The Black Death in London (34 page)

There are other more objective records which can be brought to bear. These fall into three categories. The first source is the evidence in the bishops’ registers. These documents, kept by each bishop for his diocese, recorded among other matters the filling of clerical vacancies within the diocese, whether caused by resignation, cessation, exchange or death. The latter group, where they can be identified, are clearly of great significance in helping to track the plague, since abnormal clusters of vacancies may be taken to illustrate heightened mortality in a particular area. However, the dates recorded are of replacement of the rector or vicar, not of the death itself. To be able to use the evidence, we need to understand the lag between the two. This lag was the time it took to report a death to the episcopal authorities, identify a suitable replacement, institute him to the benefice and record the fact in the register. It has been generally estimated at between twenty-one and forty-two days, suggesting a standard period of thirty-five days to some.
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However, closer examination of the register for the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, unique in recording the actual dates of death for the clergy, shows that the median period was twenty-two days and that there are reasonable grounds for arguing that the earlier in the outbreak the death occurred, the shorter the lag.
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Dorset lay within the diocese of Salisbury and the bishop at the time was Robert Wyville (fl. 1330–75).
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The earliest realistic contender for a plague-related institution was at West Chickerell (near Weymouth) on 30 September 1348. Prior to this, institutions were relatively infrequent and clustering was absent; afterwards, the frequency of institutions markedly increases in parishes and towns such as Warmwell, Dorchester and Wool from 9 to 24 October. If the vacancies were due to deaths, this would point (on the basis of the Coventry and Lichfield analysis) to deaths mounting from early September into October in the Weymouth/Poole area. Further institutions occurred in the Salisbury area (some 50 miles north-east) between 20 and 28 October.
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There is good coherence in this distribution, providing the basis for estimating a general speed of spread of 1 mile to 1.5 miles per day.

Table 5. Chroniclers’ estimations of the date and location of the arrival of the plague in England.

Nevertheless, the uncertainty over the lag between vacancy and institution requires corroborative evidence. This exists to a degree in some surviving royal documents, particularly the Patent Rolls. Among many other items, these recorded the occasions of royal presentations of candidates for vacant churches in the king’s hands. A church might enter royal control for one of two principal reasons at this time: the lord (secular or religious) may have died; or the religious house, having rights of presentation, may have been foreign (normally French), and thus its properties were sequestered by the Crown during the war. Either way, the king was entitled to propose his candidate for the vacancy, which the bishop either confirmed or not. The key point here is that the date of royal presentation lay somewhere after the vacancy/death but before the actual institution, so it acts to narrow down the date of death. Taking the Weymouth/Salisbury area of Dorset, we find a cluster of presentations between late September and mid-November 1348, none further than 20 miles from Weymouth: Dorchester on 20 September; Bincombe on 8 October; Bradford Peverell on the 16th; Piddlehinton on the 27th; Tolpuddle on the 30th; Portesham and Abbotsbury on 6 November; two churches in Wareham on the 8th and 12th, and on 13 November Owermoigne and Blandford.
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These may well represent deaths from mid-September through to the beginning of November.

A further source of evidence is sometimes available from manorial documents. The estates of lords, bishops and monastic houses all required complex administrative and legal apparatus to account for production and to regulate the labour force working the land. Such apparatus gave rise to periodic documentation in the form of account rolls and court records. These survive in England better than in any other European country and, while their composition and survival are highly variable, they can provide exceptionally clear and objective information about the arrival and duration of the pestilence.

Where clerical vacancies occur in the same locale for which such manorial evidence exists, these documents can be used to ‘anchor’ the evidence from the registers. An example of how this type of evidence can assist comes from Gillingham in Dorset, 40 miles north of Weymouth. A recent discovery of a series of court rolls for three manors centred on Gillingham shows quite clearly that exceptional mortality was recorded during the first two weeks of October 1348.
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Deaths peaked between 5 and 27 November (the dates of successive courts) but had effectively subsided by early February 1349. Two clerical vacancies in nearby Shaftesbury (just 4 miles southeast) were filled on 29 November and 10 December. Allowing for around twenty-two days’ lag, these vacancies would have occurred between 7 and 18 November, agreeing remarkably well with the manorial documents. This timing appears consonant with further manorial evidence, this time from the manor of Curry Rivel, Somerset (also about 40 miles north-east of Weymouth), where numerous deaths were recorded in court rolls between 15 October and early December.
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Taken as a whole, there is a very strong impression that the plague made itself apparent in September at the earliest and developed rapidly through October and November. The implied later date for the plague’s appearance makes much more understandable the letter of Ralph of Shrewsbury on 17 August (see
Chapter 1
), requiring preparation against an expected threat, and that of the Bishop of Winchester dated 24 October, establishing that the ‘coastal’ regions were, finally, under attack.

Other evidence previously offered in support of the chroniclers’ summer date for the outbreak of plague can be readily refuted. Two detailed references have been published (and repeated) by way of proof and confirmation of the chroniclers that pestilence was abroad in July and August 1348 in Somerset and Dorset. The first stated: ‘By the beginning of August [implying 1348], most of the tenants of Frome Braunch in Somerset were dead and there were other deaths in North and South Cadebury.’ The reference, found in the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, is in fact to 1349.
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The second recorded the ‘statement that the king had noted in July 1348 that the mortality of men in the prebend of Bere Regis and Charminster in the present pestilence is so great that the lands thereof lie untilled’. This reference, found in the Calendar of the Fine Rolls, is again to July 1349.
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While more synthesis is clearly needed in this area, there is a strong possibility that the deadly character of the pestilence became apparent in September and not June or July 1348
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and spread outward in October just as the season began to worsen and temperatures to drop. This implies that its speed of transmission into southern England was greater than has been previously entertained, and that this speed was not apparently unduly influenced by cooling temperatures.

The Experience of London & its Contribution to the Debate

Currently, the jury is still out on two key and linked debates: what the disease actually was, and the manner of its arrival and spread into England. London can contribute to these debates in a number of ways.

The first way in which the London study can inform this debate is over the issue of the rats themselves. Leaving aside for the moment the problem of Iceland, the bubonic model requires that the initial epizootic phase occurs for each rat colony before the fleas depart their dying hosts to begin the infection of humans. Archaeologists in London (and indeed across the UK) now routinely sample key stratigraphic groups (pit fills, ditch fills, cesspit fills, etc.) for environmental remains, using established sampling procedures which involve both the hand-collection and wet-sieving of bulk soil samples. Recovered through such procedures are the bones of fish, birds, amphibians and small mammals. Such tiny bones do not routinely survive, being readily susceptible to decay and destruction by natural processes, but the general incidence of rat bones
(Rattus rattus)
can be considered.

London has produced unequivocal evidence of the presence of
R. rattus
in the period both immediately before the outbreak of plague and during the later fourteenth century. Excavations adjacent to the medieval Guildhall have produced fifteen positively identified
R. rattus
bones from among a collection of discarded cat skeletons (used by furriers and skinners), scavengers no doubt, along with the remnants of red kites and crows. The yard deposits were dated to 1280–1350, and probably towards the latter date, since the yard also contains features associated with construction works on the Guildhall which were completed in the 1350s.
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Four bones were located in a flood-prone area of New Palace Yard, Westminster, dated to
c
. 1230–1350.
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In refuse dumps within the city ditch, eight
R. rattus
bones were recovered at Aldersgate dated to 1350–1400; and four ‘rat’ bones (not specifically identified as
R. rattus)
at Newgate dated 1340–1400.
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Rat bones were recovered from a hearth in an undercroft of the substantial mansion house of Sir John de Pulteney (himself a victim of the 1349 pestilence), dated to the later fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries; and from fourteenth-century domestic rubbish dumps at the quay adjacent to Baynard’s Castle. Two rat bones have also been recovered from the Augustinian priory of St Mary Merton, Surrey (about 7 miles south-west of the city), one from within the stone infirmary hall (dating to 1360–90) and one from the adjacent garden (1300–90).
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