The Black Death in London (27 page)

Amidst this activity are the inevitable guardianship hearings for children orphaned from the death of their father or of both parents. The earliest example during the outbreak was held on 4 May and concerned Alice, 7-year-old daughter of Nicholas de Pekham.
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Alice appeared in a custody hearing just a month later, since one of the relatives to whom she had been assigned had by then himself died. Other similar cases highlight probable plague deaths. Orphan Johanna, aged 8, daughter of Walter de Harwedone, was committed to William de Harwedone, her uncle, on 13 July. Sureties for her were paid by three men, including one Thomas Wylby who himself succumbed that year; his will was proved by the Archdeaconry Court within two months of the hearing.
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Draper Thomas de Welforde had died during the 1361 outbreak, leaving his estate to his wife Johanna and his children John, Elizabeth and Johanna. Between his death and 1368, both John and Elizabeth also died, leaving the last child, Johanna, the sole beneficiary under the guardianship of a Michael Ede. On 3 July 1368 Michael brought Johanna to the Guildhall handing her and her property into trust. Three weeks later, she was committed to a new guardian, draper Richard de Kyllyngworth, but within a few weeks she perished.
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Two unusual and linked cases were heard in court on 19 June, each passing custody of three children to their respective, and still living, fathers, William de Tyngewyk and Henry de Markeby. Children who still had a father did not come under the jurisdiction of the mayor and aldermen, and it seems that in these cases the children had received a bequest from the will of a third party, the mechanism of guardianship being used to protect that inheritance from waste through the process of providing sureties. Both men were goldsmiths, and this, coupled with the fact that both of the assignments of guardianship happened on the same day, suggests the bequest came from another goldsmith.
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June was, curiously, unremarkable in terms of wills: just four were drawn up and one enrolled – figures which would not in themselves suggest plague. However, corroborative evidence from another town, Derby, makes it clear that much of England was in the grip of the disease by this time. On 12 June Edward issued royal protection for the town, its burgesses and merchants, because it was:

for the most part wasted by the death of burgesses and other men of the town in the present pestilence, and the men now remaining are not sufficient to maintain and govern the town, and that the men of the adjacent country, whom they cannot resist, depasture and tread down the said pastures with their animals.
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July was rather different. Ten wills were drawn up, eight of them in the last week of the month, suggesting that conditions were especially grim. Of these, one was for John Lovekyn, the man whose mayoralty had spanned the first great outbreak and who had gone on to be mayor three more times until his death some time before November 1368. Another was for chandler William Hathefeld, whose testament was proved in the Archdeaconry Court in 1368, before being enrolled at Husting in January 1369.
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Other wills did exist which were neither listed in the Archdeaconry Court registers nor in Husting, such as that of Robert Faukes of Gaddesby, tailor and citizen of London, dated 18 July. He requested burial in Holy Trinity priory beside Robert, his uncle, and left 20s to the box of the tailors’ fraternity of his trade, along with cloth to be sold and the proceeds distributed to the poor.
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Wills of non-residents (proved in courts outside London) make it clear that many who lived beyond the city walls had significant interests in London, and indeed probably died there (not necessarily of plague it should be noted). One such was Robert de Pleseleye, rector of the church of Southfleet, in the diocese of Rochester. His will, dated at London on 22 May 1368, ‘in my dwelling
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in St Martin le Grand Lane’, and proved on 7 August, set out his desire to be buried in the church of St Martin-le-Grand, and left over £13 to the friaries and nunneries of the city.
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The summer progression of the pestilence raised once again the perceived dangers surrounding animal slaughter and butchery in and around the city. On 3 July the mayor, Simon de Mordon, and his aldermen, received a writ from Edward III enclosing the complaint from no less than the Bishop of London, the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury, the Countess of Pembroke, and other residents of Old Dean’s Lane alleging that the butchers of the Shambles (near Greyfriars):

who used to slaughter their cattle and leave their offal and refuse outside the City, had recently taken to slaughtering … within the City, carrying the offal and offensive refuse by day and night through Oldedeneslane and by the King’s Wardrobe to a small plot by the Thames close to the Friars Preachers, to the grievous corruption of the water.

The writ demanded that the practice be stopped. The mayor initiated an inquest covering four wards – Castle Baynard, Farringdon Without, Vintry and Queenhithe – to discover the extent of the problem of disposing offal and waste in the Thames, and the extent to which people considered it a real nuisance. A jury of twelve men from Castle Baynard ward found that it was indeed the Shambles butchers who carted their offal to a place called Butchers Bridge (‘Bochersbregge’), near Baynard Castle, and not only was it polluting the river, but blood from slaughter yards and offal dropped from carts fouled the streets and lanes, too. It was recommended that slaughter should take place beyond the city walls.
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Will-making in August was still at an elevated rate. Thirteen such wills were later enrolled in Husting. Among them was that of William de Burton, a goldsmith, who drew up his will on 31 August. His wife and executrix was disposing of property to third parties within four weeks of this date, so we may be confident that he had passed away within a week or two of making his will. Pepperer John de Evenefeld included in his will a rather curious stipulation: ‘his body not to be left above ground, but to be placed in a chest [coffin] underground, and to be previously covered with 10 ells of black or russet cloth’. Why he wished this treatment, and how it might have differed from a standard funeral, is not clear, but it suggests that he did not wish a period of watch or wake over his body either at his home or in church.
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He willed burial in the church of St Mary Aldermary, next to his first wife. Burial space appears not to have been the issue it had been during the earlier outbreaks, despite the fact that the emergency cemetery at East Smithfield had certainly gone out of use by this time. There is a reference to the enlargement of the cemetery of St Leonard Eastcheap in this year,
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but this seems a somewhat piecemeal response and rather underscores the sense that this pestilence was less severe than previous outbreaks.

The beginning of the end of the outbreak came in September. Only four wills were drawn up, in one of which John Briklesworth requested burial in the Pardon churchyard at St Paul’s. As with August, the intermission of the Husting court for the harvest meant that no enrolments took place. These were left over until October (or later), in which month just three wills were drawn up, returning the level of will-making to a pre-plague scale. Two of these wills are significant. The first, apparently a nuncupative will given on 29 October, is the only will in the entire Husting roll which mentions pestilence. It is that of an Ipswich man with commercial property in the city:

In the name of God, amen. I, Richard of Holewelle of Ipswich, being of sound mind and good memory, seeing the danger of this world and especially of this pestilence, establish my will for my freehold in the city of London in this form. First I leave all this holding with three shops adjoining and all things pertaining to them … to Geoffrey Sterling, Robert of Preston and John Holt of Ipswich and their heirs and assigns, to have and to hold in perpetuity. In witness of this, I have affixed my seal, and because my seal is unknown to many, I have arranged for the seal of the office of the bailiffs of the town of Ipswich to be affixed.
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The second will of importance is that dated 14 October, of Simon Benyngton, a draper. He bequeathed a quitrent for the maintenance of a chantry at the altar of St Mary in Gysma (in childbirth), probably situated in the Lady Chapel in the priory of St Thomas Acon. This is the earliest reference to such an altar, and its dedication in the face of successive child-killing plagues is likely to have carried a particular resonance. Benyngton’s will was enrolled in December, but he was certainly dead by the beginning of November.
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The backlog of enrolments brought the total for October to sixteen. Of these, thirteen were enrolled on one day (16 October). Only one of these had been penned before the outbreak of the plague, making it very likely that the majority of the remainder were victims of the disease. Among them were John Deynes (who had died before 1 September) and his son Henry. The latter, choosing not to pass his inheritance on to his stepmother, John’s second wife, instead bequeathed the proceeds to the maintenance of a clock on the church of St Pancras, a new belfry at St Margaret Lothbury, and the maintenance of six Oxford scholars. Such were the winners and losers during the epidemic. November and December saw further enrolments of wills of those who had died in the outbreak, but in smaller numbers. It is clear that by the end of October, the pestilence had once again passed.

The impact of the third plague is hard to gauge. Wills enrolled at Husting averaged sixteen annually between 1362 and 1367; the total number likely to have been associated with the seven plague months, enrolled in 1368 and 1369, was thirty-five – a figure 3.8 times higher. An annual average of eight Husting wills were drawn up over the same six-year period; in the seven pestilence months of April to October that figure was forty-four, eight times higher. On the face of it, this suggests a mortality of about
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per cent, but an expectation of mortality that was far greater. Even if we allow again for an (unproven) increase of 2 per cent per annum in the resident population of London from 34,000 in 1361 to 39,000 by 1368, this suggests that the population fell again to perhaps 35,000 by the winter of that year.

The constant erosion of London’s population must have had a significant long-term impact on a wide range of institutions in the city. There is little direct evidence of this, although problems of recruitment at two religious houses in 1370–1 may be represented by the fact that four acolytes were ordained as canons for the hospital of St Mary within Cripplegate (Elsyng Spital) in St Paul’s Cathedral on 21 December 1370; and in October 1371 Raymond Berengar, master of the entire order of Hospitallers, was forced to write to John Dalton, the prior of the church of St John Clerkenwell, ordering him to restore the number of chaplains serving in the church from around seven to the appointed fifteen.
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So, 1368 appears to have been considerably less severe than either of the two previous outbreaks, but was nonetheless a notable event in its own right, perhaps killing upwards of 4,000 of London’s pestilence-weary population.

The Fourth Plague, 1375

In 1374 the fourth pestilence began in England in several towns in the south of the country. In the following year a large number of Londoners, from among the wealthier and more eminent citizens, died in the pestilence. Several well-placed clerks of the Chancery, Common Pleas and Exchequer also died.

In 1375 the weather was scorching and there was a great pestilence which raged so strongly in England and elsewhere that infinite numbers of men and women were devoured by sudden death.
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The last plague under consideration in this volume broke out in London towards the end of May 1375, persisting across the summer months until about the middle of August.
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Just two wills enrolled in Husting were made in the second half of May, one by carpenter Richard de Chelmeresford and one by vintner John de Rothyng, and while this presents no evidence for the plague’s outbreak, de Rothyng’s will dated 23 May is interesting. In it he specified that the bodies of his father Richard and mother Salerna should be exhumed from where they lay and placed with him in his chosen burial place in the floor at the centre of the belfry of St James Garlickhythe, a definitive example of the increasing interest in co-locating family burial.

The number of enrolments in May was also normal and probably unrelated to plague deaths. One was that of Adam Fraunceys, the influential mercer who had been alderman and then mayor in the 1350s. By it, he set up two chantry chapels in the Benedictine nunnery of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, one dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and the other to the Holy Ghost; he also bequeathed money for the marriage portions of unmarried poor girls, a facet of late fourteenth-century will-making to which we shall return in the concluding chapter.
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