The Black Death (27 page)

That summer the halmote at Chester le Street opened as usual but when the Bishop’s steward arrived on 15 July at Hough ton 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.
35

In his history of Durham, Surtees
36
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.
37

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.
³⁸
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.

B
UT
while the Black Death had thus moved northwards to the Scottish border, Wales and the adjoining British counties had not been spared. From Bristol the plague had spread into
Worcestershire
, rising to its crescendo in June 1349; then dying away in August only to return in the late autumn.
1
As early as April it had proved necessary to forbid further burials in the cathedral churchyard at Worcester because the congestion of the dead was beginning to threaten the survival of the living.
2

‘Alas,’ recorded the Bishop,

The Bishop’s remedy was to open a new graveyard beside the hospital of St Oswald and transfer there not only all burials which would otherwise have been in the Cathedral cemetery, but also from several of the parish churches of Worcester as well. ‘Hence’, in the lapidary phrase of a local historian, ‘that prodigious assemblage of tumulation which, at this time, cannot be viewed with indifference by the most cursory beholder.’
4

Bishop Wulstan Bransford himself remained secluded in his manor at Hartlebury, four miles south of Kidderminster. In spite of this precaution he died on 6 August 1349. The King’s
Escheator
reported on the state of his estates between early August when he died and late November when a successor was
appointed
. His record shows that Hartlebury was not an isolated case.
Tenants, he said, could not be got at any price; mills were vacant, forges standing idle, pigeon houses in ruins with all the birds fled. Of
£
140 owing to the Bishop in cash or in the form of various feudal services,
£
84 were never received, ‘… on account of the dearth of tenants, who were wont to pay rent, and of customary tenants, who used to perform the said works, but who all died in the deadly pestilence’. As late as 1354 relief was still being sought on the grounds that it was impossible for the Bishop to obtain any of the customary services which had once been his due; ‘… the remnant of the said tenants had changed them into other services and, after the plague, they were no longer bound to perform services of this kind’.

Some time in 1349 a serious riot took place between the townsmen and the monks of the Priory of St Mary, the Cathedral monastery. The townsmen broke down the gates of the priory, chased the prior ‘with bows and arrows and other offensive
weapons
’ and tried to set fire to the buildings. Here, as in the
somewhat
similar incident at Yeovil,
5
it is tempting to see some link with the Black Death. Certainly such a possibility cannot be
excluded
. But chasing the prior with bows and arrows and other offensive weapons was by no means unheard of in Worcester. Relations between town and cathedral monastery were often strained in medieval England and, though the Black Death may have heightened the tension, there is no reason to believe that in Worcester or elsewhere it actually created it.

Bishop Trilleck’s neighbouring diocese fared no better. In Hereford the Bishop forbade the acting of ‘theatrical plays and interludes’ in the city churches, a belated attempt to avert the wrath of the Almighty which seems to have met with little
success
. In the end, it is claimed, the epidemic was checked ‘by
carrying
the shrine of St Thomas of Cantilupe in procession’. In 1352 a joint petition was lodged by the patrons of the two churches of Great Colington and Little Colington:

The Bishop saw the justice of the complaint and the two parishes were duly amalgamated.

The county historians illustrate the impact of the plague by quoting the inquisition post-mortem on the family of John le Strange of Whitchurch.
7
John died on 20 August, when the plague had already done its worst over most of the county. He left three sons: Fulk, Humphrey and John the younger, of whom Fulk, as eldest, was naturally the heir. By the time the inquiry was held on 30 August, Fulk had already been dead two days. Before an inquisition could be held on Fulk’s estate, Humphrey too was dead. John, the third brother, survived but inherited a shattered estate. Even before his father died the three water mills ‘which used to be worth twenty marks’ had been reassessed at only half the value, ‘by reason of the want of those grinding, on account of the pestilence’. In another of his manors, ‘two
carucates
of land which used to be worth yearly sixty shillings’ were held to be worth nothing ‘because the domestic servants and labourers are dead and no one is willing to hire the land’.

Cheshire, to the north, was thinly populated in the fourteenth century but there is plenty of evidence to show that the losses were still severe. The heads of three of the largest religious houses – the abbot of St Werburgh’s, the prioress of St Mary’s, Chester and the prior of Norton – all died within a few weeks of each other. It was impossible to find anyone able and willing to hold the eyre of the forest, the bridge over the Dee remained out of repair for several months, the income gained from tolls at the passage of Lawton dropped away to little more than half its former value. The increased bargaining power which the Black Death put into the hands of the surviving tenants is well
illustrated
by the case of the manor of Rudheath, between Northwich and Macclesfield. A note on the Court Roll reads:
8

It would be interesting to know more about the status of the tenants. The Government was shortly to pass legislation seeking to prevent the migration even of free tenants but it would not be surprising if the tenants of Rudheath in fact enjoyed no legal right to quit their tenements and were blackmailing their
landlord
with a threat to commit an unlawful act. Certainly such a case would not have been unique. The knowledge that the law was on his side was small comfort to a lord whose tenants had escaped and were now working on some neighbouring estate, enjoying more favourable terms and sheltered by their new
master
who, however he might deplore their breach of the feudal laws, was still primarily interested in ensuring that his own houses were lived in and his own lands were tilled.

*

Mr Rees, the leading authority on the Black Death in Wales, has recorded the lament of the contemporary Welsh poet, Jeuan Gethin, who must have seen and described the plague in March or April of 1349:
9

‘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 …’
10
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.
11

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