The Black Death in London (17 page)

The difficulties presented in interpretation both of age and sex of individual skeletons emerge when the comparison of separate research programmes is made.
Table 3c
shows the results of another examination of a sample of 490 skeletons from the East Smithfield cemetery. It is clear that this researcher identified a greater number of children, young adults and older adults present at the expense of the number of mature adults.
²⁸⁴
Overall, in this interpretation nearly 40 per cent of the victims were below the age of around 16 years, a significant increase, and the contrast in the male to female ratio is less (1.34:1). Despite the inherent difficulty in arriving at hard facts about the victims which these divergent researches show, we can be reasonably sure that about 35 per cent of the dead were children and roughly half were under 25 years old; and also that more men than women were buried at this cemetery.

The total of 787 burials probably represents about one-third of all those that might originally have taken place in the cemetery, allowing for the destruction of other burials by later development and areas not available for excavation; the original figure has been estimated at some 2,400.
²⁸⁵
Assuming the cemetery functioned in its first phase from the end of January 1349 for six months, this would suggest that an average of about thirteen burials were made daily here, although the preceding chapter has clearly demonstrated a very high peak of mortality in March and April, and a probable lessening from the end of May onwards. On that basis (and accepting we may be building surmise on supposition), we might suggest perhaps twenty to thirty burials a day for February to April, and commensurately less subsequently. While still a high figure, this is a fraction of the rate of 200 burials per day recorded by Robert of Avesbury for the much larger West Smithfield cemetery.

Table 3a. Analysis of the age and sex distribution of 265 adults from the East Smithfield cemetery (site code MIN86, data derived from Grainger et al. 2008, 26).

Table 3b. Reconstructed distribution of age/sex of victims from the East Smithfield cemetery, 1349.

Table 3c. Reconstructed distribution of age/sex of victims from the East Smithfield cemetery, 1349. (Source: sample of 490 skeletons analysed by S. DeWitte)

The physical remains of the people who were buried at East Smithfield give us a unique insight into the impact of the pestilence on the population of the city and nearby settlements. Who those buried in the cemetery were, and where they came from, is unknown. The adults were, in the main, between the ages of 25 and 45, and while any precise calculation of age at death is now impossible, the average age was probably 30–35 years. This is not dissimilar to the average age at death for the period 1413–1507 calculated for those monks of Christchurch Canterbury whose cause of death was recorded as plague.
²⁸⁶
The stature of the dead would seem to indicate that the group as a whole had been subjected to environmental stress during life. The height of some ninety adults (sixty men and thirty women) could be calculated: 1.68m (5ft 6in) for the men and 1.57m (5ft 2in) for the women; they were generally shorter than those of at least twelve other English later medieval cemetery assemblages.
²⁸⁷
This would seem to suggest that they were from the poorer segment of society.

The second clear indication from the cemetery figures is that more than one-third of the burials were of sub-adults. The number of children living in London at the outbreak of the epidemic is unknown, but this shows that, as with later plagues, the toll among the young was significant, and apparently evenly spread among infants, children and teenagers, though of course we do not know if there was a sex bias here. Certain families were clearly hit hard, such as that of William Robury, brother to the Hugh who had left funding for those brought to destitution by the plague. In 1353 a wardship hearing before the mayor and aldermen heard ‘evidence having been brought showing that the said William and all his children except one, viz, Robert, aged thirteen, were dead’.
²⁸⁸
The pathetic sight of hundreds of small, shrouded forms being carried to the cemeteries would certainly have been sufficient to create the perception among chroniclers that the plague struck the young especially hard.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the apparent mismatch between the numbers of men and women buried. This might be for a number of reasons, some technical and some cultural. The method of establishing the sex of ancient skeletons is not secure, and a bias in identification away from women and towards men is probably present. It has been proposed that as a result of the dangers of pregnancy and birth, a slight predominance of males may have existed in pre-industrial societies until the average age of female menopause, reflected in an overall greater number of men at any one time.
²⁸⁹
The cemetery, like West Smithfield, may have been used to bury strangers and travellers to the city and it is perhaps likely (although by no means certain at such a crisis time) that such travellers (such as traders) were rather more likely to be male: a male bias might have been introduced in this way. All of these factors may serve to drive up the proportion of males to females. However, there may be a more significant reason.

The disease itself might have struck males harder than females for some reason. As we will see, later outbreaks of pestilence were clearly reported by chroniclers to affect children and young men more than women, and a modern analysis of nearly 3,000 parish records of St Botolph Bishopsgate, relating to the epidemics of 1603 and 1625 in London, revealed that males outnumbered females between the ages of 15 and 44 by a ratio of 2:1.
²⁹⁰
However, such evidence as exists for the fourteenth century is not at all clear-cut. A study of the 1349 pestilence in twenty-eight townships in County Durham revealed that of a total of 718 identified tenants, 362 (almost exactly 50 per cent) died in 1349. Of the total, 155 (22 per cent) were women, and of these eighty-one (52 per cent) died, suggesting that the plague was an even-handed killer.
²⁹¹
The burial register for the Dominican friary in Siena demonstrated that in the 1348 outbreak, which raged from April to July, burials of female plague victims were equal to those of males (of 146 burials which included 19 children, 69 were male, 69 female and 8 were unknown).
²⁹²
Corroboration from the excavation of other Black Death cemeteries is awaited.

The archaeological evidence also provides some surprising and thought-provoking clues about the immediate state and treatment of the dead. The discovery of buckles and other dress accessories indicates that a significant minority of the dead, 3 per cent (24), were clothed when buried (all adults, of which half were men and one-quarter women). The accessories found varied from small platelets of copper to large paired buckles for breeches or trousers (see Fig. 9). Slightly more than half of this group were placed in one of the mass burial trenches, and the obvious conclusion is that the poor souls perished in their houses or in the street, and were gathered up for burial just as they were found.

However, excavations at the Augustinian friary in Hull recovered a range of burials made in the church during the plague, where clear evidence of clothing was abundant, and where the conclusion reached was that these were the well-to-do buried in their best clothes, and in very carefully crafted coffins.
²⁹³
Therefore, the temptation to explain the presence of clothing at the London cemetery as a consequence of people being buried in the clothes they died in, should be resisted.

The frequency of coffin use across the whole East Smithfield cemetery contributes further to this issue of preparation and management of the dead. The bodies of more than one-quarter of the dead, 214 (27 per cent), had been placed in wooden coffins before burial, regardless of age or sex. The evidence for this was revealed through the discovery of evenly spaced iron nails around the skeleton, or through the observation of a dark line left by the mainly decayed wood of the coffin sides (so many more coffins may have rotted away entirely). This pattern does not occur anywhere else in excavated medieval Christian cemeteries in Britain,
²⁹⁴
and hints at a specific use of coffins for containing the corrupted dead. This overall figure hides an important distinction between burials made in individual graves, where very nearly one-half were in coffins, and those placed in the mass trenches, where figures averaged at about 11 per cent.
²⁹⁵
This difference implies a clear distinction between the two groups which will be explored further below.

The use of coffins was absolutely required by some European cities, and while London does not seem to have adopted such a strict approach, some centralised pattern of corporate or civic management of the dead not recorded in documents may be in evidence here. Considering the scale of the mortality and the rates of burial at the other cemeteries, it seems almost certain that a significant temporary industry was required to supply the number of coffins suggested by this figure. Previewing the conclusions on mortality (see
Chapter 5
), if 27 per cent of all the London dead were buried in coffins, some 285 tons of timber would have been required (based on known medieval coffin sizes, some 9,000 coffins, and a density of oak at around 750kg per m
³
). It is a great shame that we cannot tell how this massive demand was met, whether through corporate payments to carpenters and joiners, through private purchase, or through the use of crude, homemade structures.

A total of fifteen coffins (7 per cent) were given a dark ashy lining on to which the deceased were laid (see Fig. 10). This group is of national significance, since it represents approximately 30 per cent of all examples of this kind of burial practice in Britain at this time (so far known). The ash, forming a layer perhaps 1cm thick, appears to have been domestic in nature. It contained burned food remains (bone, shell, seeds) and burned pottery fragments. It has been suggested that this was a kind of sponge to absorb putrefaction products and reduce the odour, but the rarity of the rite militates against this; more recently it has been proposed that the material was placed in the coffin at the site of death (usually, therefore, at home) as a symbolic link to the household, and as a means of discouraging the dead from returning home as an undead revenant.
²⁹⁶
If this is right, then even at the height of the disaster, some people at least were taking considerable care over funeral preparations.