The Black Death (25 page)

Nor were all the new recruits as estimable as this. The Rev. William, priest of the manor of Waltham, was appointed early in 1350. His extra-parochial activities earned him the nickname of ‘William the One-day priest’, a title which he amply justified when he held up Matilda, the wife of John Clement de Gody-chester, and robbed her of her purse. For this offence he was arrested and, one must fear, eventually hanged. The Rev. William was certainly exceptional and such exceptions were not uniquely to be found in the mid-fourteenth century. Delinquent priests cropped up in every generation. But in the conditions of 1350 and 1351 it came as less of a surprise when priests behaved with a striking degree of impropriety. In East Anglia at least the
reputation
of the clergy stood lower after the plague than before it.

T
HE
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.
1
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.
2

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.
3

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.
4

‘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’.
5
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.
7
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.
8

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.
9

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.
10

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
11
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.’
12
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.
13

‘In 1349’, wrote the common clerk of the city in the Blickling homilies,
14

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.
15
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.
16

‘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’,
17
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.
18
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.