The Black Death

11. THE MIDLANDS AND THE NORTH OF ENGLAND

THE Black Death splattered the central part of England with the same haphazard venom as it had shown in the south. In Huntingdonshire it seems to have followed much the same course as in East Anglia. By 1363, read the preamble to the city charter, Huntingdon ‘was so weakened by mortal pestilences and other calamities’ that it was quite unable to pay its taxes. A quarter of the town was said to be uninhabited and the remaining residents could scarcely find the means of supporting life.^{341} Three churches were derelict, their parishioners either dead or departed. Since the citizens were hoping to get some remission of their taxes it was obviously in their interests to paint the picture as black as possible but, even allowing for this, it is clear that things were in a bad way. But it is worth reiterating yet once again that the misfortunes of Huntingdon, as with many rural areas in England, were not solely due to the Black Death or even to the cumulative effects of the various epidemics. One of the ‘other calamities’ referred to in the city charter may have been the downfall of one of the local earldoms but more important and more constant was the economic decline of the whole area, and of Huntingdon in particular, which far preceded the violent shock of the plague. The barometer of Huntingdon’s health was the success of its great annual fair and the fourteenth century had already provided a dismal history of small attendances and dwindling revenues. The plague, of course, vastly accelerated the process but Huntingdon in 1353 would anyway have found unfairly onerous taxes which it could have paid with little trouble at the beginning of the century.

Northamptonshire seems to have been among the less afflicted of English counties. Mortality among the beneficed clergy of the archdeaconry was just under 37 per cent; a figure which was reasonably constant in all the deaneries. Only in Peterborough, another of those low-lying areas which were so remarkably well treated by the plague, was the level notably below the average at a mere 27 per cent.^{342}

Stamford had a disastrous experience. It lost six incumbents in the six months between July and November 1349, and never recovered the impetus which was carrying it towards the status of an important town. After the Black Death the population remained more or less stable or even continued to decrease; the many references to ‘void places’ in the deeds of later years suggest that a long time passed before the ravages of the plague had been put right.^{343}

Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester Abbey, who wrote some time after the Black Death but was an eye witness of the disaster, has left an account of the damage done by the plague in the English countryside.^{344}

‘In this same year,’ he recorded,

No such universal or horrifying mortality had taken place within living memory though Bede, in his De gestis Anglorum, records that, in the time of Vortigern, king of the Britons, not enough people were left alive to carry the dead to their graves.

In general the countryside was soon back to something near normal. Inevitably, some of the poorer villages were less well able to resist the depredations of the plague and the temptations offered by other, richer neighbours. At Wyville, between Melton Mowbray and Grantham, an inquisition post-mortem found ‘…the three carucates are worth little, for the land is poor and stony, and lies uncultivated for want of tenants after the pestilence’.^{345} The village was never fully to recover. But, anyway in the Midlands, such cases were rare; and even Knighton, notoriously gloomy as he was, could have found little to shock him in the outward aspect of Leicestershire by 1354 or 1355.

‘The fearful mortality rolled on,’ recorded the canon of Leicester,

As usual it is impossible to reconcile such figures with what little is known about the total population. Undoubtedly many people died. But the nearest approach to a firmly based estimate suggests that the city could not easily have contained more than three thousand five hundred inhabitants before the Black Death and may even have had less than three thousand.^{347} It is difficult to believe that Knighton’s figures were more than a picturesque expression of arithmetical inadequacy.

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}

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.

On 28 July 1348, Archbishop Zouche of York had taken alarm at the news from the Continent and sent out a warning order to his flock:

‘In so far as the life of men upon earth is warfare,’ he wrote,

The Archbishop prescribed the usual course of prayer, processions and litanies to avert the coming of the dreadful pestilence.

When the Archbishop thus addressed his flock, the Black Death had hardly arrived in England. Nearly ten months were to elapse before the first cases were recorded in Yorkshire. For the Englishmen in the south, who had heard with alarm of the terrible plague in Europe, the situation had seemed perilous enough. But France was another country, the Channel lay between; ‘it can’t happen here’ was then, as always, the reaction of the Englishman confronted by disorder among the lesser breeds without the law. But such comfort could not last long. From the moment that the plague got a firm grip in Dorset it must have been clear to every well informed Englishman that, in the end, his turn would come. The more pious or the more optimistic no doubt continued to hope that some miracle would avert their doom but, as the plague moved inexorably northwards, even the most confident must have lost their faith.

Though he may have discounted some of the wilder rumours, any northerner who kept his ears open in the spring of 1349 must have been led to believe that, in all probability, he had no more than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the rest of the year. His family and friends could be expected to die around him and those in authority over him were more than likely to join him in the churchyard. Life, as he knew it, seemed on the verge of breaking down. Faced with such a threat the temptation must have been great to eat, drink, be merry and do little else besides. It is notable that, whether through apathy, self-discipline or the resignation that comes from perfect faith, there seems to have been no such reaction. Until the moment that the plague reached his village – with a minor exception in Durham which we shall mention shortly – even, indeed, when it was already rampant, the average northerner continued to till his fields, tend his cattle and perform his manorial duties. The threat of infection was not enough; only death, it seemed, could distract him from his daily duties.

Though the mortality in Yorkshire was not quite so wholesale as in other counties, certainly much less so than in neighbouring Lincolnshire, the Black Death was far from merciful. In the 535 parishes of the diocese of York, of which the great majority were in Yorkshire itself, 223 benefices were vacated by death, sixty-three by resignation and a further fourteen from unspecified causes. Between 42 per cent and 45 per cent of the parish clergy died.

The huge archdeaconry of York shows the usual wide variants in the mortality rate from area to area. The deanery of Doncaster lost nearly 59 per cent of its clergy, yet virtually no benefices were vacated in the marshes between Doncaster and the Humber. In Pontefract the figure was 40 per cent, again with few or no casualties in the eastern flats. And yet in the mountainous district of Craven which, on the analogy of Derbyshire, should have suffered severely, a mere 27 per cent perished. York itself, with 32 per cent, was relatively lightly touched.

In so vast a county it will be obvious that the Black Death could not have arrived everywhere at the same time. It is most unlikely that more than a handful of cases occurred before April 1349; Pope Clement VI’s Bull of 23 March from Avignon referred to the plague as having already begun to harass the diocese but it seems certain that this was premature and that, even if there had been an outbreak in March or early April, it was confined to Nottinghamshire or perhaps to one or two coastal areas. It did not arrive in the city of York until 21 May. June, July and August were the worst months all over the north of England.

The Archbishop of York held to his normal practice and discreetly sat out the summer months at one or other of his rural manors near the little town of Ripon.^{360} His suffragan, however, Archbishop Hugh of Damascus, behaved with a vigour unusual in a senior churchman. He was an Austin friar who had once been excommunicated by Archbishop Grandisson for outrageous behaviour.^{361} This unconventional background perhaps explained why he so far forgot his rank as to tour his diocese, visit the sick, encourage the healthy and consecrate many new churchyards. These were usually only authorized for temporary use and the citizens of Fulford, a mile or so south of York, found themselves in trouble some years later when they persisted in burying their dead in their new churchyard of St Oswald long after the Black Death had passed. Archbishop Thoresby, in a curious commentary on the pleasures of the times, accused them of ‘taking an empty delight in novelty’ and ordered them to resort forthwith to their traditional burial ground.^{362}

York was one of the largest cities in England; smaller only than London and, perhaps, Norwich. Professor Russell^{363} estimates the population in 1377 at 10,872. By that date economic expansion had already been resumed and the plague, destructive though it was, provided no more than a check in a process which lasted till the end of the century.^{364} But, at the time of the Black Death, the city was already in difficulties, since a disastrous flood had submerged its western parishes on 31 December 1348.^{365} Jeanselme, who contends that floods, famines and earthquakes invariably precede an epidemic of plague, indeed cites the flooding of the Ouse as evidence of his thesis.^{366} It is hard to see why, in that case, the plague should have spread with equal vigour to all the other cities where the Ouse did not overflow and no earthquake or famine took place. But one can accept that the commotion which the sudden flood must have caused among the rats of York could have helped the spread of infection throughout the city and the neighbourhood.

At the Abbey of Meaux, six miles north of Hull, the monks were already expecting the worst. On the Friday before Passion Sunday, they recalled, they had been violently thrown from their stalls by an earthquake. Such a portent could only have meant trouble to come. When it was coupled with the undoubtedly sinister birth of Siamese twins in Kingston-upon-Hull and their death a few days before, then even the most sceptical could hardly have doubted the imminence of disaster. Disaster duly came. ‘…God’s providence ordained at that time’, wrote the chronicler of the monastery, ‘that in many places the chaplains were kept alive to the very end of the pestilence in order to bury the dead; but after this burial of the lay folk the chaplains themselves were devoured by the plague, as the others had been before them.’^{367} The Abbot, Hugh de Leven, and five monks died in a single day, on 12 August 1349; the prior, the cellarer, the bursar and seventeen other monks died also and, out of fifty monks and lay brethren, the chronicler claims that only ten survived.^{368} The Abbey found its revenues so reduced that it was forced to lease its grange for life to a certain Sir William de Swine for a lump payment of £80. Whether by divine intervention, coincidence or monkish initiative, Sir William was murdered shortly afterwards and the grange reverted to the Abbey. But, in spite of this windfall, recovery was slow and, in 1354, the Abbey was handed over to a royal commission ‘on account of its miserable condition’.^{369}

The countryside around Hull seems to have been ravaged simultaneously by plague and by the flooding of the Rivers Hull and Humber. An inquisition post-mortem at Hemingbrough showed pasture normally worth 12d. trampled down and valueless. ‘The herdsmen were lying in the churchyard’.^{370} All the bondigers and carters of the Abbey of Selby were dead so that turves and hay had to be carried by water. As for Hull itself, the King in 1353 remitted certain taxes: ‘…considering the waste and destruction which our town of Kingston-on-Hull has suffered, both through the overflow of the waters of the Humber and other causes, and that a great part of the people of the said town have died in the last deadly pestilence which raged in these parts and that the remnant left in the town are so desolate and poverty-stricken’.^{371} At Wharram Percy the population of the parish was so reduced that, shortly after the Black Death, the side aisles of the church were pulled down and never rebuilt.

But in Yorkshire as elsewhere the structure of government was strained but substantially survived. A curious illustration of this comes from the city of York itself. On 7 August 1349 a jury certified that William Needler had died ‘a natural and not violent death by reason of the pestilence in Coppergate, York’. There must have been some decidedly suspicious circumstances about his death if, when so many were perishing, it was found necessary to conduct an inquest. But the fact that it was possible to assemble a jury and record a verdict according to the due processes of the law at a time when the epidemic in the city must have been at or near its peak is an impressive tribute to the civic sense of the inhabitants or, perhaps, to the discipline with which the authorities imposed their rule.

Lancashire was at this date one of the most thinly populated of the English counties. One area about which an unusual amount of information exists is the deanery of Amounderness to the west of the county, including the parishes of Preston, Lancaster and Blackpool. The Archdeacon of Richmond and his proctor, and Dean of Amounderness, had a dispute about certain fees for the probate of wills. A jury was set up to inquire into the question. They viewed the statistics presented to them with a certain amount of scepticism but no alternative totals were suggested and figures of this kind at least carry slightly more conviction than the vague calculations of the chronicles. In the ten parishes of Amounderness it was claimed, 13,180 people died between 8 September 1349 and 11 January 1350. In the parish of Preston 3,000 died, in Poulton-le-Fylde, it was said, 800 died; in Lancaster, 3,000; Garstang, 2,000 and Kirkham, 3,000.^{372}

Even allowing for the enormous size of the parishes and some inflation in the estimates of the dead it seems that Amounderness must have suffered worse than the regional average. But evidence is scarce. At Rochdale where the parson died, there was a gap of eight months before the vacancy was filled, but this could be accounted for by inefficiency on the part of the diocesan authorities as well as by the high mortality. A curious entry is found in the Assize Rolls. A certain William of Liverpool ‘caused one third of the inhabitants of Everton to be brought to his house after death’; presumably with the intention of carrying out cut-price funerals and so cheating the lord of the manor and the church authorities. Since it was widely assumed that the plague was caught from the dead, his courage deserves praise as well as his business acumen.^{373}

Of Cumberland still less is known. In this county, the diocesan registers are lacking; a tribute not so much to the Black Death as to the havoc wrought by the invading Scots. But though the Scots prepared the ground it was the plague which finally dislocated the agricultural economy. The accounts of Richard de Denton, former Vice-Sheriff, presented for audit in 1354, show vividly what damage had been done. Because of ‘the mortal pestilence lately raging in those parts’, he reported, ‘the greater parts of the manor lands attached to the King’s Castle at Carlisle’ were still lying uncultivated. For eighteen months after the end of the plague, indeed, the entire estate had been let go to waste ‘for lack of labourers and divers tenants. Mills, fishing, pastures and meadow lands could not be let during that time for want of tenants willing to take the farms of those who died in the said plague.’ The jury found that Richard de Denton had proved his facts and accepted the greatly reduced value of the estate.^{374} The city of Carlisle was relieved of many of its taxes in 1352 because ‘it is rendered void and, more than usual, is depressed by the mortal pestilence’.

Durham too had suffered severely from the incursions of marauding Scots. In 1346 they had invaded in greater numbers than ever before. Under the sacred banner of St Cuthbert, Bishop Hatfield had taken the field and repelled them. But, though the victory was decisive, it had not come in time to save the Palatinate from devastation. Against such a background it is not surprising that the morale of the inhabitants should have been frail even before the threat of the Black Death became imminent. Durham is almost the only county in England where there is any evidence of panic spreading before the arrival of the epidemic and it is reasonable to see a link between this and the recent tribulations of the area. Yet even here no very dramatic evidence of demoralization is to be found.

That summer the halmote at Chester le Street opened as usual but when the Bishop’s steward arrived on 15 July at Houghton le Spring he found that accounts of the plague had spread dismay among the peasants. ‘There was no one’, it was recorded, ‘who would pay the fine for any land which was in the lord’s hands through fear of the plague.’ At Easington, the next centre for the halmote, things were even worse. The steward offered to make payment of rent contingent on the tenant’s survival of the plague but even this could not tempt the nervous peasants into taking on any new responsibility. In the end he was forced to let three tenements at an absurdly low rent since even this would be of greater benefit to the lord than to leave the land untilled.^{375}

In his history of Durham, Surtees^{376} described the Scottish invasion and concluded, ‘No other events than those related disturbed the peace of Hatfield’s Pontificate.’ The point of view which could thus lightly dismiss a calamity which killed perhaps ten times as many people as the battles with the Scots is hard to understand. But in justice to Surtees it must be admitted that few details are known. The usual pin-points of light illumine the great obscurity. Billingham was badly affected; forty-eight of the prior’s tenants were carried off, probably well over half the population. A laconic entry in the Bishop’s rolls records, ‘No tenant came from West Thickley because they are all dead.’ A peasant, driven mad with grief by the loss of all his family, wandered in search of them from village to village of the Palatinate. For many years his unceasing quest was to revive ugly memories throughout the countryside.^{377}

It seems that in Durham relations between landlord and tenant suffered exceptionally as a consequence of the plague. Here too the damage done by the incursions of the Scots may have contributed to the malaise. At all events, while the Black Death was waning, something close to a strike took place in several villages of the Chester ward and harsh methods of repression had to be adopted.^{378} Too little information survives to give any real idea whether this was no more than a spasm of resentment against an unpopular bailiff or a wider and more serious movement against authority; it is at all events, curious that the last county in England to be visited by the plague should have been the first to yield any evidence of rural disorder.