset. Standon, a village not in East Anglia at all but in Hertfordshire, was the worst hit. The number of labour services was halved and some tenements remained unoccupied for more than twenty years. But even on this battered manor, once the initial shock had been weathered, the total of rents received fell only by some 15 per cent. Wages rose sharply in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death but by the 1360s had been pegged back to little above the level ruling before the plague. For a year or two a large part of the lord’s demesne was left uncultivated but this too was soon put right.

The Mortimers seem to have suffered decidedly less than most of their neighbours. This was, as a generalization, true of the whole class of great territorial magnates who held their own throughout the recession of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Dr Holmes has pointed out in his analysis of the estates of the higher nobility that, by thus retaining their habitual revenues, they were in effect taking a larger share of a decreasing product. {328} The damage thus done was blanketed in the middle of the fourteenth century by the reduced pressure on resources which the great mortality of the Black Death produced. But, in the long run, it was a movement against an economic trend which was to weaken the stability of the system which made it possible.