The Black Death in London (29 page)

Such figures are broadly consistent with suggestions made above about the mortality rates from each pestilence outbreak and subsequent population recovery. In the absence of any more detailed information, we can suggest that the net reduction in population was in the region of 40–45 per cent between 1348 and 1380. Accepting this figure, it seems unquestionable that the character of the city changed dramatically. It was now nearly half-empty of residents, if not necessarily of visitors, even though it had probably been topped up by inward migration throughout the decades as newcomers sought to take advantage of the opportunities. Such migration can be seen in the fact that as many as 65 per cent of grocers’ guild members listed in 1373 had no previous known connection with the trade in the city and many seemed to be new to London entirely.
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The composition of this reduced population may also have changed. Using evidence from the London Court of Orphans, it has been calculated that the average sex ratio (males to females) was 1.33:1 between 1309 and 1348. This figure dropped to 1.17:1 from 1349 to 1398. A more detailed consideration of the period 1375–99 suggests a ratio of 1.12:1. This can be considered in the light of evidence from the Husting wills. As seen above (
Chapter 3
) for the decade from August 1349 to July 1359, the sex ratio of children mentioned in the Husting wills was 1.27:1, dropping to 1.22:1 for the period August 1349 to December 1375. On the face of it, the numbers of men and women were becoming more equal. The London tax return for 1377 suggests a ratio of 1.07:1, and work on other towns in England indicate even lower ratios by 1381, including Southwark at 1.02:1. It has been suggested that this phenomenon is partly related to an increase in female migration from rural districts to the town.
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The overall demographic shrinkage should have affected the physical structure of the city, but clear evidence is lacking. We know that in 1357 Londoners (trying to reduce their royal taxation burden) were claiming that one-third of the city’s buildings lay vacant. While this may have been exaggerated, it cannot have been implausible since the city’s proximity to the royal palace at Westminster meant that the king’s agents could easily investigate the matter for themselves. The better trading or craft zones may have been able to capitalise on this, attracting inward migration at the expense of poorer or more marginal districts. A study of the development of the drapers’ gild in London concluded that such vacant properties were colonised from the early 1350s by new businessmen taking advantage of the weakening monopoly by London merchants and purchasing the larger properties beyond the traditional gild core.
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In other larger towns it is clear that some level of contraction could be blamed on plague. Of up to 280 dwellings in the city of Gloucester rented from Llanthony priory, it is quite clear that sixty (22 per cent) had become vacant in the years after the initial outbreaks of the plague. Half of these were the poorer cottages in the suburb beyond the South Gate, from which it is speculated that survivors of the plague moved to available and better located intramural properties.
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In Norwich, of ninety-one shops, stalls and tenements listed in a 1346 rental, forty-six had changed hands before 1357 and twenty-seven (29 per cent) were still vacant in that year.
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In Coventry, it has been noted that the increase in property deeds (from fifty-seven surviving in the Coventry archives for 1348 to 177 in 1349) was accompanied by an increase in the use of the term
quondam
(one-time) when referring to adjacent properties for locational purposes. Thus, rather than mentioning existing tenants, the deeds referred to those who formerly held the properties. This usage went up from 21 per cent in 1348 to 46 per cent in 1349, hinting at a significant increase in the prevalence of empty properties. In Oxford, many halls formerly used for student accommodation lay empty immediately following the first outbreak, a picture supported by evidence of decaying buildings and vacant plots.
⁴⁷³
In many other towns, the decrease in rents gathered by religious institutions hints at the same story. Henry Knighton’s chronicle noted that ‘after the plague many buildings both large and small, in all the cities, boroughs and townships, decayed and were utterly razed to the ground’.
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This glut of urban property may have impacted on the size of the properties in London. St Martin’s seld, a covered market in the parish of St Pancras Soper Lane, contained twenty-one plots in 1250; by 1360 it comprised eleven larger plots, some of which were now shops with rooms above.
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However, this picture of contraction is complicated by the fact that an interest in speculative building activities remained and indeed increased in certain areas of the city and surroundings. The wealthy merchants Adam Fraunceys and John Pyel had, in August 1348 (thus just before the plague), contracted with the prioress of St Helen’s Bishopsgate to demolish certain houses between the high road on the west and the convent garden and cemetery on the east; the aim was to build a new house and a block of five two-storey shops along the street. Despite the fact that the programme of building works ran throughout the months of the epidemic, the scheme had by December 1349 expanded to create eight shops and two houses. Before 1373, Fraunceys also built a block of at least six shops immediately east of the Austin friary in Broad Street. Other city projects included considerable redevelopment by the dean and chapter of the area south of St Paul’s Cathedral on the sites of the cathedral brewery and bakery, in 1369–70, comprising one range of twenty shops with cellars and another of eighteen shops with cellars; and a block of five shops and houses built on Addle Lane in 1383 by Thomas Carlton, a borderer.

In Southwark in the 1370s there was clear evidence of similar large-scale building along Bermondsey Street and Tooley Street. In the latter, in 1373, a master carpenter was contracted by the prior of Lewes to build eleven jet-tied shops adjacent to the gatehouse of the prior’s house in explicit imitation of the row built by Adam Fraunceys. At Westminster, rows of shops appeared in the precinct from 1354, and the site of the almonry was redeveloped by the almoner in successive blocks between 1357 and 1387, resulting in some thirty-four shops along the south side of Tothill Street. Subsidence required one shop to be raised on a new clay platform, indicating the relative simplicity of the buildings. These unitary, purpose-built developments were clearly not the only kinds of construction going on in the metropolis, but their appearance suggests a demand for a new kind of commercial property. There appears to be no evidence for new projects of this particular kind beyond 1400 for about a century, suggesting that it was a phenomenon associated with certain conditions and opportunities.
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Archaeological evidence for change to the city’s topography is not at all clear: truncation of the majority of floor levels by more recent building activities generally leaves just foundations, rubbish pits and cesspits, making it rather hard to develop any coherent picture of the changes in the late fourteenth-century building pattern. Closer analysis of cesspit disuse alongside documentary evidence for the plots may well reveal more of a pattern of change or indeed continuity. In summary, it may be possible to envisage a contrasting picture of a far less crowded city and one with many new faces, displaying some decay and vacancy alongside bold, new and sometimes extensive redevelopment.

The plague might also have had an effect on the administration and governance of the city. Wider impacts on royal government included a reduction in experienced administrative staff through significant losses of the most senior officials in Chancery (three out of twelve clerks of the Ist grade died in both the first and second outbreaks), the Exchequer and the royal household. Longer-term changes in property rights, the Crown’s approach to taxation, legislative controls over employment and appointments in county administration may all have been encouraged or hastened by the effects of the epidemics, even if some of the national labour market controls may have been adopted and adapted from pre-plague attempts by the city authorities at market regulation and enforcement.
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However, these changes affected the whole nation, not specifically London. The demographic pressure induced by successive waves of plague certainly did have an impact on the stock from which the ruling city elite were drawn, and the basis for one of the city’s more important codifications of its customs and regulations, the
Liber Albus
(dated 1419), makes this issue plain:

when, as not unfrequently happens, all the aged, most experienced, and most discreet rulers of the royal City of London have been carried off at the same instant, as it were, by pestilence, younger persons who have succeeded them in the government of the City, have on various occasions been often at a loss from the very want of such written information, the result of which has repeatedly been dispute and perplexity among them as to the decisions which they should give.
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This change in the status quo was also evident in the evolution of burial customs of the aldermen, and was in the same volume placed firmly at the door of the plague:

For it is matter of experience that even since … 1350, at the sepulture of Aldermen the ancient custom of interment with baronial honours was observed … But by reason of the sudden and frequent changes of the Aldermen and the repeated occurence of pestilence, this ceremonial in London gradually died out and disappeared.
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These observations, compiled by Richard Whittington, Mayor of London, provide a powerful sense of the impact of a high mortality rate on the preservation of experience and learning among the ruling class of the city, and suggest that an old order had passed with the plague. The elite were primarily drawn from the merchant class and merchant families now rarely survived for more than three generations in the male line.
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Competition for apprentices for the gilds which these merchant families ran became fiercer as a result of the plague. The devastating mortality rate experienced among apprentices in companies such as the Goldsmiths’ (see
Chapter 3
) appears to have seriously exacerbated a problem of depressed numbers in the early 1340s. Analysis of a sample of gild ordinances shows that prohibition of ‘enticement’ or poaching of apprentices was specified in 56 per cent of cases (14/25) between 1344 and 1400, relaxing to just 14 per cent (4/28) in the period 1451–1500.
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Competition, already significant when the plague struck, grew much fiercer in its wake and required regulation and management. As well as prohibitive measures, customary entry charges fell as gilds moved to encourage a greater uptake of positions. The grocers’ fee for taking on apprentices was
20s
in 1345, a sum which had plummeted to 3
s
4
d
by 1376.
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Younger starting ages (between 10 and 14) seem to have been permitted in the second half of the fourteenth century, and greater opportunities for the apprentices may be responsible for the fifty cases of absenteeism recorded in the surviving Mayor’s Letters between 1350 and 1370.
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Such cases also indicate that civic authorities were investing considerable time after the plague helping masters to recover apprentices who had left before completing their contracts, in contrast to the position beforehand.
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Overall, the strategies employed to maintain numbers seem to have worked – despite dips, the average enrolment of the Goldsmiths’ Company was nineteen between 1334 and 1400, and seventeen between 1400 and 1500. Those who survived appear to have been able to reap the rewards: nearly 75 per cent of apprentices enrolled in the Goldsmiths’ Company had taken on their own apprentice within eight to sixteen years of enrolment, compared with under half in the last quarter of the fourteenth century.
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There is some evidence for rapid change in certain craft trades which is suggestive of a link to the Black Death. London’s trade in monumental brasses went through a process of rationalisation from a number of smaller entities to two big workshops which emerged in the second half of the 1350s, and for the next half-century these two firms would command a very large share of the English market overall. The first decade of this transformation may have been affected by skills loss, since minor compositions and not major monuments formed the principal output until around 1360.
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Pottery trading in the London area also appears to have undergone a significant change, with pottery industries formerly used commonly in the capital all but vanishing from the scene and being replaced by new products.
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Such transformations in industries would be unsurprising results of the high mortality of trained and experienced craftsmen, and it is probable that changes can be identified through closer examination of other London crafts and industries.