The Black Death

8. PROGRESS ACROSS THE SOUTH

For the historiographer concerned with the Black Death in England, 1349 is a year of which there is much to be written, for it was in the course of this year that almost every town and village was afflicted. At first it is possible to visualize the plague conducted, as it were, like a military operation. The initial attack on the Dorset ports; the bold thrust across country to the north coast so as to cut off communications between the western counties and the mainland; seaborne landings at points along the coast to outflank the defence; the slow mopping up of what opposition was left in Devon and Cornwall; and the main thrust towards the Thames valley and London. But after March 1349 the analogy with a controlled campaign can no longer be pursued. To change the metaphor, the dykes were down and the water was everywhere. The infection no longer advanced regularly from point to point but sprang up simultaneously in a hundred places; reaching its peak, for no reason that can be established, in Norfolk and Suffolk before Cambridgeshire; in Hampshire before Surrey; in Warwickshire before Worcestershire. By July it was spreading across the northern counties, by the end of the year nowhere had been spared. Through winter and summer, through flood and drought; against old and young, weak and strong; the disease went imperviously on its way. To track its course with any precision would be a hopeless task: the most that is possible is to register its impact in the various regions and to highlight its workings at a few points where fuller detail is available.

When the plague turned eastwards after reaching the Bristol Channel the first city to be threatened was Gloucester. The town council, horrified at the tragedy which had overtaken their neighbours in Bristol, decided to seek refuge in isolation. An embargo was placed on all intercourse between the two cities and the gates closed to any refugees who might carry with them the seeds of the plague.^{257} But even if it had been possible to keep out every infectious human, and there is no doubt that the plague had been present in Bristol in its most virulent and infectious form, the citizens of Gloucester could have done nothing to protect themselves from the plague-bearing rat, making its way along the ditches or travelling in the river boats that plied up and down the Severn.

Bishop Wulstan Bransford remained on his country estate, occupied in the endless search for new priests to take the places of the dead. Between March and September alone eighty vacancies had arisen, almost all caused, according to the County History, by the death of the previous incumbent.^{258} The Bishop himself died on 6 August 1349. At Ham, a manor belonging to the Berkeleys not far from Cheltenham, so much land either escheated to the lord because of the tenants’ death without an heir or was abandoned to look after itself that the bailiff had to hire the equivalent of 1,144 days’ work to get the harvest in. The figure is impressive but so also is the fact that the extra labour was forthcoming, though no doubt at a considerable price.^{259}

In so far as any pattern can be detected in the advance of the plague from west to east across England it seems to have struck from Bristol into Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire and from Southampton and the West across Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Surrey towards London. The first prong of the advance provided some of the most fearful devastation of the whole epidemic.

The worst months for Oxfordshire were March, April and May, though there must certainly have been many cases before and after this period of maximum destruction. The county was, at this time, an archdeaconry within the vast diocese of Bishop Gynewell of Lincoln. Professor Hamilton Thompson’s enormously valuable analysis of the Registers of the diocese shows that, so far as mortality among the clergy is concerned, the south of the county escaped lightly. In the deanery of Henley only a quarter of the beneficed clergy died and in Aston a mere 19 per cent. But in the city of Oxford itself, 43 per cent did not survive, in the deanery of Woodstock 42 per cent, in Bicester 40 per cent and in Chipping Norton 29 per cent. In the whole archdeaconry just over 34 per cent of the beneficed clergy perished, well below the 40.7 per cent which was the average for Gynewell’s diocese.^{260}

Applying the suggested margin of error, one arrives at the highly speculative conclusion that total mortality in the archdeaconry should have been between 25 per cent and 37 per cent. The Cartulary of Eynsham Abbey provides evidence to show that, in that part of the county at least, the lower of these estimates was well below the mark.^{261} The Abbey itself, between Witney and Oxford, seems to have suffered badly enough. Abbot Nicholas had been deprived of his office by the Bishop because of some now forgotten offence. Bishop Gynewell nominated two administrators to look after the Abbey pending the nomination of a new Abbot but on 13 May two of the senior brethren arrived to report that the first of his nominees was dead and the life of the second despaired of. He named in their place the two monks who had brought the news and sent them on their way. His new appointments met with no greater success; both monks were dead before they reached the Abbey. In despair Abbot Nicholas was forgiven and reinstated.

But the manors of the Abbey suffered still worse. Common tradition in England ascribes to the Black Death the responsibility for the disappearance from the map of many villages, leaving the church, usually the only solidly constructed building, as a solitary monument to the past. Certainly the Black Death helped the process of depopulation and so weakened many communities that they were unable to survive the economic and social vicissitudes of the next two centuries. But very few villages can be shown to have been finally and completely deserted as a direct result of the Black Death.^{262} One of the exceptions was the Abbot of Eynsham’s manor of Tilgarsley (or Tilgardesle) where the collectors of the lay subsidy reported in 1359 that it was not possible to gather the tax because nobody had lived in the village since 1350. There is no reason to think that Tilgarsley was either rich or thickly populated before the Black Death but the fact that the tax was fixed at 94s. 10d. suggests that the community was reasonably prosperous or, at least, far removed from starvation.^{263}

Another Eynsham manor, that of Woodeaton, went near to sharing the fate of Tilgarsley. ‘In the time of the mortality of men or pestilence which befell in the year of our Lord 1349’, reads the Cartulary, ‘scarce two tenants remained in the manor and they would have departed had not Brother Nicholas of Upton, then Abbot, …made an agreement with them and the other tenants who came in afterwards.’ The bargain which the Abbot struck, giving the tenants a somewhat higher rent but less arduous feudal services, is an interesting example of the methods to which landlords were to have recourse in the years following the Black Death. He was only partially successful. By 1366 there were twenty-seven tenants in the village but six cottages still stood vacant.

At Cuxham, some seven miles south of Thame, only two reeves had been appointed to administer the manor in the whole period between 1288 and 1349. The old reeve died in March 1349. His replacement died in April. His successor, a bailiff, died in June. His further successor died in July, and the fifth in line died or, at least, departed from the scene a year later in July 1350. By 1360 the lord had given up any attempt to farm the manorial demesne and was seeking to put all his land out to rent.^{264}

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

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.

The plague got a firm grip in Wiltshire before a significant number of cases occurred in neighbouring Hampshire. The lists of institutions to the benefices of Hampshire, assuming the usual gap of a month to six weeks between mortality and replacement, suggest that the first deaths took place at the very end of 1348, that the worst months were February and March 1349, and that things were more or less back to normal by the end of the year.^{274}

But three months before the plague had struck, on 24 October 1348, William Edendon, alias Edyndon or Edyngton, Bishop of Winchester and former Royal Treasurer, had sent out warning orders to all the clergy of his diocese.^{275}

‘A voice in Rama has been heard’; he lamented, ‘much weeping and crying has sounded throughout the various countries of the globe. Nations, deprived of their children in the abyss of an unheard-of plague, refuse to be consoled because, as is terrible to hear, cities, towns, castles and villages, adorned with noble and handsome buildings and wont up to the present to rejoice in an illustrious people, in their wisdom and counsel, in their strength and in the beauty of their matrons and virgins; wherein too every joy abounded and whither multitudes of people flocked from afar for relief: all these have already been stripped of their population by the calamity of the said pestilence, more cruel than any two-edged sword. And into these said places now none dare enter but fly far from them as from the dens of wild beasts. Every joy has ceased in them; pleasant sounds are hushed and every note of gladness is banished. They have become abodes of horror and a very wilderness; fruitful country places without the tillers, thus carried off, are deserts and abandoned to barrenness.’

Whether the inhabitants of these erstwhile earthly paradises would have recognized them from Edendon’s description may be doubtful but the picture of the fate which had overtaken them must have caused dismay in the minds of all his readers. For, went on the Bishop:

To avert this doom the Bishop instructed his clergy to exhort their flocks to attend the sacrament of penance; on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays to join in saying the seven penitential and the fifteen gradual psalms and to take part, barefoot and with heads bowed, in processions around the market place or through the churchyards, reciting the greater litany. Three weeks later, while staying at Esher, he followed up this mandate with a further letter reminding the people ‘that sickness and premature death often come from sin and that, by the healing of souls, this kind of sickness is known to cease’.^{276}

But belated penitence availed nothing. The plague struck the diocese of Winchester with especial violence. 48.8 per cent of all beneficed clergy died, a figure not exceeded in any other diocese of England.^{277} One explanation of this high mortality may be that the coastline of Hampshire was particularly exposed to ship-borne infection; the other two dioceses to suffer most were those of Exeter and Norwich, both of them similarly vulnerable. But it is difficult to make any sensible deductions valid for the whole of England about the factors which made any given area a ready target for the plague. In one region the hilly country seemed to suffer most, in another the plains. The fens of East Anglia escaped lightly, yet the valleys of the Severn and the Thames were devastated. The coast of Hampshire was much affected, yet Kent was relatively little damaged. Nowhere was immune but it seemed that only when the plague had come and gone could any town or county know whether or not it would prove especially susceptible.

In Crawley the population dropped from four hundred in 1307 to only a hundred and eighty in 1673. It did not reach four hundred again until 1851.^{278} Certainly the Black Death was not alone responsible for what must have been a protracted process of depopulation. But the rapid changes in the methods used in the cultivation of the manorial demesne, in particular as regards the number of weekly workers, which immediately followed the epidemic show how much it must have affected the available labour force.^{279} Prior to 1349 the reeve of Crawley, on behalf of his landlord, the Bishop of Winchester, was happy to receive ‘fees for annual recognition’, that is to say, fees paid by villeins for the privilege of staying away from the manor to which they belonged. After this date no more such fees were received. Given the dearth of labour that then existed no landlord would willingly allow his villeins to deprive him of their services. Certainly the villeins did wander abroad, with greater frequency and success even than before the plague; but it was in defiance of their landlord and the law of the land.

Hampshire’s off-shore islands suffered no less than the mainland.^{280} The Isle of Wight was so reduced in population that, in 1350, the King remitted the tax due from the royal tenants. Almost every benfice in the island became vacant during the plague. Hayling Island, off Portsmouth, suffered quite as badly. ‘Moreover’, said a royal declaration of 1352, ‘since the greater part of the said population died whilst the plague was raging, now, through the dearth of servants and labourers, the inhabitants are oppressed and daily are falling most miserably into greater poverty.’^{281} For these unfortunates, too, a reduced rate of taxation was conceded.

Winchester, the ancient capital of England, was as severely affected as any large town in the country. As usual it is difficult to establish either how large the population was before the plague or what percentage perished. Professor Russell has calculated that, in 1148, the population was about 7,200 and that, by 1377, the year of the poll tax, it had dropped to a mere 2,160.^{282} Almost certainly numbers would have grown between 1148 and 1300 and dropped only slightly, if at all, between 1300 and 1348. The population at the latter date could not have been less than 8,000 and was perhaps as much as 9,000 or 10,000. If one guessed that the Black Death killed 4,000 people in the city the estimate would probably be conservative.

By January 1349 deaths were running at such a level that the existing burial grounds were overcrowded. The Church insisted that all burials must take place in consecrated ground; the populace, more concerned with hygiene than theology, insisted with equal vigour that the bodies of the plague victims must be taken outside the city walls and buried in a common pit. When a monk from St Swithun’s, the priory of the Cathedral, was conducting a burial service in the central churchyard, an angry crowd broke in and attacked and wounded him. The Bishop, outraged at this aggression by ‘low class strangers and degenerate sons of the church’ against a man ‘whom, by his habit and tonsure, they knew to be a monk’, ordered the excommunication of the guilty. At the same time he gave the indignant citizens most of what they wanted – ordering the rapid enlargement of the existing graveyards and the opening of new ones away from the centre of the town. He explained, for the benefit of the less well-informed members of his flock, that, since the Catholic Church believed in the resurrection of the dead, it was important that their corpses should be buried ‘not in profane places, but in specially enclosed and consecrated cemeteries, or churches where with due reverence they are kept, like the relics of the Saints, till the day of Resurrection’.^{283}

In the Middle Ages it rarely paid to get into a wrangle with a monk. The Bishop of Winchester had the last laugh when the time came to enlarge the churchyard of the Cathedral. With polite expressions of regret it was explained that this could only be done by reclaiming a stretch of land between the Cathedral and the High Street which had been granted to the priory by Henry I but subsequently ‘usurped’ by the Mayor, bailiffs and citizens as a site for a market and for bi-annual fairs. In Winchester, it was clear, either the quick or the dead were going to suffer and, if the Church had anything to do with it, it was not going to be the dead.

As in Siena, the plague left Winchester a tangible record of its visit. Edendon had formed grandiose plans for remodelling the west end of the Cathedral and reconstructing the nave in the Decorated style. He completed the demolition work in 1348, pulling down the two massive towers that flanked the Norman front. But when it came to rebuilding, the Black Death removed his labour force and funds ran short. A new west front was hurriedly flung up as a temporary measure until there was time and money to build something which would redound with greater éclat to the glory of Bishop Edendon. So far this makeshift has lasted something over six hundred years and still appears to have plenty of life left in it.

The plague reached Surrey, the other half of Bishop Edendon’s diocese, a few weeks after Hampshire. March and April seem to have been the worst months. Banstead, four miles east of Epsom, was typical of many of the victims.^{284}

The manor had been granted by Edward III to Queen Philippa as part of her dowry. A certain John Wortyng was installed as bailiff but evidently failed to win the confidence of the Queen’s man-of-business. Some years after the Black Death had passed through the manor he claimed an allowance of £6 9s. 10d. for rent not paid on vacant tenements. The entry was struck out in his accounts and the sceptical note appended: ‘Cancelled until inquiry is made into how many and what tenements are in the Queen’s hands and for how much he could have answered on the issues of each tenement.’ In the event he seems to have been proved justified. A jury sitting in 1354 found that twenty-seven out of 105 villein holdings had been vacant since the epidemic. It is not unreasonable to deduce that a few others at least had found new tenants during this period and that the original death roll must therefore have included at least a third of Banstead’s villeins.

The Black Death at Farnham has been the subject of a special study.^{285} The hundred of Farnham was one of the richest and most populous in the great estates of the Bishop of Winchester. Judging by the Reeve’s records in the Pipe Rolls there was a freakish first visitation of the plague at the end of 1348 which disappeared as mysteriously as it had come early in 1349 and was followed by the main outbreak at the same time as the rest of Surrey a few months later. In the twelve months between September 1348 and September 1349, 185 heads of households died. The ratio between householders and dependants is a subject of some controversy but, for the moment, it will be sufficient to assume that it could be no less than one to three. The total population of the hundred was between three thousand and four thousand; taking a figure half-way between the two, it would seem that some 20 per cent of the inhabitants died.

The paradoxical result of this mortality was that the Bishop of Winchester did very well financially. In a normal year fines paid on the estates of the deceased yielded between £8 and £20; in the twelve months of the Black Death this soared to £101 14s. 4d. As heriots, the head of cattle which the heirs of every dead tenant had to hand over to the landlord, the reeve received twenty-six horses and a foal, fifty-seven oxen, one bull, fifty-four cows, twenty-six bullocks, nine wethers and twenty-six sheep. This windfall had its embarrassing side. Prices had slumped as a result of the plague and the reeve, even after killing and salting some of the oxen and cows, was forced to convert part of the demesne to pasture for the new herds.

On the debit side there was a substantial drop in rents; either because the tenants were dead or because conditions were so difficult that all or part of the rent was remitted by the landlord. But, as on most of the manors of the Bishop, labour services were more important than a money rent. So great was the surplus of labour in Farnham immediately before the Black Death that it proved relatively easy to fill the vacancies and get in the harvest without much recourse to specially hired workmen. The three traditional harvest dinners were given for the twenty-four customary workers at a total cost of nine shillings, a figure very similar to that for earlier seasons. In the year in which the Black Death was at its worst, total receipts at Farnham were £305; total expenses only £43 5s.1¼d.

If this had been the whole story, then Farnham would have had cause to congratulate itself. But though the plague diminished in virulence it was still active. Between September 1349 and September 1350 another 101 head tenants died. By now the dwindling of the population must have meant that the ratio between householder and dependant also diminished but at least another three hundred villagers died. By the end of 1350, especially as a few further cases of plague occurred even in the last months of that year, more than a third of the people of Farnham must have been dead. Forty times in that year it was said that no fine was paid because there was nobody left to inherit. This meant that the cottage and land escheated to the lord; a situation which was profitable enough for the landlord in normal times when there were plenty of spare villeins to take up the tenement but disastrous when all the putative tenants were in their graves. The income from fines fell to £36 15s. 10d. and only four heriots were delivered, presumably remitted through charity or because the landlord had too many cattle already. By the end of 1349, fifty-two holdings were lying derelict. Thirty-six of these were filled up rapidly but the remainder proved more difficult. An increased amount of work on the demesne, particularly at harvest time, had to be done by hired labour and wages rose sharply in 1349 and 1350. With the virtual closure of the potters ‘and brick makers’ industry in the neighbourhood, sales of clay and fern fell away to nothing. But even in this year the reeve could still show a reasonable profit on his operations.

It took some years to get things back to normal. Considerable pressure had to be brought on tenants to take up the vacant holdings but in the end all of them were filled. Wages never returned to the 1348 figure, but they soon fell below the inflated level of 1350. A market for clay and fern gradually reopened. Good administration; the support of a rich and powerful landlord and the natural wealth of the land, ensured that the hundred of Farnham, like the greater part of the Bishop’s estates, was never a liability. In spite of the death of every third inhabitant, life and business went on much as before. In this Farnham was no more typical of England as a whole than the many manors already mentioned where the economy collapsed and income fell away to almost nothing. But its resilience was far from being unique or even exceptional. It is important to remember that both kinds of manors existed when seeking to establish a picture of England under the Black Death.