The Black Death (24 page)

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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.
18
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.
19

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
20
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.
21
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.
22
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.
23
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.

Norfolk in particular is rich in those holes and mounds and crumbled ruins which local historians have painstakingly
identified
as the lost villages of another era. We have already referred to the tendency to ascribe such disappearances to the baleful effects of the Black Death. In Norfolk this seems even less
justified
than elsewhere. More than a hundred Norfolk villages
existed
at the time of the Domesday Survey and have subsequently disappeared. Thirty-four of these had already vanished by 1316 and others almost certainly fell into desolation between that date and 1348. Only one, Ringstead Parva, ceased to exist as a community between then and 1351; the bulk of the remainder lingered on till the second half of the fifteenth century or even later.

‘There can be little doubt’, concluded Mr Allison,
24
‘that the Black Death played no more than a contributory part in village depopulation in Norfolk.’ But though it is easy to exaggerate the destructive power of the plague, it would be far more misleading to minimize it. Great tracts of the county, in particular the
barren
Brecklands around Brandon, can literally be said never to have recovered. Economically weak and on the decline even
before
1348, the blow which the Black Death then inflicted and, more insidious, the opportunities which the plague created for finding better land in other, more prosperous parts of the
country
, sealed the doom of these unlucky areas. The hold which civilization had established on the border-lands during the great expansion of the thirteenth century was especially weak in East Anglia. Now it was driven inexorably back and the wild took over its own again.

Bishop Bateman was conducting peace negotiations with the French when the plague neared the borders of his diocese. He returned by sea to Yarmouth on 10 June and was told on landing that his brother, Sir Bartholomew Bateman of Gillingham, was already in his grave.
25
Hurrying to Norwich, he found the plague raging; his Vicar General, Thomas de Methwold, lurking at Terlyng in Essex; and his palace, next to the new cemetery in the Cathedral Close, made almost intolerable by the stench of the
dead. He at once ordered Methwold to return to his duties but barely was the Vicar General back at work than the ‘intrepid Bishop’, as Dr Jessop hopefully called him, was himself on his way to his rural manor at Hoxne nearly twenty miles south of Norwich. He spent three days at Ipswich in the next few months but did not visit the capital of his diocese again till the plague was safely over.

Certainly Norwich was anything but a pleasant place to be in the summer and autumn of 1349. ‘There died’, recorded
Blomefield
, possibly confusing figures for the city with those for the county or diocese, ‘no less than 57,104 (or more rightly as others have it, 57,374) persons in this city only, besides religious and beggars.’
26
He admitted that this figure might seem surprisingly high since the population of Norwich when he wrote in 1806 was still quite a lot less than the casualties of 1349, but explained that the city, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was ‘in the most flourishing state she ever saw, and more populous than she hath been ever since.’ Given about a thousand inhabitants to each of the sixty-odd parishes and throwing in an allowance for the suburbs and the religious houses, Blomefield calculated that the total population of 1348 must have been a minimum of seventy thousand. Seebohm accepts that the death rate may have been in the neighbourhood of fifty-seven thousand but reduced the total population to sixty thousand; evidently feeling that a death rate of 95 per cent called for no special explanation.
27
Basing
himself on the Leet Rolls Professor Russell estimates that the population of Norwich was some thirteen thousand in 1311.
28
Subtracting the poll tax figure for 1377 of 5,928, the figure for the population which remains to be accounted for comes
r
emarkably
close to 7,104; the last four figures of Blomefield’s total.
Russell
ingeniously surmises that the five at the beginning was added by some careless transcriber and that the ancient record to which Blomefield referred should in fact have been read as a broadly accurate seven thousand dead. He could be right but since, as he himself frequently points out, medieval statistics were invariably grossly over-stated, it seems easier to believe that the usual rule applied in the case of Norwich. What at all events seems certain is that Norwich, the second city of the kingdom, lost more than
half its population and not only never recovered its position in relation to the rest of England but, in absolute terms, had barely regained its vanished citizens by the end of the sixteenth
century.

Though the whole of Bishop Bateman’s diocese may not have suffered as much as its capital there is no doubt that mortality among the clergy was unusually high. In the years before the Black Death the average annual figure for episcopal institutions was eighty-one. In the year between 25 March 1349 and 25 March 1350 the total rose to 831.
29
For the population as a whole, Jessop remarked: ‘If any one should suggest that
many
more
than half died, I should not be disposed to quarrel with him.’
30
It is unlikely that he would go so far if he were writing today but at least it seems certain that the death rate in East Anglia was well above the national average.

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The Bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Ely was in Avignon when the plague reached his territories. He seems to have made no effort to return. He had already appointed five Vicars General to look after the diocese in his absence and, on 9 April, appointed an additional three ‘to exercise their duties until death’.
31
In his letter he referred to ‘the epidemic, as it is called, wondrously increasing in the diocese’,
32
a phrase soon to be fully justified but at the time a little premature since it was not till April that the plague took a serious grip in Cambridgeshire. He specified which of the Vicars General was to dispose of vacant benefices in his absence and carefully listed the order of succession to this attractive prerogative.

In the whole diocese there were eighteen times as many
institutions
as in a normal year, a far higher ratio even than in
Norfolk
and Suffolk. Only one of these institutions is known to have been due to the resignation rather than the death of the previous incumbent though there are other cases in which details are lacking.
33
But the incidence of the plague seems to have been even more erratic than in other parts of England. Within a radius of ten miles of Cambridge thirty-five out of fifty tenants died on the Crowland manors at Oakington, twenty out of forty-two at Dry Drayton, thirty-three out of fifty-eight at Cottenham and
yet at the manors of Great Shelford and of Elsworth, though there may have been deaths which were not recorded in the Court Rolls, there is no evidence that the Black Death had any effects at all. All these communities were in broadly similar
country
with populations of between two and four hundred. Their inhabitants suffered the same weather, farmed the same land, ate the same food. No one, be he epidemiologist or historian, has yet been able to suggest plausible reasons why one manor should have lost half its tenants while another seems to have suffered little if any ill effects.

There is remarkably little to show how severely the plague affected the University at Cambridge. The only College which furnishes any useful material is King’s Hall where sixteen out of forty resident scholars died between April and August. But one can deduce that the losses among students must have been severe by what is known of events in the town of Cambridge. Though some of the damage may have been done by the second epidemic of 1361, an idea of the devastation is given by a letter from the Bishop of Ely written in 1366 which suggested the amalgamation of two of the city parishes on the grounds that there were not enough people left to fill even one of the churches. Practically the whole of the town on the Castle side of the river, ‘The Ward beyond the Bridge’, seems to have been wiped out. Most people in All Saints in Castro also died and the few parishioners left alive moved out. The nave of All Saints’ Church fell into ruins, leaving ‘the bones of the dead exposed to the beasts.’
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If eight hundred beneficed clergy died in East Anglia, well over twice as many priests must in all have perished. Taking into account subsequent desertions there must have been at least two thousand vacancies; nearly two thousand five hundred if
Cambridgeshire
be included. Given that this was a national and not a local problem and that all the other dioceses were in competition for the limited intake of new priests and remembering the diminished appeal of a priest’s métier when he could not even be
guaranteed
a living wage, it will be obvious that the task of replacing the dead was prodigious. That it was not altogether impossible is because the Church in 1348, like agriculture, seems to have been a decidedly over-manned profession. Far more of the
land-owning
families had unloaded their younger sons on the Church than the available parishes could comfortably accommodate and there was therefore a surplus of clergy in search of benefices which could be drawn on at least to plug the more attractive gaps.

But even allowing for this, it was more than the Bishops of Norwich and Ely could do to build up the numbers of their clerics without some loss of standard. Jessop denies that there was any serious decadence in the East Anglian church after the Black Death
35
but certainly the educational level of the new priests was lower than that of their predecessors and, even when they were literate, they were often middle-aged men with little sense of vocation but widowed by the plague and looking for some way to fill the rest of their lives.