The Black Death (43 page)

Razi, Poos and Goldberg are demographers as well as social historians. And the two specialisms are combined again in the work of John Hatcher and Barbara Harvey. John Hatcher’s survey of
Plague,
Population
and
the
English
Economy
1348–1530 (London, 1977) has been reprinted many
times. He subsequently moved to an earlier period, but has since returned to the later Middle Ages with two important papers on ‘Mortality in the fifteenth century: some new evidence’,
Economic
History
Review,
39 (1986), pp. 19–38, and ‘England in the aftermath of the Black Death’,
Past
&
Present
,144 (1994), pp.3–35. Hatcher’s research on the obituary lists of Christ Church (Canterbury) was what gave him the ‘new evidence’ for that article in 1986. And the heavy mortalities and characteristically short life-spans of Canterbury’s post-plague monks have been found to be matched exactly in the Westminster Abbey data, discussed by Barbara Harvey in her Ford Lectures of 1989, and published in
Living
and
Dying
in
England
1100
–
1540.
The
monastic
experience
(Oxford, 1993).

Philip Ziegler ends his book with three wide-ranging chapters on the effects of the pestilence in the longer term, with particular reference to English instituions and the economy. But as everybody writing on the Black Death has found, disentangling its consequences from those of other contemporary factors has not been easy. Was it plague, episcopal benefactions, or new chantry-related employment opportunities, for example, which brought increasing numbers of students to Oxford and Cambridge in the Late Middle Ages, as William J. Courtenay noted in The effect of the Black Death on English higher education’,
Speculum,
55 (1980), pp.696–714? What part did plague or fear of Purgatory play in the Corpus Christi gilds described by Miri Rubin in ’Corpus Christi fraternities and late-medieval piety’,
Studies
in
Church
History,
23 (1986), pp.97–109, and again in her
Corpus
Christi.
The
Eucharist
in
late
medieval
culture
(Cambridge, 1991)? Was the horror of an unsecured death more responsible than plague itself for the developments in art discussed by Joseph Polzer, ‘Aspects of the fourteenth-century iconography of death and the plague’, in
The
Black
Death,
Ed. D. Williman (Binghamton, 1982), pp. 107–30, by John B. Friedman, ‘“He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence”: the iconography of the plague in the Late Middle Ages’, in
Social
Unrest
in
the
Late
Middle
Ages,
ed. Francis X. Newman (Binghamton, 1986), pp.75–112, by Louise Marshall, ‘Manipulating the sacred: image and plague in Renaissance Italy’,
Renaissance
Quarterly,
47
(1994), pp.485–532, by Phillip Lindley in ‘The Black Death and English Art’ in
The
Black
Death
in
England,
eds. Mark Ormrod and Phillip Lindley (Stamford, 1996), and by myself in Chapter 9 (‘Architecture and the Arts’) of
King
Death
(London, 1906)?

On mortality art and its associated rituals, Paul Binski’s
Medieval
Death
(London, 1996) is especially useful But there is much relevant material also in Kathleen Cohen’s
Metamorphosis
of
a
death
symbol
The
transi
tomb
in
the
Late
Middle
Ages
and
the
Renassance
(Berkeley, 1973), Philippa Tristram’s
Figures
of
Life
and
Death
in
Medieval
English
Literature
(London, 1976), R. C. Finucane’s ‘Sacred corpse, profane carrion: social ideals and death rituals in the later Middle Ages’, in
Mirrors
of
Mortality.
Studies
in
the
social
history
of
death,
ed. Joachim Whaley (London, 1981). J. M. Maddison’s ‘Master masons of the diocese of Lichfield: a study in 14th-century architecture at the time of the Black Death’,
Transactions
of
the
Lancashire
and
Cheshire
Antiquarian
Society,
85 (1988), pp.107–72, Pamela King’s ‘The cadaver tomb in England: novel manifestations of an old idea’,
Church
Monuments,
5 (1990), pp.26–38, Howard Colvin’s
Architecture
and
the
After-Life
(New Haven and London, 1991), Nigel Llewellyn’s
The
Art
of
Death.
Visual
culture
in
the
English
death
ritual
c.
1500–c.
1800
(London, 1991), Malcolm Norris’s ‘Later medieval monumental brasses: an urban funerary industry and its representation of death’, in Death in Towns, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, 1992), pp. 184–209 and 248–51, Richard Marks’s
Stained
Glass
in
England
during
the
Middle
Ages
(London, 1993), Ann Eljenholm Nichols’s
Seeable
Signs.
The
iconography
of
the
Seven
Sacraments
(Woodbridge, 1994), and Christopher Daniell’s
Death
and
Burial
in
Medieval
England
1066
–
1550
(London, 1997).

One of the more popular subjects in post-plague literature and the arts was the
Dance
of
Death
which, in reminding its viewers of Death’s equalizing sweep, always carried with it at least an element of social protest. And, in the
longue
durée,
it was probably in the encouragement of new aspirations in the deprived and disadvantaged that the Black Death’s legacy was most enduring. On those aspirations and their outcome, see the collected papers in
Social
Unrest
in
the
Late
Middle
Ages,
ed. Francis X. Newman (Binghamton, 1986). Christopher Dyer summarizes the main arguments in ‘The English medieval village community and its decline’,
Journal
of
British
Studies,
33 (1994), pp.407–29, and S. H. Rigby recently gave them a new sociologial twist in his
English
Society
in
the
Late
Middle
Ages.
Class,
status
and
gender
(London, 1995), while protest is again the main concern of E. B. Fryde in
Peasants
and
Landlords
in
Later
Medieval
England
c.
1380
–
c.
1525
(Stroud, 1996), a development on his chapter on ‘Peasant rebellion and peasant discontents’ in
The
Agrarian
History
of
England
and
Wales.
Volume
III
1348
–
1500,
ed. Edward Miller (Cambridge, 1991), pp.744–819. For valuable contributions on different
aspects of the Great Revolt, see
The
English
Rising
of
1381, eds. R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (Cambridge, 1984), which follows Rodney Hilton’s
Class
Conflict
and
the
Crisis
of
Feudalism:
essays
in
medieval
social
history
(London, 1985), and his earlier monographs on
Bond
men
made
free.
Medieval
peasant
movements
and
the
English
Rising
of
1381
(London, 1973) and
The
English
Peasantry
in
the
Later
Middle
Ages
(Oxford, 1975). Steven Justice’s
Writings
and
Rebellion.
England
in
1381
(Berkeley, 1994) investigates the literature, while R. B. Dobson’s
The
Peasants
‘Revolt
of
1381 (London, 1983) publishes a useful selection of the relevant documents in translation. Mavis Mate has studied the circumstances of later rural discontent in The economic and social roots of medieval popular rebellion: Sussex in 1450–1451’,
Economic
History
Review,
45 (1992), pp.661–76. And Isobel Harvey’s Jack
Cade’s
Rebellion
of
1450
(Oxford, 1991) is the first full-length modern study of that middle-class revolt, led by the comfortably-off farmers of mid-Kent.

By that time, it was less social protest that roused the men of Kent than the mid-century recession, largely the result of bullion shortages, which John Hatcher discusses in his The great slump of the mid-fifteenth century‘, in
Progress
and
Problems
in
Medieval
England,
eds. R. H. Britnell and J. Hatcher (Cambridge, 1996), pp.237–72. And the Black Death was no longer the first thing on their minds. Yet plague, for another two centuries, remained endemic in the West, its still mysterious departure in the early 1700s exercising A. B. Appleby in The disappearance of plague: a continuing puzzle’,
Economic
History
Review,
33 (1980), pp. 161–73, and au Paul Slack in The disappearance of plague: an alternative view’,
ibid.,
34 (1981), pp.469–76, where Appleby favours the biological explanation and Slack the medical response. The argument continues in
The
Decline
of
Mortality
in
Europe,
eds. R. Schofield, D. Reher and A. Bideau (Oxford, 1991); and plague, one might assume, is now contained. But as Montaigne once wrote: The world runs all on wheels. All things therein move without intermission … Constancy itself is nothing but a languishing and wavering dance.’ (
Essays,
3:2) And with bubonic plague reported in Southern India just a few years ago, we may not have heard the last of it yet.