Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

‘Black smoke’, ‘Rootless phantom’: such phrases convey something the mystery and horror of the plague to those who suffered it. But what is so moving about Gethin’s comment is that he did not allow the horror to overwhelm him but, with the vocabulary of a poet and the eye of a scientific observer, struggled to pin down the physical appearance of the phenomenon, to find the simile which would convey to the reader precisely what he saw. It was the defiant dedication of the doctor who, on his death-bed, records his symptoms from moment to moment for the future education of his colleagues. In the response of men like Jeuan Gethin lay the victory of mankind over his adversities.

Geoffrey the Baker traced the course of the plague around England. ‘The following year’, he went on, ‘it devastated Wales as well as England…’ {388} The chronicler’s phrasing is obscure but it seems from the context that ‘The following year’ must refer to 1350. This must be incorrect. The Welsh were affected at much the same time as their English neighbours; in the south, indeed, somewhat earlier since the infection apparently moved across the Severn valley into Monmouthshire before it had run its course through Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. {389}

By March 1349 the infection had taken a firm grip on the whole lordship of Abergavenny. The lord of the eastern portion died at the beginning of the month, and by the middle of April, devastation was almost complete. In the manor of Penros only £ 4 out of rents worth £ 12 could be collected ‘because many of the tenements lie empty and derelict for lack of tenants’. The guardian of the heir petitioned for a reduction of £ 140 in a rent of £ 340. An inquiry allowed arrears only to the extent of £ 60 but, more significantly, accepted a permanent reduction of £ 40. The damage must have been grave indeed if the sceptical royal officials were prepared to accept that there was no hope of it being made good in the foreseeable future.

So far as any course can be plotted the disease seems to have travelled northwards through the border counties of Hereford, Shropshire and Cheshire and re-entered Wales in the North-East. The lead miners at Holywell, a few miles west of Flint, suffered so severely that the survivors refused to go on working. The Court Rolls of Ruthin provide an unusually complete picture of the depredations of the plague in that part of Wales. Nothing at all unusual seems to have happened before the end of May. Then, in the second week of June, the abnormal number of seven deaths took place within the jurisdiction of the Court of Abergwiller. The plague quickly spread. Seventy-seven of the inhabitants of Ruthin died within the next two weeks; ten in Llangollen, thirteen in Llanerch, twenty-five in Dogfeiling. Mortality continued at this level or even higher until the middle of July, abated for a few weeks, then returned to its most ferocious excesses in the last three weeks of August. The worst was then over and the winter passed with relatively little further loss.

Rees considers that the Black Death probably reached Carmarthen by way of the sea. Certainly two of the officials of the Staple were among the first victims and, if infected boats were putting into the harbour, their post would have been one of peculiar danger. The Lord of Carmarthen, in fact the Prince of Wales, suffered no less than other great landlords: receipts from mills and fisheries fell drastically and fairs, one of the most profitable sources of revenue, had to be abandoned altogether.

In Cardigan, so great was the mortality and the fear of infection that it proved almost impossible to find anyone to fill such offices as beadle, reeve, or serjeant. Out of one hundred and four gabularii or rent-paying tenants, ninety-seven died or fled before midsummer.

Wales in the mid-fourteenth century was divided into the lowland ‘Englishry’, largely controlled by colonizers from across the border and run on a manorial basis similar to that of England, and the upland ‘Welshry’ where the unfortunate natives skulked in what was left to them of their country. In the latter areas the writ of the English hardly ran and such records as survive give little indication of what befell the inhabitants. That they suffered seems certain and, if the analogy of the English hills is anything to go by, they suffered worse than their invaders in the valleys. But the damp mist which hangs so constantly over the Welsh mountains seems as apt to confound the historian as the tourist and even the small nugget of fact on which large guesses can be based is here entirely lacking.

Painful readjustment, demoralization, lawlessness: such are the familiar symptoms of a society recovering from the shock of the plague. Madoc Ap Ririd and his brother Kenwric

came by night in the Pestilence to the house of Aylmar after the death of the wife of Aylmar and took from the same house one water pitcher and basin, value one shilling, old iron, value fourpence. And they also present that Madoc and Kenwric came by night to the house of Almar in the vill of Rewe in the Pestilence, and from that house stole three oxen of John le Parker and three cows, value six shillings. {390}

How many others must have ‘come by night in the Pestilence’, to profit by the concomitant chaos, to rob the survivors or loot the houses of the dead.

But in Wales as in England, though law and order was badly shaken, substantially it survived. Burglary and banditry were anyhow far from uncommon in medieval England and self-defence the only satisfactory answer to the would-be aggressor. Things certainly got worse at the time of the Black Death but not sensationally so. The main highways were little less safe than in the past; the streets in the cities and big towns, anyhow never to be recommended during the hours of darkness, do not seem to have become conspicuously more perilous. In some cases, where the authorities lost their grip, the more prosperous citizens formed vigilance committees and took their protection into their own hands. A great many Aylmars were fated to lose, not only their wife but their pitcher and their old iron, value fourpence, as well. But the situation never became intolerable. Certainly the greater lawlessness was an inconsiderable extra burden compared with the overwhelming weight of the plague itself.

Mr Rees records that the effects of the Black Death in Wales seem to have been very similar, at least so far as the Englishry was concerned, to the effects in England itself. The decay of the manor and the manorial system was the immediate and the permanent consequence of the plague. The garden of the manor, with no one to tend it, was more and more often let out as pasture. The dovecot and fish stew were allowed to fall into disuse and often never reactivated. The lords of the manor renounced the fanning of the manorial demesne and began to let it out at the best rent they could get. The principle of bondage thenceforward played a far less significant part in the social structure of the manor. The system, in short, broke down because of the shortage of labour and the improved bargaining position of the villein.

All these phenomena were recorded in England too. But in the latter country so many qualifications have to be made to allow for the history of the previous decades, for regional variations and for eccentric and inexplicable movements against the trend that any generalization is open to destructive criticism. In Wales the scope for generalization is greater. Partly the reason for this is geographical: the area was smaller and more homogeneous; variations therefore were less. But the nature of the manorial system in Wales ensured that it would bear the imprint of the plague in a way much more clear-cut and decisive than its English counterpart. On the one hand the seeds of decay, which were already beginning to corrupt the English system long before Pasteurella pestis added its contribution, had by 1349 hardly affected Wales. Any change which did take place at this period can therefore be attributed with greater confidence to the plague. On the other hand, since the manorial system in Wales was younger and more fragile, it succumbed more rapidly to the blows which it received in 1349. In Wales the Black Death accomplished in a year or two a revolution which in England was worked out over the whole of the fourteenth century.