Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

A curious feature is that a surprisingly small drop in the number of tax-payers in Leicester and the amount of tax which they paid was recorded between 1336 and 1354. This, prima facie, is hard to reconcile with a death roll that could not possibly have been less than a quarter and was probably a third of the total population. One may permissibly draw several deductions from this. The first and most obvious is that here is another proof of the inaccuracy of Knighton’s estimates. Another, slightly more valuable though no more than confirmation of what has already been remarked elsewhere, is that the poor must have borne the brunt of the plague. The tax-payers were naturally the richest section of the community and there is nothing astonishing in the fact that, pro rata, many more survived than was the case with their less fortunate fellow-citizens.

But this alone is not enough to account for so sensationally rapid a recovery. The most interesting conclusion to be drawn is that a boom-town like Leicester, centre of a prosperous agricultural area and with rapidly growing trades and industry, could quickly make up its strength recruiting not only peasants but free men of some wealth and standing as well. The same has already been pointed out in the case of other towns but, in Leicester, a local historian has analysed the lists of new inhabitants so as to establish, as nearly as possible, from where they came. {348}

The tallage rolls of Leicester, in the years immediately after the Black Death, record the disappearance of a remarkable number of long-established names and a still more abnormal influx of new ones. Of the 247 new arrivals who were well enough off to pay taxes by 1354, sixty-five came from villages in Rutland and Leicestershire, another twenty-seven from villages on the borders of Leicestershire and the rest either from unspecified districts or from far afield. Immigrants came from Northumberland, London, Dublin and even Lille; the latter, presumably, to assist with the expanding cloth trade. These figures underline the fact that there was striking mobility among the people of medieval England and that, in the main, the big towns reinforced themselves at the expense of the adjacent countryside. It is unlikely that a village as impoverished as Wyville contributed to Leicester any one rich enough to be a tax-payer within a few years of his arrival but it would not be in the least surprising if some of the few villeins who survived decided that they had had enough of its stony poverty and set off to make their fortune in the city.

In Derbyshire, in the diocese of Lichfield, seventy-seven beneficed clergy died in 108 parishes. The family of de Wakebridge, records a local historian, lived in considerable style ‘in as healthy and uncrowded a spot as any that could be found on all the fair hillsides of Derbyshire’. But their luxury and solitude availed them nothing. Within three months William de Wakebridge lost his father, his wife, his three brothers, his two sisters and a sister-in-law. ‘The great plague’, says Dr Cox, ‘had the effect of thoroughly unstringing the consciences of many of the survivors and a lamentable outbreak of profligacy was the result.’ Sir William, at least, was spared this secondary infection. He retired from the army and gave a large part of his painfully acquired inheritance to the Church. {349}

Nottinghamshire was remarkable mainly for the erratic incidence of the plague within its borders. The mortality among beneficed clergy in the archdeaconry as a whole was 36.5 per cent, well below the national average, but this concealed the difference between Newark, with a calamitous 48 per cent, and Retford, including Sherwood forest and the flat lands in the basin of the Trent, with only 32 per cent. The county as a whole illustrated to a still more marked degree the phenomenon which has already been mentioned in other parts of England; in the high and supposedly healthy county the death rate was far higher than in the flats and fens. {350}

The figures for the clergy in Nottinghamshire illustrate well the danger of stating categorically what in fact is mere assumption. For the one hundred and twenty-six benefices in the county, sixty-five new appointments had to be made. Seebohm assumed that all these were due to the death of the previous incumbent {351} and Gasquet accepted his assumption, concluding ‘…the proportion of deaths among the beneficed clergy is found, as in other cases, to be fully one half the total number.’ {352} It was not until Hamilton Thompson, whose figures are quoted above, conducted researches which showed that, in the case of Nottinghamshire, nearly 28 per cent of the benefices were vacated for other reasons, that it became dear how inflated the earlier figures had been.

Neighbouring Lincolnshire suffered more severely than any other county. It was divided into two archdeaconries; Stow, in the north-west, and Lincoln covering the rest of the county. In Stow 57 per cent of beneficed clergy died and in Lincoln 45 per cent, including 57 per cent in Stamford, 60 per cent in the city of Lincoln itself and 56 per cent in the wold deanery of Gartree. A logical explanation for the high figure in Lincolnshire, as suggested in the case of the southern counties, might be that the county’s long coast line exposed it to many different lines of attack, in particular by ship-borne rats. But here again logic breaks down. Grimsby, with a death rate of only 35 per cent, was one of the two least troubled deaneries in the county; as a prosperous and busy port it should have been at the other end of the scale. {353}

‘In 1349’, wrote the common clerk of the city in the Blickling homilies, {354}

there was that great pestilence in Lincoln which spread all over parts of the world, beginning on Palm Sunday in the year aforesaid and enduring until the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist next following [24 June], when it ceased, God be praised who reigns for ever and ever, Amen.

By 1349, Lincoln was already losing ground economically and some at least of the decline which followed had its origin in earlier causes. But there is not only the evidence of mortality among the parish priests to show how heavily it lost. The Burwarmote Book shows that, of the 295 wills disposing of burgage tenements which were enrolled in fifty-four years around the year of the plague, 105 can be ascribed to 1349; the fruit, that is to say, of some thirty normal years. {355} Almost all were enrolled in June and July.

The chronicler of Louth Park, the great Cistercian abbey, twenty-five miles north-east of Lincoln, dealt briefly but sufficiently with the outbreak. {356}

‘This plague’, he recorded, ‘slew Jew, Christian and Saracen alike; it carried off confessor and penitent together. In many places not even a fifth part of the people were left alive. It filled the whole world with terror. So great an epidemic has never been seen nor heard of before this time, for it is believed that even the waters of the flood which happened in the days of Noah did not carry off so vast a multitude. In this year many monks of Louth Park perished; among them, on 12 July, the Abbot, Dom Walter de Luda. He was buried in front of the high altar by the side of Sir Henry Vavasour, Knight.’

No rural economy, however resilient, could recover quickly from devastation on this scale. All generalizations are dangerous but at least it can be said with confidence that the wapentakes at the southern end of the Lincolnshire wolds, ‘The classical district of mined churches and lost village sites’, {357} were left entirely desolate. Centuries were to pass before any serious re-colonization took place. Indeed, it has been convincingly argued that the population of much of the fenlands at the aid of the thirteenth century was as large, if not larger, than that recorded in the censuses of the nineteenth century. {358} Fifteen villages in Lincolnshire vanished directly after the Black Death or within a decade or two of its visitation. Probably all of them were thinly populated and economically weak before the middle of the fourteenth century but, in most cases, it must have been the plague which applied the coup de grâce.