The Black Death in London (22 page)

The problem persisted, however, and in 1357 the king issued a further order to the city, stating that in past times the city’s streets and lanes had been accustomed to regular cleaning but that now, filth accumulated there and on the banks of the Thames, ‘which, if tolerated, great peril, as well to the persons dwelling within the said city, as to the nobles and others passing along the said river, will, it is feared, ensue’. The mayor was therefore to ensure that the city was kept clean on ‘pain of heavy forfeiture’.
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The link between these concerns and the pestilence itself is not explicit, but the ‘great peril’ would have raised but one spectre in the minds of those hearing the king’s words. We have already seen Edward’s concern over the filth in the city streets at the height of the first plague, and we will see once more worries about the stench of rotting refuse during the second and third outbreaks. It does seem likely that a new sensitivity to the urban environment was engendered through fear of the disease recurring.

If there was a suspicion that the threat to life had not fully receded, it was probably correct. It looks as if there was a significant dip in fertility, with families becoming smaller, and at the same time an increase in the likelihood of childhood mortality, neither of which was conducive to a rapid replenishment of the population. There is, of course, no census data, but a partial idea of family sizes in the fourteenth century in general has been advanced, based on the information contained in wardship cases brought before the city courts.
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From 1309 to 1348, the average number of children per family suggested by this calculation was 1.79. In the first decade after the Black Death, this figure dropped to just 1.5 and remained significantly lower throughout the fourteenth century. This pattern is generally supported (but with rather lower figures) through an examination of the number of direct offspring mentioned in the Husting wills. Between 1 January and 31 October 1348, a total of thirty-four will-makers identified forty-nine children as beneficiaries, an average of 1.44 per testator. The male-to-female ratio was 1.08 for these children.

During the key plague months, from 1 November 1348 until 31 July 1349, a further 392 wills were drawn up which identified a total of 428 child beneficiaries, an average of 0.92 children per will-maker. The male-to-female ratio had increased to 1.12. For the decade from August 1349 to July 1359, 132 will-makers made bequests to 125 children, an increase to 1.05 per will-maker. The male-to-female ratio increased to 1.27. These figures show just a partial picture, but it does seem likely that the trend was downward. In terms of increasing mortality, analysis of the wardships shows that between 1309 and 1348, 18 per cent of orphans of both sexes who were entered into wardship (between 7 and 10 years old) did not survive to come of age (at 21). This rose very significantly to 27 per cent between 1349 and 1398.
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Examination of the male heirs of wealthier merchant families shows a similar pattern but suggests a slightly greater risk for this group. Between 1318 and 1347, 23 per cent of merchant sons orphaned as youngsters died before coming of age. Between 1348 and 1377, this figure rose sharply to 33 per cent.
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While the sex ratio of the children mentioned in the Husting wills is not a reliable indicator of the wider demographic structure of the city, it is of interest because it hints at one of two things: either there were more male children surviving the plague (or being born) than female, or there was an increase in the desire to name boys as beneficiaries at the expense of girls.

The pattern of will-making changed in other immediate ways. At a basic level, the number of people both making and enrolling wills at the Husting court fell from a pre-plague level of around twenty-eight wills per annum to half that figure – an annual average of 12.4 wills were drawn up and 15.6 enrolled between 1351 and 1360. While obviously indicative of the mortality level, it may also reflect the concentration of property into fewer hands. The nature of the wills also changed. People began to specify their burial locations in much greater detail, selecting not only the church or monastery, but often specifying the churchyard, chancel, porch or chapel that they desired as their resting place. Although known from as early as 1275, the specification of burial location was very rare in the wills until the 1330s, and the first plague seemed not to have made much of a difference to this initially. For the period January 1347 to the end of October 1348, thirty of sixty-six (about 45 per cent) Husting wills drawn up expressed a preference. Of 392 wills which were made in the key plague months, between 1 November 1348 and 1 August 1349, 182 (a comparable 46 per cent) did so. The first plague, therefore, did not seem to have instantly modified Londoners’ approach to their own resting places. Once survivors had had a chance to take stock, however, the frequency increased dramatically. In the period from 1 September 1349 to 31 December 1359, nearly 74 per cent of citizens specified their choice of burial location (99 out of 134 wills made). Examples include John atte Bataylle, a weaver, who specified burial in the processional way within the church of St Giles Cripplegate in 1352; and John Edward, a butcher, who chose the chapel of St Mary within the church of St Leonard Eastcheap.
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It seems entirely probable that this upsurge occurred in response to the chilling memories of vast plague pits, lost relatives and uncounted, unmarked graves.

London’s pool of intellectual and artistic skill must have been dealt a severe blow. The city’s administrators and elected officials had suffered with at least thirteen aldermen known to have died in the first outbreak
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leaving both a requirement and an opportunity for new blood to prove itself in the complex political and economic world of the city. Adam Fraunceys rose from alderman to mayor within one year (1352) without holding office as sheriff first, and this speed of promotion was partly due to the effect of the pestilence.
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Architects and designers were killed, such as William Ramsey, who designed St Paul’s chapter house and cloisters; his successor, John atte Greene; and Walter le Bole, master mason at Westminster.
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Metalsmiths clearly suffered and a quick scan of the occupations noted in the Husting wills shows that fifteen goldsmiths, two bell-founders and two pewterers perished, alongside numerous craftsmen working and trading leather, wood and cloth. It has been suggested that the king’s decision to impress glaziers to complete the windows at St Stephen’s chapel Westminster may have been because of the dearth of skilled craftsmen.
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Almost certainly, more than half of London’s resident population had been killed or displaced, buildings stood empty, trade was affected, and social and economic networks had been transformed. The psychological scars of such a profoundly shocking experience are not easy to establish, but we can detect immediate shifts in approaches to bequests through wills, suggesting that the way people saw the world had fundamentally altered. These changes were to be more deeply embedded in the city (and indeed the country) as it was rocked by no fewer than three further outbreaks before 1377, each one amplifying the impact of the last. The most significant of these later visitations was the
pestis secunda
of 1361, but chroniclers also pointed out widespread outbreaks in 1368–9 and 1375, and it is to these subsequent and less well known pestilences that we now turn.

Four

PESTILENCE IN LATER
FOURTEENTH-CENTURY
LONDON

Pestis Secunda,
1361

Secunda mortalitas. Eodem anno mortalitas generalis oppressit populum que dicebatur Pestis Secunda. Et moriebantur tam maiores quam minores, et maxime iuvenes et infantes.

The second mortality. That same year a widespread mortality, known as the Second Plague, overwhelmed the people. And the great were killed along with the masses, and especially infants and the young.
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Anno xxxv (Edward III): And that same yere men, bestys, treys, and howsys were smyght fervently with lytthenyge, and sodenly i-peryschyde. And they fonde in mennys lyckenys splatt men goyng in the waye.

The 35th year (Edward III): And in that same year, men, beasts, trees and houses were smitten violently with lightning and suddenly perished. And fiends in the likeness of men accosted men as they went their way.
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Mesme celle ane fuist la secunde pestilence parmy Engleterre la quel fuist appelle la mortalites des enfauntz.

That same year was the second pestilence in the country of England which was called the mortality of the infants.
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Such are the chronicles of the events in 1361, but there is a short foreword to this second disaster in which London may have been visited by some kind of outbreak as early as the autumn of 1360. The Chronicle of the Greyfriars of King’s Lynn notes: ‘In that year [1360] began a plague among Londoners at about the feast of St Michael, where at first infants died in huge numbers.’
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This lone reference has, perhaps, the feel of a scribal error about it, and might best be conflated with the main outbreak of 1361, but we cannot actually tell. Apart from the fact that a disease initially affecting the young would be unlikely to be well represented in evidence from wills, the wills themselves do not survive for this specific time: roll 88 of the Husting court, dating to between January 1360 and February 1361, is missing.
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Of the wills drawn up in 1360, we have just ten which happened to be proved in March 1361 or later when the sequence resumes, and none of these offer any clue about such an outbreak. Additionally, among charters from Colchester, Essex, is one from 1410 which notes a will from 34 Edward III (so January 1360 to January 1361) at the time of the
secunda pestilencia.
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It remains possible, therefore, that a plague, one which affected the young, did strike the city in the last months of 1360.

There is, however, no doubt about the events of the following spring. The greyfriars of Lynn may be quoted again:

and after the next Easter following [April 1361], men and women died in great multitudes … In that year the plague raged in the southern parts of England with great mortality among children, youths and the wealthy. This plague was however much less serious than that which had befallen thirteen years before.
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This report is backed up by most other contemporary chroniclers. As well as Henry Knighton (above), the Anonimalle Chronicle called it the mortality of children, and states that several people of high birth and a great number of children died.

A striking aspect of the reports was that not only was this outbreak apparently killing the young, but it was disproportionately killing men. Higden’s Polychronicon, claiming that it actually started in London, called it a ‘great pestilence of men … killing many men but few women’; Walsingham also asserted that the disease devoured men rather than women. John of Reading’s chronicle stated that ‘this year the mortality was particularly of males, who were devoured in great numbers by the pestilence’; and the chronicle of Louth Abbey described ‘a mortality of men, especially of boys’.
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